Actually this isn’t true, many Presidents have won without a popular majority (and in any system with multiple realistic candidates it would almost never occur that a single one of them wins a majority of the popular votes.)
For example:
1996 Bill Clinton won with 49% of the vote
1992 Bill Clinton won with 43% of the vote
1968 Richard Nixon won with 43% of the vote
1960 JFK won with 49.7% of the vote
I could go on but there’s really no point, suffice to say many, many Presidents have been elected without a majority of the popular vote (pretty much any third part candidate getting more than 4-5% of the vote all but guarantees the winner won’t have a majority.)
Now, Bush was the first President in over 100 years who had a lower popular vote total than another candidate and still won the Presidency. The other incidents of this happening:
1888: Benjamin Harrison (5,443,892 votes) defeats Grover Cleveland (5,534,488)
1876: Rutherford Hayes (4,034,311) defeats Samuel Tilden (4,288,546)
1824: John Q. Adams (113,122) defeats Andrew Jackson (151,271)*
*In 1824 the campaigns were very, very different. The popular vote was not even recorded in many states, candidates won with 90% majorities in many of the states the won, it was a campaign where candidates fought very targeted battles state-by-state, the idea of a “national” campaign was somewhat unrealized at this time. So you had candidates who would typically win huge in a few States where they were uncontested by their opponent and where many of the voters wouldn’t even know much/anything about the other candidate. Meanwhile the battleground states where hotbeds of campaign activity.
Ron Paul is a Republican candidate for President, not part of any “third” party, the GOP is one of the “two big” parties in this country.
I have no problem with a system that discourages third party candidates. Why is a third party candidate better? Only having two candidates and two major parties is one way to guarantee compromise.
What happens in systems with say, proportional representation in the legislature, where the head of government is chosen based on how many seats a given party has in the legislature? Well, for example in a system where there are many viable parties, you have a fragmented legislature. So what happens? All those little parties and all those unique-like-a-flower candidates get together and form a coalition, essentially compromising. Their ideals get shifted to meet what is acceptable to everyone else in the coalition.
In America, we have two “big tent” parties where very much the same thing happens, in fact because of our separation of powers we actually have a lot more give-and-take between even the two parties than most people actually realize. A lot of governing at the Federal level isn’t nearly sexy enough to get popular media attention and compromise between Democrats and Republicans is quite common.
Again, why? If there are tons of parties it simply means you’ll see coalitions being formed, diluting the individuality of all those individual parties. I’m not saying say, Germany’s system is a bad system. With all those parties with seats in the Bundestag, you do have many options. But, a lot of those little parties are only going to have power by forming coalitions, which means they have to dilute their views and make compromises. This all happens in the U.S. system, but it happens within the two parties (in fact you see this on very prominent display during the primaries, as you have candidates from different “segments” of the party.) Sure, voters don’t get the “window dressing” of a lot of little-unique-as-a-flower candidates, but functionally a two party system isn’t a whole lot different. We just compromise in different ways, but most political systems involve a ton of compromise between differing ideas–at least democratic political systems.
