The failure of Congress to (so far, anyway) pass a healthcare bill makes it seem like the two factions of the GOP are moving farther and farther from each other. I think the Dems may be starting to fracture a bit too.
So what would happen to make the US a three- or four-party country? OK, I know there are more than 2 parties now, but let’s face it – the Green Party and the Libertarians and the others had no chance of taking the Presidency or even a sizable enough group in either house of congress to have an impact.
Move ahead to the 2024 election. (I’m assuming the 2020 election will be so tainted by the current POTUS that any predictions are off.) Suppose the GOP primary system ends up with 2 frontrunners – a Moderate and a Tea Party representative. Neither has enough votes to claim the nomination on the first go-around. If the convention gives the nom to one or the other, would the other group say basically, “Fuck you. We’re gonna run our guy anyway”? I’m thinking not, since that would pretty much assure the presidency would go to the Democratic nominee. Even so or if the convention gives the nom to someone else (who is presumably more centrist) won’t the situation be the same as it is now – nothing gets the approval of all the GOP congresscritters? Wouldn’t this situation quickly become untenable?
So what happens? Does one faction of the party split off with the hope the same would happen to the Dems? Do conservatives decide that the only real option is to give the presidency to the Dems for a few terms until their two parties can garner enough support to be contenders?
The EC I believe has to give more than half its votes to one person for that person to become POTUS. Would three or four major parties cause most elections to go to Congress to be decided?
The problem is actually not the electoral college, as antiquated and destructive as the EC may be, the problem is what’s called “First Past The Post, Winner Takes All.”
Whosoever gets 51% of the votes (or more than any other candidate) wins a district. This means that Leftist #1, Leftist #2, and Extreme hardcore Fascist are all in direct competition. Leftist #1 & Leftist #2 might agree on 99% of all issues, but 1% that has a huge margin of single issue voters. Let’s just use abortion because it’s easy. If there is a perfectly even population split of 33% for each party, it’s a tossup, but that implies that 66% of the country is leftist. If only, say, 55% of the country is leftist, then it would be closer to 27.5%, 27.5, and 45%. The Extreme hardcore Facists win every district, every time, assuming of course every district has a perfect distribution of L1’s, L2’'s and EHF’s… and that’s despite 55% of the population being on the complete opposite of the political spectrum.
Naturally, the L1’s and L2’s aren’t stupid enough to give the EHF’s every district, so they join together into a single coalition party (True Leftists) and put forward one candidate. Now the TL’s get 55% of the vote and the EHF’s get 45% of the vote and the TL’s win every district, every time.
The same thing probably happened to all the right wing parties, which is where the monolithic 45% EHF party came from in the first place. FPTPWTA means you really can only have one candidate representing about half the population, and one candidate representing the other half. A vote for not the majority party is effectively a vote for the opposition!
It doesn’t have to be this way, though.
You could fix the American political system overnight if you could wave a magic wand and implement the following simple changes.
[ol]
[li]Eliminate all human influence on districting. Use an algorithm that produces districts that maximize convexity & population equality between districts and takes no other factors into account (especially voting history, population density, race, etc).[/li][li]Merge every set of 5 districts into one and implement Single Transferable Vote.[/li][/ol]
Those two things would end the two party system and create a system where the candidates elected are the best possible match for voter desire. There are no wasted votes, no gerrymandering, and no direct competition between like minded parties.
How does STV work? Simple. For each 5-man district, voters are allowed to vote - in order of preference - for any number of candidates. In the first run, any candidate that gets more than 20% of the first choice gets a seat. Once that candidate gets 20%, the votes that contributed to that 20% are eliminated and the remaining votes are rolled over into second choice and the first choice is struck from the list. Repeat. If no one has 20%, eliminate the last choice of every vote not yet eliminated. Repeat. Once all 5 seats are filled, the election is over.
In real terms, it means Democrats would have been able to vote for HRC as #1 and Bernie as #2 (or vice versa), and HRC and Bernie would not have had to chew each other a new one in the primaries. Likewise, all the never Trumper’s could have run on the ticket, and conservative voters could have chosen Rubio or Bush as their #1 vote without fear that doing so would have “wasted” their vote and risk HRC. What’s interesting, though, is that a liberal might have run Stein #1, HRC as #2 and Sanders as #3, again without risking that Stein vote as a waste. 3rd parties are just as viable as major parties in such a system, and there is no benefit to being in a massive party that really caters to no one.
If that’s really how it works, it’s not a particularly good design. When candidate A gets 20+% of the votes and “the votes that contributed to that 20% are eliminated”, it matters a whole lot which order you count in. Suppose some areas have machines and others have paper ballots, the machine votes come in first and are eliminated. Then all the “paper” ballot people whose first choice was A get there first (A) and second choice to count, but the machine ballots don’t get their second choice. Isn’t easy to imagine that those people have different second choices because they’re from different areas?
But in any case, you have to decide which set of voters put A over, and I don’t really see a fair way to do it. Even if you said do it randomly, it leads to strategic behavior. If A is my favorite candidate, but I’m confident she will win, I’ll vote for my second choice, to ensure my ballot is not one of those eliminated after the first round. Then I get A and my second choice perhaps. And if too many people do this, A, who might be everyone’s first choice might not even be elected at all.
Oldguy, you make an excellent point. And some STV systems do use random drawing to choose which votes are reallocated. But you can also reallocate surplus votes fractionally – so if a candidate’s vote total is 25% surplus (say they got 20 votes but only needed 15), you count all of their voters’ second-place choices and multiply the totals by 0.25.
It gets even more complicated. Computers have allowed refinements to the vote-counting systems. See the wiki article for starters, specifically the subsection on surplus allocation … Counting single transferable votes - Wikipedia
There is no way the USA can be a permanent 3 or 4 party system. 1860 was a unique election, but it also resulted in civil war and the destruction of the Southern USA economic system. These minor parties that currently exist in the USA are nothing but vanity exercises. As despicable as I think Donald Trump is, he was more qualified to be president than Gary Johnson or Jill Stein.
Republicans proved in 2016 that they will always vote party over country. They knew Donald Trump could care less about the Supreme Court, but he’d appoint someone from a conservative list to the Supreme Court seat that Mitch McConnell stole. They had their eye on the end game, and even if the starting quarterback had been convicted of dog fighting, winning the Super Bowl was the ultimate goal.
Most Democrats came home after the poisonous Bernie Sanders campaign. Not enough did in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. The purity ponies are more toxic to the Democrats than the Republicans Tea Party purists as the electoral college demonstrates. But there isn’t enough of them on either side for a viable 3rd or 4th party.
Except the other three large countries which use First Past the Post don’t have only two parties. The UK, Canada and India all have multi-party systems. There are usually two dominant parties, but also several smaller ones.
The US is unique, I think, in the duopoly of parties: two, and only two. I don’t see how that can be attributed to FPTP, when other countries which use that system do not have two and only two parties.
I think you’d need to change the electoral system and the structure of the two major parties (and of course, both are intertwined). When the voters are the parties, it’s harder to claim that the parties don’t represent the voters. If you can’t get the voters of either party in your area to back your candidacy, that’s a good sign that it’s you that’s the problem. There is no tiny clique of dues-paying members keeping you out, no remote leader issuing a decree prohibiting you from being nominated, etc.
I fear that this is going to become a real possibility, and it would be a disaster. Extremists - probably the extreme right - are the ones who would most likely benefit.
Look to France. Get someone like Macron who wins the Presidency, gains control of the House of Representatives, and gains a significant number of seats in the Senate.
As for STV, no, it’s not the answer. STV has the problems of being complex and appearing opaque. Approval Voting is a far better - but not perfect - method. It’s simpler, maintains the elector-elected relationship, and scales to multi-member constituencies.
Don’t forget the other end of all this. The parties themselves. What has happened historically, especially since the end of the 19th Century, is that as soon as a “third” party gets big enough to pay attention to, one or both of the Big Two, shift policies about a bit (shuffle the furniture so to speak) so as to bite off chunks of the new party for themselves. In relatively short order, the new party is winnowed back down to inconsequential status.
The Republican party in the US, since about 1967, is built almost entirely of such “furniture moving.” Just as the Democrats didn’t all REALLY care deeply about civil rights, so too the Republicans have never REALLY given a crap about things like abortion, and certainly not about illegal aliens working on the cheap.
The reason the parties appear to be splintering, is that both have reached the point where there are more “band-aids” and pseudo-causes in their platform, than things that they are energetically dedicated to accomplishing.
One of two things is most likely to result: either a galvanizing leader will emerge in one or both parties, who can make it appear that all those patchwork band-aids really DO represent a cohesive and engaging solution to the countries ills, or both parties will splinter off bits and swallow each other’s debris until they are each relatively cohesive again.
What I tend to notice about those people who think we need a third party is that they all assume that the third party will be one which more perfectly matches to their own particular platform, but every one of them has a different one in mind. So while it may be that a substantial portion (even the majority) of the of populace say that what this country needs is a third party, you have 10% of the country that assumes the party is going to be libertarian, 10% that assume it is going to be left wing populist, another 5% that think it will be liberal but with no abortions and everyone owning guns, 3% that think it will take back America for white Christians etc.
No, they wouldn’t. Without getting into the benefits or demerits of ethnic nationalism in the abstract, the reason Trump is in charge of the United States right now is because 1) ethnic nationalists captured one of the two major parties in the primarys, and 2) a fluke having to do with the Electoral College. If either those elements had been missing (if for example, all the ethnic nationalists had their own Constitution Party to vote for, and if we had a coalition-based multiparty legislature), ethnic nationalists would have gotten the 30-35% of the vote proportionate to their public support, and they wouldn’t have the presidency right now.
Many European countries actually have more public support for ethnic nationalism, immigration rstrictionism, etc. than the United States (opinion polls are pretty clear on that), but they also don’t have effective two party systems, so in order to influence the direction of the country the country ethnic nationalists either have to win an absolute majority of the vote or they have to make coalitions / compromises with other parties.
The structural differences between the French presidential electoral system and the US presidential electoral system are so great that it’s not possible to just say, “Get someone like Macron.” He’s obviously a smart politician, but no matter how smart and charismatic, there’s no way an American Macron could do the same thing that French Macron did, just one year in advance of the presidential election.
The French system is much simpler than the US system. To start with, it’s centralised. There’s only one election. It’s also much simpler to be nominated: a candidate needs signatures from 500 elected officials (mayors of cities, cantons; members of the Assembly and Senate, etc.) As summarized by the wiki article on the President of France:
So Macron started his own political party in the spring of 2016, literally one year before the presidential election. He got his party’s nomination without any primary, got 500 elected officials to sign his nomination papers, and bingo! he’s on the ballot for the election for the President of France. And remember, it’s only one ballot, not 50. So then he stands for election in a single election and has to come in first or second in the first round to make it to the final round.
Now what would an American Macron have to have done? He would have had to start his new political party, in a form that complies with 50 state election laws. Then he would have had to register his party in all 50 states, while the Dems and Pubs are already registered automatically in all 50 states. And then he would have to have complied with whatever rules are required to get on the ballot in all 50 states, while the candidates for the Dems and Pubs are automatically on the ballot in all 50 states. Any chance he could have done that starting in the fall of 2015, just one year in advance of the election? And then US Macron would have had to won the elections in enough of the 50 states to get a majority in the Electoral College.
Doesn’t matter how charismatic US Macron is: to have a chance at winning the presidency, he has a much harder job to do than French Macron had.
I disagree. I want a third party not because it would necessarily agree with me, but because it would result in less blatant stupidity. There are utterly stupid things in the Democratic Platform, and utterly stupid thinks in the Republican Platform (though it’s certainly not a wash or equivalence). Let the crazy extremists in either party have their own parties, so that moderates who aren’t hellbent on ideologies can actually get something done without the perpetual fear of primarying.
Why not all those parties? That’s exactly how things should be. Remember, the founding fathers pleaded with future generations not to form political parties (this was long after the constitution and thus not thought to be included, but the problems with FPTPWTA were seen then too).
First, there is the major structural difference. The elections for the French Parliament are a single set of elections, overseen by the national electoral body. To run candidates, a party just has to register with that one body. As well, it looks like to get on the ballot for parliamentary elections, a French citizen just has to file a declaration et Robert est son oncle, if I’m reading the Electoral Code correctly: Code Electoral, Livre I, Titre II, Chapitre V: Déclarations de candidatures.
That’s considerably simpler than in the United States, where there are fifty different electoral bodies that run the elections: the electoral bodies set up by the states. That means that to be competitive nationally, a new party has to register with 50 different electoral bodies, and then get on the ballots in 50 different states, meeting 50 different state requirements. That’s a considerably more difficult administrative task. See the wiki article on Ballot Access to get a sampling of the requirements for new parties to get on the state ballots in the US. And, of course the rules are different for the Republican and the Democrats, compared to new parties. Those two parties are automatically on the ballots, unlike the new parties. (It’s almost as if the two major parties wrote the ballot access laws to favour themselves, but that can’t be it, can it? )
The second point is that the French don’t elect their Parliament at the same time as the President. The parliamentary elections are about six weeks after the second round of the presidential elections, and the voting pattern is often in response to the presidential election. Macron’s En Marche party won big in the parliamentary elections, in part because of his solid victory in the presidential election. His party was riding that wave. If he had lost, doubtful that En Marche would have been very successful at all in the parliamentary elections.
That’s not the case in the US, where the Congressional elections are held simultaneously with the presidential elections. The voters can’t respond to the outcome of the presidential election, so even if a third party candidate is doing well in the polls in the run-up to the election, it strikes me as doubtful that voters for Congress would have a strong reason to vote for congressional candidates from that third party.
But in any event, let’s ask the American Dopers: do they think that a charismatic third party leader could get on the presidential ballot in all 50 states, and get a slate of candidates nominated for Congress and the open Senate seats, starting just thirteen months before the election, the way Macron did? (i.e. starting in October, 2015, 13 months before the 2016 elections)
Not impossible, no. Of course, the last time a new party won the presidency was in 1860, when the other two parties were badly split (Democrats) or had self-destructed (Whigs) on the slavery issue. The successful Republican candidate, Lincoln, was running against a divided field of three other candidates. He only pulled in 39% of the popular vote, but since it was heavily concentrated in the northern states, he got a majority in the Electoral College.
So yes, not impossible for a third party to win. It’s just highly unlikely, unless there is a similar political crisis that breaks the existing parties.
Really? then why did none of the founding fathers, who were big-wigs in their states, try to change the electoral system? Could you provide a cite that the founding fathers were critical of First past the post?
Reread the quote. I said they opposed political parties, and it’s every hit on google:
But within a decade of the Constitution’s ratification, political parties had emerged. Some of the Founding Fathers originally most concerned about these “factions” had actually helped to bring them about. George Washington lamented that political party wrangling "agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another."3 And Thomas Jefferson, always good for a pithy line, swore "if I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all."4 But as president, Washington pursued economic and foreign policies that alienated a huge part of the electorate. And in 1793, Thomas Jefferson resigned his seat in Washington’s cabinet to lead the opposition to the administration—a move that led directly to the formation of the first American political parties.Source
FPTPWTA would be more viable if we didn’t have parties, but parties are the only logical response to our current election process.
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