And first past the post doesn't give an intrinsic advantage to either party. What it does is cause there to be two parties instead of more than two, which doesn't benefit anybody except for the party leaders in both major parties who don't want competition.

> Considering his polling tanked after debating Harris and then he refused to debate again, I'm not sure if you can make this argument.

The general consensus was that Harris would be defeated in a debate if there were neutral moderators, so she would only agree to a debate if the moderators were in her camp. Trump took a chance on that once and it went about as you would expect, after which Trump wouldn't agree to left-wing moderators and Harris wouldn't agree to right-wing or neutral moderators which meant there were no more debates.

The Harris campaign tried to paint this as "Trump won't do any more debates" but it's hard to make that seem credible when Harris was the one dodging media interviews.

The Democrats had better candidates than Harris. Their problem was they didn't nominate one.

Granted, sometimes they go further. Project 2025 said to scale back USAID; the Trump administration simply illegally impounded its funding and let it collapse entirely.

Project 2025's most prominent authors are in Trump's cabinet: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/key-pr...

You can say what you want or continue to deny it, but there is no left equivalent of it. There are no left wing think tanks writing documents like Project 2025, detailing how to take over the government and root it out of "cultural Marxism," whose presidents say things like "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be" with the degree of influence the Heritage Foundation has on the Trump administration.

Perhaps there should be; clearly they see it as a bloodless war. But there isn't.

Project 2025 is almost halfway implemented and several of its authors hold positions in government, charged with its implementation.

Everyone who thinks it is some side project or wish list that isn't "real" and actually, literally, happening right now is a fool.

https://www.project2025.observer/en

The original premise was you have a lot of elected officials and then they act as checks and balances on one another. So, for example, to pass a law against something it has to be voted on by the House (elected officials), and the Senate (originally elected by state legislatures, giving the states, an independent elected body, a voice in the federal government; not anymore) and then signed by the President (another elected official), and then as a final check it had to be upheld by the courts (elected by the President and Senate for lifetime terms).

Then we effectively replaced most of that with administrative bureaucrats that act only within the executive branch. They're not only not directly elected, they're not even indirectly elected by the Senate; the President appoints them -- or they're hired by other unelected bureaucrats -- and then they tend to stick around between administrations because there are so many of them that you can't plausibly replace millions of people every time the constituents want to change who is in office.

Meanwhile they make the rules and enforce them and bypass the courts through coercive plea bargaining. But we call an attack on this system an attack on democracy?

They're supposed to write a coherent plan with specifics on what they are going to do once they are in power. The (R) side did this with Project 2025. It was detailed and specific and they are executing on it like a checklist. Where is the (D) checklist?

> You want the DNC to do stuff, to solve problems, to execute plans that grow this country, you have to put them into power first

I'm not going to help vote them into power unless I see what their plan is. Even a one-liner that says "We have a list of what Trump did and we're going to revert each commit!" is better than nothing. Their party platform from 2024 is vague and talks more about principles and what they're not going to do rather than specific things they are going to do.

A better example of close elections and recount procedures is the literal tie that happened in a Virginia state legislature race in 2017. The attorneys were able to litigate the validity and intent of individual ballots in that race because they had the physical ballots, as well as the machine scans and logs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia%27s_94th_House_of_Del...

--- Is that really your own-developed opinion, based on concrete available data and reasonable examples, having passed through your own mind and examined by yourself? Or just entertaining oneself by spouting vehement political rhetoric for gratification? (i.e. opinion entertainment. as FN is rightly called)