James Carville and Senator John Fetterman are Democrats who’ve essentially said to people with a more left-leaning political perspective, recently elected as Democrats, get out, or I’m leaving the Democratic Party. Joe Scarborough and George Will were Republicans who left the Republican Party because new people with a Make America Great Again (MAGA) political perspective took over their Republican Party. What all four are either threatening to leave or have left over is a problem Democrats nor Republicans can complain about because it’s a problem they both rigged.
In an interview with Fox News, James Carville said: “I am not going to be in the same party with Hasan Piker; I can tell you that right now. If he becomes a force in a Democratic Party, I’m out of here. I have no intention of ever being in the political party with that guy. “The one thing I can tell you is for certain: Hasan Piker and James Carville are not going to be in the same political party. One of us is going to leave. It might even be me”.
Hasan Piker is a left-wing activist, political streamer with both progressive and socialist views, and a prominent endorser and campaigner for Michigan’s U.S. Senate Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed. He has 3.1 million Twitch followers and between 1.3 and 1.8 million YouTube followers. Piker is notorious among mainstream Democrats for saying in 2019 that “America deserved 9/11”, which he later, after heavy criticism, walked back, saying he did not mean America deserved the attacks and accused critics of ignoring “the actual truth of what I was talking about”. Piker is also notorious for saying that Israel does not have a right to exist in its current form, an opinion he says is directed at Israel’s political structure and not the citizens of Israel.
Senator John Fetterman says that he wishes that the Mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, and the 3 recently elected New York City Democratic nominees for Congress, Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Claire Valdez, who all, like the New York Mayor, self-identify as Democratic Socialists, would not campaign as members of the Democratic Party but instead would campaign as members of a separate Democratic Socialist Party. Senator Fetterman also said that because Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, who does not self-identify as a Democratic Socialist, but allows Hasan Piker to join him on the campaign trail, he cannot support El-Sayed’s Democratic Party candidacy for the U.S. Senate, even though an El-Sayed loss would mean Republicans gain a Senate seat now held by Democrats.
Democrat Nominee Darializa Avila Chevalier, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Carville and Fetterman are not alone in their Democratic Party preferences; they represent the view of many so-called Democratic mainstreamers, who speak the “big tent” rhetoric but aren’t really interested in making room in the Democratic Party for those who are not like-minded. Now that a Fox News interview with a national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) went viral because of the extremely left goals expressed by the co-chair, Democratic DSA-affiliated politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are stressing that they are members of their local DSA Party and not the national DSA, creating new division within the Democratic Party between Democratic DSA members loyal to the national DSA and Democratic DSA members loyal to their local chapter of the DSA Party.
MSNOW host and former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough left the Republican Party in 2017, due solely to the huge invasion of Donald Trump’s MAGA followers into the Republican Party. He said at the time of his departure: “You have to ask yourself, what exactly is the Republican Party willing to do? How far are they willing to go? How much of this country and our values are they willing to sell out”? Conservative icon and columnist George Will left the Republican Party in 2016 for the same reason as Scarborough, saying at the time of his departure: “This is not my party”. The Republican Party has become a “cult”.
Scarborough and Will were not alone in their exits from the GOP; the former husband of a former White House counselor to President Trump during his first term, George Conway, left the GOP in 2018 over MAGA dominance and ran unsuccessfully as a candidate of the only other viable political party, a Democrat, in the 2026 midterms. Steve Schmidt, a veteran GOP strategist who ran John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, left in 2018, saying: “29 years and nine months ago I registered to vote and became a member of the Republican Party, which was founded in 1854 to oppose slavery and stand for the dignity of human life. Today I renounce my membership in the Republican Party. It is fully the party of Trump”.
Former moderate Republican Adam Kinzinger decided in 2022 not to seek reelection to Congress; in his farewell address, he said: “The Republican Party used to believe in a big tent, which welcomed the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Now we shelter the ignorant, the racists, who only stoke anger and hatred to those that are different than us”. And one considered as Republican right-wing royalty, the daughter of former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney, Elizabeth “Liz” Cheney, was effectively voted out of the Republican Party in 2021, over her vote to impeach President Trump, when the MAGA-controlled Wyoming Republican Party voted to no longer recognize Cheney as a member of the party, and in the 2022 Wyoming Republican primary when she was defeated for reelection by a MAGA Republican candidate.
In the midst of all the inter-party turmoil that both Democrats and Republicans are experiencing, only one former member of a political party, former Republican Justin Amash, has acknowledged the rigged problem that neither Democrats nor Republicans can complain about. In a 2019 Washington Post op-ed where he explained the reasons why he was leaving the Republican Party, Amash wrote: “Today, I am declaring my independence and leaving the Republican Party. No matter your circumstance, I’m asking you to join me in rejecting the partisan loyalties and rhetoric that divide and dehumanize us. I’m asking you to believe that we can do better than this two-party system, and to work toward it”.
When Amash says we can do better than this two-party system, he is referring to the political monopoly or duopoly Democrats and Republicans have rigged in America. Both Democrats and Republicans intentionally work together to rig access to political power, government debates, and the electoral system, with the secret intent of making it extremely difficult for third or Independent political parties to have an equal opportunity to compete against Democrats and Republicans. For instance, the most anti-competitive and unfairly rigged barrier Independent or third parties face is gaining a spot on an election ballot. No one focuses on the ballot-rigging scheme designed by both Democrats and Republicans to maintain their political duopoly, because Democrats and Republicans use the Jedi mind trick of primary elections to mislead the public into thinking election ballot access is free and open to all.
Among the 50 states in America, there are only 5 states– Alaska, Florida, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Washington that allow any candidate who wants to run for public office, regardless of what political party they are a member of or if they are running as an Independent, to do so by simply paying a filing fee to have their name listed on a general election ballot. The other 45 states either require candidates to collect a certain number of registered voter signatures (petition) and pay a filing fee, or collect a certain number of registered voter signatures and pay no filing fee.
Since collecting signatures from registered voters to get a candidate’s name on an election ballot can be an expensive and time-consuming barrier for potential candidates to overcome, in the vast majority of the other 45 states, Democrats and Republicans working together have rigged rules that advantage Democratic and Republican candidates and disadvantage Independent or third-party candidates in 3 ways:
- If anyone, regardless of race, gender, religion, or political perspective, pays a filing fee as a Democrat or a Republican candidate and runs in a Democratic or Republican primary election, or competes at a Democratic or Republican convention or caucus to be the party’s nominee, the candidate isn’t required to collect any registered voter signatures to get their name listed on any election ballot. Whereas a candidate running as an Independent or as a member of a third party has to collect hundreds or thousands of registered voter signatures to get listed on the general election ballot.
- In the majority of states that require all candidates to collect registered voter signatures, the number of signatures required for candidates running as Democrats or Republicans is far less than the number of required signatures for third-party or Independent candidates.
- Only candidates running as either a Democrat or a Republican can compete in a primary election; Independent or third-party candidates cannot.
It’s an equal opportunity for everyone willing to seek public office as either a Democrat or Republican, but not if you want to seek office as a Green Party, Libertarian, Tea Party, Democratic Socialist, or an Independent politician, because Democrats and Republicans have rigged election rules that, by design, don’t allow for taxpayer-funded Green Party, Libertarian, Tea Party, or Democratic Socialist primary elections. Green Party, Libertarian, Tea Party, Democratic Socialist, or Independents have to renounce their allegiance to their political parties’ platform principles and pledge allegiance to Democrat or Republican platform principles, or obtain hundreds, in some cases, or thousands, in other cases, of registered voter signatures to be listed on a general election ballot.
Rigged primary election laws not only give Democrats and Republicans an unfair government-sponsored membership recruitment advantage. It also gives them an unfair government-sponsored financial advantage. Alabama, Arkansas, and Delaware are the only states in America where political parties set the filing fee amount, keep 100% of the filing fees, and pay no cost associated with conducting primary or general elections.
In the other 47 states, 17 don’t require filing fees, and the remaining 30 require that filing fees are split between state and local governments and the Democratic or Republican Party; which party gets part of the fee is determined by which party the candidate pays the filing fee as a member of. Since neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party ever pays any cost associated with conducting any primary or general election anywhere in America, filing fees give both the Democratic and Republican Parties a cost-free revenue stream that partially funds their political operations, which is not offered to third or Independent parties to fund their political operations.
If the Libertarian Party of Georgia had a guaranteed revenue stream to partially fund its political operations, it might have avoided the announcement it just made in July. But since it does not, it also did not have adequate financial resources to obtain and submit the required 72,000 registered voter signatures (petition) by Georgia’s July 14th deadline, and because Libertarian candidates didn’t receive 1% of the vote total when they competed in Georgia’s 2024 statewide election, the Libertarian Party had to announce that they will have no Libertarian candidates on the 2026 Georgia general election ballot. Brian Allen, the party’s acting chair, said, “It is clear that the current law exists simply to advantage Democrats and Republicans, who have never had to petition to get onto the ballot, as they were grandfathered in when the law was first written”.
Rigging election laws so that third parties or Independents are prevented from competing in primary elections gives Democrats and Republicans an unfair government-sponsored publicity and momentum advantage. State and local governments pay 100% of the cost for primary elections, and since primary elections occur months before all general elections, every election cycle begins with the attention of voters being first directed towards the government-sponsored Democratic or Republican primary candidates; consequently, by the time of the later general election, voters have been so saturated with media attention and political ads exclusively about Democratic or Republican candidates, that voting for the lesser known third-party or Independent candidate in a general election is perceived, by many voters, as a wasted vote for a candidate that doesn’t have enough name recognition or momentum to win.
Last but not least, it comes down to questions of fairness, discrimination, and equal inclusion for equal taxation. If every citizen’s taxes pay to conduct primary and general elections and no political party funds do, then it’s only fair if every citizen’s political party is eligible to compete in both primary and general elections, and discriminatory if they can only compete in general elections but not primary elections.
And if every citizen’s taxes pays for a political election system that’s rigged so that only Democratic or Republican Party candidates consistently win public office in America, then Democrats and Republicans don’t have the democracy prerogative to reject any new members who wish to join their party, and they lack the moral authority to throw out party members, who at best possess vaguely similar political views, or at worst possess opposite far-left or opposite far-right political views than the mainstreamers of the Democratic or Republican Party.
Ideally, in search of a more perfect American democracy, all political parties and Independents would receive their fair share of public office filing fees and have equal inclusion on primary election ballots for each one of the United States’ federal, state, and county legislative bodies. This would make all legislative bodies in America resemble Britain’s House of Commons, where multiple political parties are allowed an equal opportunity to be created, to compete, and to win governing seats, which could empower multiple political parties in America, not just Democrats and Republicans, with political representation in legislative halls of power and change throughout America.
Unrigging America’s elections would also give the James Carvilles and the John Fettermans of the Democratic Party, and the Joe Scarboroughs and the George Wills of the Republican Party, a true democracy prerogative and the moral authority to never again consider leaving their party, but remain within it and say to those that are only slightly ideologically similar, or extremely far-right, or extremely far-left of the party mainstream, “Get out of our party and go form your own political party”.
But until Democrats and Republicans unrig America’s election system and open it up to equal opportunity for all political parties to compete and win, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are both obliged to be big-tent parties, where their mainstream members are forced to either leave the party, or suffer in silence the extreme views of those who only have two viable political choices in America: choose to be a Democrat or choose to be a Republican. It’s the rigged American election reality of Democrats and Republicans, by Democrats and Republicans, exclusively for Democrats and Republicans!!!
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