Nope. They get more than 50% of the votes case. Those who don’t vote aren’t voters.
Low turnout may be a problem, but I’m not sure how it matters here, unless you’re claiming that it is caused by the two-party system.
If 60% of the US eligible voters don’t vote and the 40% who do are split fairly evenly between two well established and well funded political machines there isn’t a lot of room for a third or fourth party.
Parties don’t cause people not to vote, but in the US parties aren’t concerned, arguably their success is dependent on people not voting. US politics is vast amounts of money on media buys. Quite rationally it’s spent with the expectation of influence. Nobody sane spends those sorts of amounts on “I just got into the race to give some speeches and keep them honest”.
The non-voters are irrelevant, by choice.
The voters can simply choose to vote for a different party if one is presented to them. They aren’t bound by their past votes to continue to support a certain party.
The reason there is no room for a third party is that enough voters vote strategically to know that voting for a third party is a wasted vote. Only the leading two usually have a chance to win, since other voters also vote strategically and will support someone who has a chance.
That doesn’t make sense.
A party can be just as successful by getting more people to vote for it as getting fewer people to vote for the other party.
Of course not. They spend it so that they can help themselves, or a candidate they support, win election. And?
So what?
I agree with the above.
I think this is backwards. We’ve seen “majority of the majority (of the majority of the majority)” politics in recent decades. The two-party system makes it undesired for the caucus to split, so legislators hang together with the fanatics in their own party against their own better judgment. A system with many parties and sub-parties, and more easily broken coalitions, might resist the wackies better.
Apparently the parties haven’t done all that much managing of candidates for the last 25 years, except for all the pledges on the GOP side. There are no smoke-filled rooms; there are instead preachers (of more than one kind) demanding compliance. When the gatekeeping is done by anti-tax absolutists and other fanatics, the real risk is that at least one party becomes beholden to crazy ideas and mostly useless.
The answer has to be more parties, and a system that lets coalitions break up.
But if we had multiple parties, and one candidate could win with just 20% of the vote, that candidate could be one of the fanatics! And he/she would have absolutely no reason to share power or compromise with the moderates, because they have no leverage.
Moderates “hanging together” with radicals is what controls the radicals. If the radicals get too strong, middle-of-the-road voters will simply go to the other party, and the radicals will lose.
The point I’m trying to make is mathematical. A simplified example:
If there are two possible outcomes, then the winner must have 51% of the votes.
If there are five possible outcomes, then it is possible for a winner to succeed with 21% of the votes. In a two party system, 49% of the population can oppose a candidate and still fail to carry the election. In a five-party example, that means that 79% of the population opposed the candidate, but they won anyway, and therefore may or may not represent what the majority actually wants.
This is an extremely common effect and reason independent candidates are often called “spoilers.” Imagine a scenario in which 40% of voters support Policy A and 60% support Policy B. In any normal election, this would result in Policy B winning. However, if two candidates participate in the election and both adhere to Policy B (or at least, offer two very similar platforms) then the vote might end up being split 40/30/30. Therefore, the candidate that supports Policy A wins the election despite the fact that most voters did not support their policy.
The more candidates you add to a system, the more chaotic the system becomes and the easier it is for a non-majority platform or party to win the election. This especially benefits the lunatic fringe, because of the effect of the Median Voter Theorem. Multiple candidates clustered around the center of the political spectrum would split the centrist votes, while one candidate at the extreme end might capture a larger portion of the votes.
Your claim, if I understand it correctly, is that the other members of the party hang onto the lunatic fringe elements because they want those votes from the extreme end of the spectrum. That might be a valid strategy for managing the problem, but that also kind of proves my point.
And…the parties know this. They are trying to win by attracting as many votes as possible. This forces other parties to do the same. This process leads to the existence of just two parties, because two are the only with a shot at winning. That is why we have two parties. Whenever a third party has emerged, it has either died off quickly–because one of the big two coopted its ideas and therefore its voters–or it became one of the big two by killing off a previous one by taking all its voters. The last time the latter happened was when the Republicans came along and replaced the Whig party, which was falling apart.
How would you eliminate political parties anyways?
How would you choose a nominee for elected office? First come first serve?
It’s not so much FPTP in itself, but (IMO) a product of single member districts combined with FPTP. (what John Mace said, but a little more detailed.
There’s nothing inherent (i.e. in the Constitution) about the US system that requires political parties- in theory, we could return 535 independent congressmen and even elect independent Presidents and Vice Presidents, and the system would function without a hitch.
If political parties are the problem, the US/British systems are probably the closest to ideal for that reason; proportional representation systems actually institutionalize the presence of political parties in the system itself.
And, FWIW, the fact that states are all equally represented in the Senate is a feature, not a bug. It’s a counterbalance against big states like Florida, Texas, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania and California (those 6 combined are 40% of the population) running roughshod over the rest of the country.
Canada and Great Britain have single-member districts and FPTP and have more than two viable political parties.
Well, yeah, if you’re using a winner-take-all plurality election. Why don’t you have runoffs?
Yes, because not only are the populations within each of those six states incredibly monolithic, they are all also incredibly similar to each other. [/sarcasm]
You didn’t get my comment. The SCOTUS has no parties because it isn’t elected, and HAS no voters. The elected parts of government have parties because they are elected, and they are elected by people who affiliate with parties.
Why would a court need political parties?
But why shouldn’t they? They have more people - shouldn’t they have more say in how the country is run in a democracy? That’s how it works in the House.
I know this is what the states were thinking when they wrote the Constitution. Perhaps it’s out of date today.
I’m describing the reason parties exist in our current election system. If we change that system, the dynamics might indeed be different, possibly for the better.
We do have runoffs in a few elections. In Louisiana, for example, everyone is on the ballot, even candidates from the same party, and then if one gets 50%, he/she wins, if not, there’s a runoff between the top two vote-getters, and they may be from the same party. No primaries.
Because judges are chosen by elected officials who have party affiliations and want to appoint judges who share the same party affiliation.
As does India, as far as I can tell from wiki: single-member districts and FPTP.
Keep in mind that when the Constitution was drawn up, the very largest state, New York, was only six times the size of the smallest state, Rhode Island. Today, the twelve largest states account for around 85% of the population.
They certainly never imagined just how large the US would become or just how much larger many US states would become.