What's holding thrid parties back in the US?

Factual Questions
1

I keep hearing that our election system keeps third parties from ever really becoming viable. But what exactly about our system is it? The Reform Party seemed like it might have become a rival to the Democrats and Republicans, but it fizzled out, with some blaming Perot himself as well as a lot of in-fighting.

But let’s say that Perot did everything right and there was no in-fighting. The Reform Party would be on it’s way to becoming a major party. What obstacles would be in their way to prevent that from happening?

2

My thought is that it is the way we vote - winner take all even if more than 50% do not vote for you.

A third party will most likely take candidates from either of the 2 dominant parties disproportionally…which means the third party takes out one of the major parties leaving a dominant one in control. So long as the third party exists, it torpedoes one of the dominant ones.

Say people vote 50-50 repub and dem. A liberal party starts up and it goes 45-35-20. The 45% republicans will win the elections and will keep winning until the third party dies or it kills one of the dominate ones and takes its place.

3

Fear of letting the bad guy win, even in a state where the bad guy always wins. That’s why I don’t vote for the Libertarian candidate (although, since the bad guy always wins, I may as well).

4

Plurality. Countries where winning candidates need to do is win more votes than than anyone else always have two parties (over the long run).

Basically any third party will have its positions integrated into the platform one of the two major parties. Voters then have the choice of voting for the third party or one of the other parties that stands for much the same thing – and has an actual chance of winning.

The US has only added new major parties when the original party fell apart completely. The UK switched from Liberal to Labour (originally a third party) because of a demographic shift and people who had been disenfranchised got the vote and found Labour more to their liking than the Liberals.

5

Or until the major party co-opts the policies of the third party and smothers it into obsolescence.

6

Here in WA, there’s a (relatively new) law saying that the top 2 vote getters in the primaries will appear as the candidates. (Googling, it turns out that the law was passed in 2004, upheld in 2008). According to the linked article, only Louisiana also runs their primaries this way. So, two Republicans? Fine. Two Democrats? Fine. Any mix’n’match? Fine.

While this seems like a good thing (and I think it is, to a small degree, as it promotes more moderate candidates), I also feel that it further institutionalizes the two party system, as I think it’s likely that the top two vote-getters will always be from one or both of the main parties. I’d have much rather had the top THREE appear on the ballot.

7

Another problem is that there is no party discipline (until recently?) in the USA so elected members can pretty much say and do whatever they want.

In parliamentary systems, the government survices or falls on the votes of its members. If they vote against the government on a “confidence” motion - key policy or a money bill - the government falls and new elections result. As a result, members cannot stray too far from the party line.

Since the choice of your local member determines who forms the government, people vote for you as member of parliament as much to choose who will be prime minister (your party leader) as for your wonderful political appeal. Very few politicians could survive an election and win after being evicted from their party; so the pary holds leverage over individual members.

What this means is that for voters who disagree with a party line, there is an advantage in voting for a different party in other countries. In the USA, congresscritters are so independent anyway, that they tend to attract votes on their personal point of view rather than the party line. Party does not mean that much. The real fight is in the primaries, getting the nomination of the dominant party in your area.

8

Money.

To win average Congressional seat costs about $2 million in a general election in advertising, staffing, etc., and I would guess that a Congressional seat from a district in NYC or LA or some other metropolis wouldnt’ be touchable with $2 million. From there it goes waaaaay up- Hillary Clinton spent $20 million or more on her campaign and that was only until the primaries.

Third parties just can’t raise that kind of money generally, one reason being that people who have the money to donate often think “I’m not going to throw it away on somebody with no chance of winning”.

9

Nobody’s mentioned the district/state system yet? Seriously?

Check out the countries where parties are allowed seats proportional to the popular vote and then get back to me.

10

Also, in a lot of states it is extremely difficult to start a 3rd party. I’ve made no secret that when I get to Colorado, I’m going to try to start up a more centrist 3rd party but trying to do the same thing in California would have been near impossible. And that brings up my second point. Many of the third parties are extremists even beyond the platfrom of the Dems and Reps. Most people in the middle not on a party ticket run as independents.

11

The simplest way to make third parties viable is to make votes transferable, so that voters aren’t punished for voting for a third party. For instance, you could use something called Instant Runoff Voting. On the ballot, instead of just saying who your first choice is, you give a ranking of all of your choices: First choice, second choice, and so on. When you count up the ballots, if one candidate gets a majority of all of the first choice votes, that candidate wins immediately. If nobody has a clear majority, though, you eliminate the one who got the least, and move all of the ballots for that candidate into their second-choice pile. The process repeats until one candidate gets a majority.

This way, if (for instance) a voter preferred the Democrat to the Republican, but liked the Green candidate better than either, he wouldn’t be forced to vote Democrat for fear of splitting the vote, but could instead put the Green candidate as his first choice and the Democrat as his second. That way, even if the Green gets eliminated early, as is likely, his vote is still going to a viable candidate he can support.

Now, IRV isn’t necessarily the best voting system to use, and in fact all voting systems have problems when you’ve got an election with more than two choices. It mostly gets a lot of discussion just because it’s a relatively simple system to understand. But it’s still better than the one-choice-per-ballot method we currently have.

12

Mostly American politics works like this:

some small number say 5% are at the extreme ends of the political spectrum (pick an issue, doesn’t really matter, will be about the same.) Of the remaining 90%, about a third are actually not really committed to either side. They swap back and forth on issues, and will support a candidate mostly based on a perception of the actual candidate, rather than needing complete assurance that there is agreement on every issue. The other sixty percent are party affiliated, and care more about keeping their party in power than any single issue.

Now, once someone is in office, the reality of our system is that parties select from their elected members for positions of power, such as committee assignments, appointed offices when they are in power in executive offices (Governor, or President). The majority party has more such power than the any other party, and aside from a few who caucus with another party, such positions are rather tightly controlled.

However, the US Senate has very peculiar rules that make even a significant majority control of the body less powerful than one might imagine. Because of this, The Democratic party is unlikely to fail to work hard against some progressive left leaning smaller party, since the existence of their party is an impediment to really moving their agenda. Many state legislatures have analogous power structures. Since there are no “votes of confidence” during the term of office, there can be no realignment of minority parties into a “coalition” government such as parliamentarian systems regularly have.

This causes some really odd political happenings. The Bush administration failed to marshal their extreme wing during the last half of his second term, because they had a lot of difficulty avoiding losing the uncommitted center. At the same time, a very large fraction of that center expressed their dissatisfaction by actually turning out and working for the opposition party during the off year elections, and without that moderate end of the Republican party speaking out forcefully, the more strongly conservative wing of the party gained a lot of control over the party itself.

What didn’t happen was a building of a base of support for the Republicans among the uncommitted center. The center isn’t a fertile area for the growth of new parties, and the right wing believed they were gaining power, so they rode the tide, believing that the silence of the majority actually was an opinion. So, there was very nearly a strong super-majority elected to the Senate. For a refreshing change, the left actually decided to all walk along together as if they were an organized political force.

So, mostly, the fight is over the middle third of the engaged electorate. They have no platform around which to form a party. If you have enough conservatives or liberals to take an office, or offices, you have enough to take over the Republican or Democratic party itself, so only the far five percent are likely to form a new party. (Single issue parties almost always actually support one party of the two largest, with aberrations now and then, like Perot, Nader, etc.) The reason is that you cannot get anyone elected with five percent of the vote, and if you get someone elected, they get to make speeches, and submit bills, but never see such bills reach the floor of the legislature. To do that, you need majorities in committees.

So, the reason is that the Federal system was actually designed to facilitate two parties, and deny power to anyone not involved in one or the other.

Tris

13

Here in NC it’s very hard for them to get on the ballot - possibly the hardest in the US. And if they do get on , they need to get a certain percent of the vote (I think 3-5%) to stay on. The Libertarians kept getting on and then kicked off.

14

You have the most political power when you are part of a bare majority. The smartest thing for the members of a 3rd party to do would be to join another party that would put them in the majority, and then influence policy within that party.

15

Yeah, the Schulze method (or, really, any method that satisfies the Condorcet criterion) doesn’t get that much love, even though it’d ultimately be far more democratic than what we have now.

16

The answers have been pretty comprehensive. I can’t think of any additional questions because everything I’ve been thinking about has pretty much been covered. Thanks.

17

Historically, other parties in the US have been in charge: four US presidents were members of the Whig Party, for instance. Three were members of the retrospectively amusingly named Democratic-Republican Party.

18

Here there are strict limits on how much a candidate may spend on his election campaign; nor may anyone else incur expense on his behalf, whether from urging people to vote for him or to keep him out, without it counting towards the limit.

19

But the Whigs fell apart, and the Republicans then took the stage from their remnants. At the time, it was the Republicans who were the third party.

20

Historically the failure of third parties has been because whenever a third party does come along with a good point, it’s usually adopted by either the Republicans or the Democrats into their platform.

Thus there is not need for the third party.

The Democrats and Republicans are not really as far apart on issues as it seems. As other posters noted, a Senator or Representative is more loyal to his state than his party. And this makes sense. A Democratic Representative, can hold his job for 20 years in a heavily otherwise Republican state, as long as his district likes his performance.

No Democrat or Republican in a small state is going to vote against his states interests to be loyal to the President or to push an agenda. Because presidents come and go but his office can be lifelong.