[Election Digest] What if you had one chance to fix American politics?

"The U.S. is in need of a Demilitarized Zone." —David Butow, Crossing the Lines in Battleground America PolitiBot 3000: Hello, traveller. Welcome to the future. Thanks PolitiBot — you turned up at just the right moment! Things were looking horrifically, vertigo-inducingly messy back in 2016. So glad you whisked me away! Um, why am I here? Yes. 2016 was terrible. That's why I've brought you here: to make a change to the American political system. Something is broken. Find a way to mend it, make it work again, and then I'll send you back. Do I have to go back? Sigh. If I must… Okay, let's look at the problems in front of us: Is the voting system broken? Should we ditch the electoral college? Is all we need a truly viable third party? Perhaps we just have to come to terms with the fact that our country is so fractured because we try to fit four — or even five — parties into a two-party system? Tell me more, human. What if we had smaller Democratic and Republican parties that occupy more central ground, and then a BernieBro faction on the far left, and a special seat for the religious right? (That's probably what Erick Erickson would want.) 2016 showed us that we kind of already have a multi-party system...we might just be in the middle of a major shift. Think about how different this election might look if we recognized that change. But, traveller: There appears to be one variable missing in your calculations. Ah yes, Donald J. Trump. It's not really clear exactly how he fits into any system. Some people say that he is a third party candidate — just one who somehow found himself at the wheel of the GOP. This is exhausting. Maybe we should just dispense of democracy altogether? Mood: Hoping for 1.21 gigawatts. Connect with us on: Get the Medium app: You're receiving this email because you follow a 2016 election tag on Medium and are opted in to receive topic-based digests.

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