Microblog Memes

It is extremelly hard (basically impossible) for people to "maintain hope" during that initial period of several election cycles as a party grows from nothing to "big enough to win some power" if during all those years their vote makes no difference whatsoever.

Alternatives to the parties in government don't just appear fully fledged and big enough to take power, they grow over the years and they start getting votes because people have some hope they will make a difference and keep on getting more and more votes as people hear and see the representatives of those parties as they participate in lawmaking and are shown by the Press because of it.

Whilst in countries with PV systems it's absolutelly natural for parties to organically grow and shrink in response to how they increasingly match or mismatch the desires of the population, hence naturaly over time power rotates (for example in The Netherlands governments with 3 parties in cohalition are absolutelly normal, and its normal to one or more of those parties to end up replaced oreven a totally different cohalition to replace them all), in countries with electoral circles, especially large circles with single representatives like in the US, you need a huge fraction of votes to all switch at the same time, all to that same new party, and all in the same electoral circle, merelly to change a single representative (itself a far from having any real power versus the 2 behemoth power duopoly partis), so people seldom vote for any alternative party because it's almost always a wasted vote in such system since each individual voter has no guarantee that a sufficient number of other people will at the same time change their vote to that same party so that their representative is the one elected. Even when it does happen, it's an extremelly local phenomenon in a single electoral circle, and such movements that elect local stars in alternative political parties have so far never managed to progress into national movements so they never amount to a real change of power and most commonly are just "bought out" by one of the 2 power duopoly parties.

(The ideas of "usefull vote" and "voting against a candidate" do not exists in a PV system because people believe their vote, no mater who for, count, so they vote positivelly - for their preferred candidate - rather than negativelly - to block a certain candidate. It's quite a different mindset.)

So your casually thrown sentence of "people can just elect a different party" in practice requires that a huge fraction of the electorate at the same time starts supporting the very same obscure party (which they wouldn't have heard of much before because even if that party got a couple million votes before, they would have had no congress members hence no real press coverage). What you said just translates in expecting a hundred million people to somehow make their minds all in the same electoral cycle to vote for a party they've barelly hear of, each believing their vote will not be wasted because they somehow and against a lifetime of experience of it never javing happenned before believe that many tens of millions of other people people will also vote in that same obscure party, hence their vote will not just be wasted in unelectable candidates.

Feel free to suggest mechanisms for those 2 somehows that would work in the real world and don't involve magic.

(Anyway, my reference to PV systems is because I've seen there how new parties grow to the point of taking over power, and that's oragnically and over time, and relies on people believing that if they vote for something new their vote still counts and doesn't just get thrown out by the system. As each vote does count, other see the results and if they agree they too will next time vote the same eventually to the point were that party grows big enough to benpart of a governing cohalition. This is not at all possible in the US system were there is no such possibility of incremental change: any change throught the vote has to be immediatlly massive, involving many millions of people coordinating in a HUGE country, all without any help of the Press to spread the message, a huge barrier to entry - in business language - which is de facto impossible to overcome. In practice what you see is that any such changes only happen via internal subversion of one of the parties of the power duopoly, as Trump did).