Has there been a congressional split in the last fifty years that was as significant as, say, the Dixiecrats?
Historically, as another person noted, if a third party has a bit of success the Democrats or Republicans simply add the reason WHY that third party had sucess to their platform and they take the votes back.
Even if you argue that the Republican Party of Lincoln was a third party (which you could), it shows that if a third party ever became dominant enough to win a major election, it would one of the other parties would be reduced to from a main to a third party, while the “third party” would achieve “main party” status. In other words they would replace them.
We saw this when the Farm Labor Party of Minnesota had success and basically merged (or replaced if you want to argue that) with the Democrats.
The thing is whenever there is an issue, the Republicans will take one side and the Democrats will immediately oppose it. Or vice versa.
Party memebers are also a lot less loyal in America than eleswhere. A Democratic Senator from Delaware isn’t going to go along with the Democrats if it hurts his state. He would switch his vote to the opposition for that issue.
And/or, the Democrats might become more libertarian as well, easing up on drugs or prostitution.
I wish the Dems would adopt a new Federalism. Rather than trying to fix the whole country at once, keep more of the blue state money that flows out and use it to fix health care and education at the state level. Not only do we shell out more than we take in, we also catch crap for it. I think that approach would attract some conservatives.
The result is highly sensitive to exactly how conditions have changed, to say the least.
I think you misunderstood me. The celebrity wouldn’t be running for office. The party would have to get itself started through grassroots movements, winning local elections, etc. Then a celebrity or celebrities go around singing its praises, raising awareness, getting Oprah on board, etc. It could happen. Ross Perot got, what, 20%? And he was uncool as fuck.
The OP is obviously a hypothetical. How the system would change to allow third parties, I don’t know. I leave it up to the reader to decide.
BrainGlutton, holy crap, post #11 surprised me with how many factions and divisions there are. The two main parties are a lot bigger tent than I thought. I plan on posting something on it when I get more time to read it slowly and let everything sink in.
Well, that’s because: (1) The winner-take-all electoral system naturally produces a two-party system in which anybody who wants to be involved had better pick one or the other. (2) The media, naturally, then focus mainly on the contests between the two main parties. (3) This tends to obscure the finer differences – American politics appears superficially to be a simple contest between “liberals” and “conservatives.” But it’s really much more complicated than that.
But it’s just not true that all you need to become president is a truckload of money and an endorsement by Oprah. And why is Oprah endorsing your third party candidate rather than the Democrat? If you honestly think that celebrity endorsements are the key to electoral success, well, the major parties can churn out celebrity endorsers much more easily than fringe candidates. And if truckloads of money are what it takes, well, the major parties can deliver 10 times the tonnage of a fringe candidate.
And that goes back to my point. If you seriously want to be elected president, you don’t run on a third party ticket. You run on a major party ticket. The people who run on third party tickets don’t expect to be elected, they are trying to make a point of some kind or another. And Ross Perot, for all his 19%, came in third. Not even second. Our system gives the office to the person who gets the most votes. You don’t get shit for coming in second. Or third. Or fourth. Ross Perot got 19% of the popular vote and didn’t get a single electoral vote. The last third party candidate to win the Presidency was Abraham Lincoln. The only other one who came close was Teddy Roosevelt–and he had the advantage of having already been president.
And as for the recommendation to start at the grassroots and start winning local elections–well, that’s the real trick, isn’t it? Serious people who want to actually accomplish things in politics can take a couple of paths. They can run for office as a Democrat or Republican, or go to work for a major party candidate. Or they can start or join an advocacy group that attempts to influence elected officials. Turning your advocacy group into a party that runs candidates for election is a waste of time and effort. Time and effort that isn’t being spent advocating for your cause(s).
And if it turns out your advocacy group somehow has a guy with the talents to actually win an election, you’d be an idiot to advise him to run on a third party ticket. He should join the party that is the natural ally of your advocacy group, and run on that ticket. Plenty of elected officials started off as community organizers or advocates. But the ones who got elected chose a party and got elected within that party, and changed the party.
That doesn’t allow for the third possibility - the third party becomes so successful it becomes one of the two major parties after the total collapse of one of them. This essentially happened in the 1850s, as the GOP was established and the Whig Party died off.
I don’t see it happening today, but the possibility cannot be totally discounted.
See my post above. After 1856 the GOP had already run a presidential candidate and the Whig organization no longer existed in any strength anywhere in the country. Abraham Lincoln won as one of the candidates of the two major parties.
The conditions today are so stacked against a third party that it’s hard to see how one could succeed. Gerrymandering has created so many ‘safe’ districts that even in a year where public opinion of Congress can be down in the 20% range, only maybe 5-10% of the seats actually change hands.
Campaign Finance Reform has stacked the deck in favor of incumbents.
Another way incumbents have stacked the deck is by assigning powerful committee positions by seniority - voters who kick out a senior politician for a junior one see their representational power fall.
Once in power, politicians are able to raise huge amounts of money for campaigning through the plying of favors to powerful constituencies.
Libertarians have a hell of a time raising funds, because corporate money generally flows to politicians who promise to tilt the playing field in favor of the corporation. The other big campaign funding comes from other special interests like Unions, who also have a vested interest in activist government.
The established parties have complex, sophisticated ‘ground games’ - get out the vote drives, connections to local parties to help drive local turnout, etc.
The media game has been rigged to help incumbents. Unless a third party can raise a huge amount of national interest, it’s going to be shut out of media coverage, debates, etc. The Libertarian party has been on the ballot in all 50 states, and in the past has polled as high as 7-10% of support before an election, and it’s never gotten into the media big leagues. Neither did Pat Buchanan’s Reform party, which for a time had a considerable amount of support. CFR rules work to the advantage of incumbents because incumbents get plenty of free media coverage, while everyone else has to pay for theirs.
Now, if you did have a viable third party that was capable of pulling 20-30% of the votes, you’d have an interesting dynamic. Let’s say the part represents the extreme wing of one of the two parties (say, a Green party surge on the left, or a libertarian surge on the right). It seems to me that a major party can act in one of two ways:
- it can abandon the fringe, move to the center, and hope to capture the undecided centrist votes or even poach moderates from the other side. The idea would be to occupy the center and turn the other party into a fringe party just like the one you lost.
- it can try to placate the extreme fringe, giving up its centrist votes to the other side, hoping that the body politic has moved far enough in that direction overall that it can still win a majority of seats without maintaining the old center. This would only happen if the population became fairly radicalized, IMO.
In Canada, what we wound up with essentially was our fringes splitting off, leaving the two major parties to fight for the center. But for a long time, the Conservatives moved with the fringe, abandoning the center, and the ‘red Tories’ or center-left PC members joined the Liberals and sent the Conservatives into the wilderness for a long time.
One last thing - most countries that have many parties also have parliamentary governments, which changes a lot of things. I can’t imagine how the U.S. government would function if Congress were actually made up of many different parties, and everyone was always excercising a free vote. It might actually work pretty well, or it might be an utter disaster. These things tend to grow organically, and the end result is not really knowable in advance. You might have total gridlock, or you might wind up with a system that’s much better at representing various local constituencies - without party discipline it might just be an endless pork fest as every politician wheels and deals to divvy up the public treasure to the benefit of his or her own people.
When it comes to media coverage, I think there does need to be a minimum amount of support for a party or candidate, otherwise the airwaves would be clogged with coverage for people who don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell at getting elected. Even when it comes to the more well know, better supported parties, people like Jesse Ventura who actually make it to any office of significance are rare.
Wait…it’s not like that now? 
This makes two pretty long replies you’ve written that completely miss the point of my posts 
.
I’m talking about a party, and you’re replying about candidates.
XYZ party starts up and wins some elections. They build awareness, run ad campaigns, build a strong, clear platform that focuses on what Dems and Repubs are doing wrong and how they’re going to do those things right. “Cool people” (Matt Damon, Oprah, Scarjo) start talking about them, wearing their tshirts, endorsing their candidates. They run ads on television. They build online followings. Etc etc. I don’t understand why you don’t think it could happen. Most people I talk to are sick of the Democrats and Republicans and hold their nose when they vote for either. A major 3rd party that isn’t all fringe and wacky like the Libertarians or Constitution Party could take off like wildfire.
Any party that gets support from Matt Damon and Oprah and the rest of Hollywood is guaranteed to be a ‘fringe’ party. You seem to be laboring under the illusion that America is really a far-left country, and that it’s the major parties holding it back from becoming a truly ‘progressive’ land.
America is a center-right country. That’s clearly where the bulk of the population is. The most successful third parties have been centrist parties which rose up when the public perceived the Democrats and Republicans to be pandering to their bases and ignoring the center. Obama’s popularity drops more every time he moves to the left.
Let’s look at the only two serious third party challenges that arose in the last 50 years: In 1980, John Anderson created the ‘Unity Party’, which gained traction because Carter was seen as being too far to the left, and Reagan too far to the right. His support was building, but then he was shut out of the Presidential debates and marginalized. In the end, he still wound up getting 6 million votes.
The other big third party challenge came from Ross Perot, who campaigned against George Bush’s big deficits and his disconnect from the people, and against Bill Clinton’s liberalism.
In both cases, the message of the third party was: Government is corrupt. Government is spending too much money. Government is not looking out for the interests of the center, where most Americans are.
The conditions today for a similar third party are pretty good. When Perot ran, approval of congress was about 35%. It’s lower than that now. If Obama continues to move to the left, and the Republicans flee back to their religious base, the door will be open for a centrist third party with the same message Perot and Anderson delivered - pragmatism, balanced budgets, fiscal responsibility, common-sense solutions free from ideology.
Anderson’s campaign platform would actually be pretty popular today. He advocated a 50 cent per gallon gasoline tax, with money used to bring down the deficit, shore up Social Security, and to encourage Americans to find alternatives to gasoline. He said Republicans were too socially conservative and intolerant, and that Democrats were too willing to tax and spend their way out of problems. He wanted to keep reasonably high personal income tax levels, but cut business taxes to spur economic growth.
If someone with a message like that can win over the ‘tea party’ crowd, you could see a viable third party. It still won’t win, but it could shake up an election.
But what is a political party FOR, if it isn’t winning elections?
You can’t have a cool, hip celebrity-endorsed political party unless that political party is running candidates for election. If it doesn’t run candidates for election it isn’t a political party, it’s an advocacy group, like the Sierra Club or the NRA.
In our country, elected officials control the parties. A political party that doesn’t have any elected officials is a pretend make-believe play-camp.
Suppose everyone really were sick of both the Democrats and Republicans. And Matt Damon says, “Hey, let’s start the Good Government Party! All the cool kids are doing it! And we’ll be centrist, not fringe. We’ll be for good things, not bad things! Whoo-hoo!”. Even if they win a few offices, the GG party is totally useless unless they get big enough to form a majority, or at least make a coalition majority with one of the major parties. One guy from the GG party, unless he’s in the executive branch, doesn’t mean shit. He’d be an adjunct of one of the major parties, like Bernie Saunders.
The Reform Party was a huge effort during the 90s. And it was a massive failure.
If someone is really sick of both major parties, then their only option is to reform one of the parties to their liking. If you’re conservative but hate the Religious Right, forming a moderate conservative party is retarded. Your only hope is to take back the party from the RR. This isn’t an impossible task, after all, this is what the religious right did starting in the 1980s!
And it sure doesn’t seem to me that people are equally fed up with both parties. It seems to me that they are particularly fed up with one party in particular. It might be that the Religious Right will purge all the moderates from the Republican party, and leave them nowhere to go. But rather than create a moderate conservative party, it seems rather that the purged voters will vote for moderate democrats instead. And then we’ll have a fringe Republican party, and a massive Democratic party. And eventually the shell of the Republican party will be so weak that it will be ripe for whatever the next popular movement will be, and it will be captured by them.
Political parties aren’t static, with people leaving them once they no longer agree with them, and joining or forming other parties that more closely reflect their beliefs. Rather, the parties change to accommodate the voters. Which means if people are starting to get annoyed at both parties, the first party that can figure out how to be less annoying enjoys a massive advantage.
The only hope for a third party is that both major parties implode at the same time. Because if only one of the parties implodes, the crumbled shell of the party is still much more useful than a brand-new third party.
The Democrats are a fringe party?
Huh? What have I said that even remotely relates to the political spectrum? Is there a fiber of your being that isn’t rabidly partisan, Sam? It’s the only way you seem capable of viewing anything.
I’m not being partisan at all. Hollywood is farther to the left than the Democratic party is. Hollywood supports Democrats because they’re the only game in town for them. Your suggestion that a new party could form that has major support from people like Matt Damon would necessarily put it to the left of the Democrats, would it not? Surely you’re not suggesting that a bunch of Hollywood people will become disaffected with the Democrats and form a party to the right of them, are you? Or maybe you are - if those Hollywood types are Fred Thompson, Clint Eastwood, Kelsey Grammar, Robert Duvall, Tom Selleck, and Kurt Russell…
My whole point was that a party with major Hollywood support would necessarily be a party to the left of the Democrats, and this means it will not be successful, because very few Americans are to the left of where the Democrats are today. That’s just a fact. In fact, Americans say that the current Congress is too far to the left by a 2-1 margin over those who say it’s too far to the right.
Repeat after me: America is a CENTRIST country. Center-right, to be specific. A third party will only be successful if the other two parties abandon the center and a new party with a strong leader can move into the gap and occupy it. The only two remotely successful third party attempts in the last fifty years did exactly that.
How is any of this a partisan attack on my part?
I pulled Matt Damon out of my ass. Use one of your right-wing Hollywooders or one of the many other that exist and my point is exactly the same. You made it partisan.
You used Matt Damon and Oprah as examples - both of whom are far to the left (I have no idea who ‘Scarjo’ is).
If you were just trying to say that a third party needs a powerful, popular leader, then I have no beef with that. It could be someone from Hollywood, or it could be some other respected leader like General Petraeus, or Jack Welch, or someone else who commands respect and attention.
My point remains that you will not have a viable, successful third party that comes from the far left or the far right. It will have to be a party that occupies the gap between the other two parties. Do you disagree with that?