zlacker

Ranked voting will help, but it's a stretch to day it will solve it. There's still the issue of money/publicity and party loyaty/identity. If you don't have the money for the publicity, many people won't even know who you are. You'll still have people who use one of the two main parties as part of their identity and won't entertain the thought of outside candidates. Politics has become a religion to many.

>>giantg+(OP)
I have family friends and neighbors who subscribe to both of the state religions. None of them ever start their evangelizing by telling me what their party stands for. It is always about what they stand against. I think the religious fervor is primarily a side effect of fear of extremism they don't like, instead of the extremism that doesn't really effect them. If they can rank their cuddly extremist first then the moderates whose name they only vaguely recognize in some random order based on what they think they might have read, or some stereotype based off the name itself, then the unthinkable evil dead last, they will still serve to moderate things, just via the central limit theorem.

Edit: there will be a fortune ready for the person that has a generative model in hand to let candidates change their name to something minimally scary.

>>galang+F1
The problem with that theory is that parties still hold primaries. Primaries have the most extremist representation since those are the people who are most motivated to vote. This is a problem when voter turnout for primaries is something like 15-20%

>>giantg+6c
If via some magic, the electoral system changed as I described despite those who won in the current system being in power, then the primary candidates would lose against moderate independents hardly anyone knew except for the reasons described. Except that the parties would forsee that and run different candidates using ranked voting in the primaries as well. Again, that is if somehow the changes could ever be made. Where it has happened it has often happened via referendum, and even then, it has been reversed on multiple occasions as well. I think Seattle just selected for local elections? It will be interesting to see how that goes.