For some time I've been urging independent politics activists, including fellow participants in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s presidential campaign, to adopt Sam Husseini's VotePact concept. I even came up with a new hashtag, #DRexit, to help popularize it. So I was thrilled last Sunday, during a national webinar updating people on the campaign's progress, to hear that they're going to do so, calling it Kennedy Match. Coincidentally, this is the same day Husseini posted a new article about this strategy on his blog.
The idea is that disaffected voters with opposite ideological leanings, who are frustrated by the sense that they're obligated to vote for a "lesser evil" to stop the "greater evil" and are blocked from taking effective action to seek something better, can team up to break with both establishment parties at the same time while leaving the balance between them unaltered. This has the added enormous advantage that it incentivizes people to step outside of their ideological comfort zone by developing dialogue and trust with people of different perspectives. Some guidance on how to do so may be found on the Braver Angels website.
This approach can also be seen as an application to electoral strategy of Robin Hanson's "tugging sideways" concept.
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