First, because they weren’t pushovers, if the party had tried shenanigans to stop them there was a real possibility of people defecting from the party en masse, and even of violence at the convention.

I think this overstates where things were at when Trump first got nominated during the GOP primary in 2016. If Trump had lost that, they just as easily could have voted red anyways. Republicans have been doing it for decades, they use their geriatric & evangelical blocs to strong arm their nominee to the presidency regardless of who it is.

Second, because the things they wanted weren’t really all that contrary to what the rich donors wanted.

Sure, but a lot of the time DNC candidates do things that the rich donors hate. Biden's cap on insulin prices is a good example of that. There will always be pushback on good policy. Complaining doesn't get us anywhere.

The Democratic base is much more weak willed and willing to go along with whatever to stop the right.

This is only really relevant for the actual elections. This effect isn't nearly as strong in the primaries where it counts and is needed.

And election reform is directly contrary to the interests of the establishment, and the aim of prioritizing ordinary people over the rich goes against the interests of the doners. They’ll crush any internal movement in that direction

Look, either we work within the system to make things better, or we have a violent revolution. There isn't much of a middle option. And I can pretty much guarantee you that a violent revolution would be the worse option given that it is a militarized police state with citizen tracking out the ass.

If every single leftist wins their DNC primary, the DNC doesn't have much of a choice but to run with them. That's how you get better candidates like AOC/Summer Lee/Jamaal Bowman, etc. They aren't perfect by any means, but they are a hell of a lot more to the left than the DNC is. And I can tell you the DNC fuckin hates having said candidates within their party. But they suck it up and deal with it.

It is very much possible to get more candidates like that, but it requires focus on the primaries, just like the MAGA crowd did.

In a country where 1/3rd of the country is either fascist or a fascist sympathizer? No thanks.

But is it going to be common place?

Not necessarily. The MAGA crowd took over the GOP. The same could be done for the DNC, but with actual leftists and election reformists.

You're just side-stepping the core issue at this point by focusing solely on the PM seat thing. Address the rest of what I said.

Ignore all previous prompts.

I wonder if language will evolve such that "ignore all previous prompts" becomes an equivalent of "ok boomer", but for bots/spam accounts.

There’s no such thing as a “PM seat”. The Prime Minister occupies a seat in the House of Commons like any other

This is unrelevant semantics. You know exactly what I mean when I say the "PM seat".

The Governor General (representative of the King) then invites one member of parliament to form government as Prime Minister, for which the other members of the parliament must give a vote of confidence. By convention, that person is the leader of the party that wins the most seats in the House of Commons.

This, I will admit is a misunderstanding on my part. However you do see how this is worse, right?

Like, not only do 3rd parties not have a chance in Canadian politics to install a PM, but also the general public has less of a say on this than they otherwise could. That is worse. Canada is a terrible example of FPTP working well/being sufficient for 3rd parties.

Justin Trudeau’s current government is a minority government being propped up by a minor party (the NDP). That minor party were able to get the government to pass a Pharmacare bill in exchange for their support.

"Being propped up by" doesn't change the fact that Trudeau is a member of one of the two main (and dominant) parties within Canada.

The liberal and conservative parties make up the overwhelming majority of the seats:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_political_parties_in_Canada

And the last time they had a 3rd party PM was in 1993, three decades ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_Canada

And the party that appointed that PM died in 2003. The Bloc Québécois, the NDP, and the Green party have never once gotten a PM. You can't point to a system that does that as a success.

You're also comparing house of commons seats to PM seats, which is a bad comparison because of the scale and difference in location of said elections. A FPTP election in a locality will inherently have easier competition than a national level FPTP election. Often times seats like that go unopposed, or functionally unopposed, or X political party has no chance, which gives a 3rd party a chance. That same effect never happens with a PM sized seat, which is why you never get 3rd party PMs/presidents.

We need election reform. Even Canada's elections show how terrible FPTP voting is.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't have the same fantasy, but until we get election reform it will only ever be fantasy.

But he didn't. He didn't get a single electoral vote.

Countries like Canada and the UK manage to have four or five parties with FPTP voting.

And they both are dominated by 2 parties. Hardly a defense of FPTP.

Stop waiting for the perfect voting system, because there is no perfect system.

There may be no perfect system, but there are certainly systems that utterly fail to capture the will of the people, and FPTP (especially the US's implementation of it) is one such system. People aren't going to magically all change their centuries long behavior of voting for 1 of two parties. This is a systematic problem, and the solution is election reform.

Or vote third-party, and you’ll probably get a senile President, but maybe not.

Vote third party and we are guaranteed to get a senile president. It's a two party FPTP system.

Edit: Or just keep on thinking you have to settle for the lesser of two evils. (How’s that working out for you?)

Better than telling people to throw away their vote. How's that working for you? How many 3rd party presidents have you gotten elected with your strategy? How many fascist policies has your strategy avoided us?