Have you never seen “The Manchurian Candidate”? 
Look up the history of Wayne Morse. From the Wiki entry:
" During World War II, he was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Republican; he became an Independent after Dwight D. Eisenhower’s election to the presidency in 1952. While an independent, he set a record for performing the third-longest one-person filibuster in the history of the Senate.[2] Morse joined the Democratic Party in February 1955, and was reelected twice while a member of that party."
I think it is safe to say that he single-handedly converted Oregon from rock-ribbed Republican to solid Democrat where it has remained ever since. Always his own man, he opposed the Democratic leadership on Viet Nam.
In 1954 Richard Neuberger became the first Democrat elected to the senate since 1914, following in Morse’s footsteps.
Right, FPTP will favour two big parties generally. But, Duverger’s so-called “Law” assumes that voter preferences are distributed evenly across the nation. When that is not the case, FPTP will actually favour strong regional parties, which happens in Canada, the UK and also India. The current example in Canada is the Bloq quebecois, but it’s not the only regional party in Canadian history. The Reform Party, for example, was a very successful western party. Before that, there were the CCF, the Social Credit and the Progressives, primarily based in western Canada.
Also, there is a major difference between those three countries and the US. Those three countries have two dominant parties, and also smaller parties. That is completely different from the US, which has two and only two parties.
A far more significant factor is that those three other countries are parliamentary, not presidential-congressional. In a parliamentary system, voting for a smaller party is not necessarily a “wasted vote” in the way it is in the US. For example, there is currently a minority government in Canada, and the NDP has gained some policy concessions from the Liberal government, in exchange for support. In the UK, the Liberal Democrats got Cabinet appointments, and the Deputy PM spot. That sort of thing can happen in other cases of a minority. There have also been cases where a smaller third party has pushed popular policies which the majority government has felt it had to adopt, to avoid being overtaken at the polls. That was the pattern with the majority Liberal government and the CCF, post-WWII.
All I’m saying is that it’s far too simplistic to blame FPTP for everything that is odd in the US system. It is a factor, certainly, but not the factor, in my opinion.
To address the OP, the closest example I can think of a politician deliberately deceiving his party to serve the interest of the other is Phil Gramm. In 1978, Gramm was elected to Congress from Texas’ 6th Congressional District as a Democrat. When Reagan was elected, Gramm worked with the Administration and Congressional Republicans to pass the Gramm-Latta budget that implemented Reagan’s economic program. Democrats also believed (undoubtedly correctly) that he was sharing internal Democratic strategy conversations with the White House.
The next session, he was removed from the Budget Committee by Democratic leadership. He ended up resigning his seat and running for it as a Republican in the subsequent special election. He was successful and would also go on to serve as a Senator for three terms.
I don’t vote on the infinitesimal chance I will be the deciding vote. So if there is a true moderate on the ballot, I might vote for them despite policy differences – to send a message of wanting to move in that direction. This used to be much more common but sometimes still happens with local offices.
I do agree with you on something like the Oz - Fetterman race. It is possible that Oz would have been a more effective Senator, but, if so, he would have been more effective in generally doing the opposite of what I want.
In a parliamentary system, yes that’s the tendency, but a third party can get some traction due to hope of being in a coalition.
Add FPTP to a presidential system, and you have a stronger 2-party tendency.
Of course, as discussed over here, the US does not use FPTP for its presidential elections. The candidate must receive 50% + 1 of the electoral votes.
True, but it almost certainly means the candidate likely to become president will be one of two parties. FPTP still affects that.
We use FPTP popular elections to determine how the Electoral College members form each state are selected.
A good counter-example to FPTP is the French presidential elections. They have a run-off system; very Georgian. Typically there are 4 major candidates, from very conservative to very liberal/socialist. It is not unknown for voters to “send a message” by voting for a different candidate than they would prefer to win, so as to indicate a level of displeasure with their preferred party’s direction in the last while. Sometimes, the party gets too much displeasure and the other left/right candidate is in the run-off.
The NDP in Canada tried to push an alternative to FPTP. However, the alternatives are ridings with ranked voting, and proportional representation. (…or run-off). Run-off is less preferable because pretty much the same effect can be achieved with ranked voting - it just makes counting slower.
For Canada, for example, the problem is that the NDP used to be full-blown socialist, and a lot of people would not vote for them - so they’d vote say 1-Liberal 2-Conservative; or 1-Conservative 2-Liberla. the more socially left voters would vote 1-NDP 2-Liberal. Rarely would there be a 1-NDP 2-Conservative or 1-Conservative 2-NDP; presumably if the Liberal leader were too strongly disliked (but he’s a nice guy) those voters would leave #2 blank.
Many ridings are decided by less than 50%. The net result is that unless it’s the Liberal that comes 3rd, the center candidate (Liberal) will probably pick up the remaining vote. The only question is whether the Conservatives or NDP do better with the Liberal eliminated in a ranked ballot.
(With proportional representation - each party produces a ranked list. SO the incentive for a politician is to suck up to the party brass to get high on the list, rather than to worry about any local issues for any one area of the country.)
Not sure what system is in play, but I see several US states have a “no-party” primary, so two people from the same party can end up in the main election. Also note that even in places where multiple candidates from multiple parties compete, the main parties tend to come ahead. Part of the calculation, as Herschel Walker seems to demonstrate, is that the entirety of the national result figures as much as the local candidate in people’s vote. Even in parliamentary elections, who is the leader of each party seems to help make up voters’ minds.
The disparity between the population and the senate (and electoral college) was originally a “feature” of the US constitution. The other states were worried that the more populous Northern states could outvote the rest and perpetually install their own man - or always force the decision to congress - hence the 1-vote-per-state in congress also. But then a party system quickly emerged to prevent this. (Although cynics may say, with some validity, that it was also a mechanism to ensure that the North could not overwhelm the slavery system.) However, the population disparity today is creating an analogous divide between rural and urban with different party/ideology preferences, exacerbated by the imbalance of having many small rural states.
Not necessarily. Some systems use a closed list, where the parties set the list. But there are also systems of open lists, where the voters have input into the composition of the party list.
Do you have a link to one of the states you are taking about ? Because the way you are describing it makes no sense- the whole purpose of a primary is to pick the party’s candidate. I think what you may be referring to is open vs closed primaries. Each party can have a primary to choose its candidate and you will not have two people both running as Republicans in the general election. The difference is who can vote in the party primary - only people who registered with that party or anyone. There are circumstances where a lifelong Democrat doesn’t get the nomination and ends up running on a different party’s line - but there’s still only one Democratic candidate, the other candidate is now representing the Rent is Too Damn High party ( a real party in NY) or the Green Party
No, he’s referring to a “jungle primary”, more formally called a “Nonpartisan blanket primary”. California and Washington use a top-two-candidate primary; Alaska uses a top-four-candidate primary.
In a top-two primary, the two candidates with the first and second greatest number of votes advance to the general election, regardless of party affiliation. As the wikipedia article says: “It is entirely possible that multiple candidates of the same political party advance to the general election.”
Does that mean in those primaries the voter does not have to declare an affiliation which would get them a republican or democrat ballot but rather gets a ballot with everyone on it?
Kinda sounds like a general election but with more steps.
Yes, in California everyone gets the same “primary” ballot with all candidates listed, and the top two finishers are in the general election. Not only is it possible for both candidates to be from the same party, it happens very often. In this recent election, both candidates for our state legislature district were Democrats.
It’s utterly bizarre that a nation of our size could be so split on the national, state, and local levels to have seen so many knife-edge elections. Historically, one party has tended to dominate and close elections only happen when circumstances are unusual or popular sentiment is switching from one side to the other with an election in the middle.
On the presidential level in modern history (since 1900), only the elections of 1960, 1968, and 2000 were within 1% of the popular vote and only Bush was close in electoral votes. Trump lost by 2% of the popular vote in 2016.
The House was within 10 seats in 1916, 1930, 1952, 2000, and 2020. 2022 is a maybe.
The Senate was within 2 seats in 1918, 1926, 1930, 1952, 1954, 1956, 2000, 2006, 2020, and 2022.
Both parties had liberal, centrist, and conservative wings until around 1968, when the liberals were pushed out of the Republican party. The moderates were mostly gone by 2000, about the time that most of the conservative Democrats were leaving rapidly.
In today’s world, every Democrat in Congress is to the left of every Republican. That used to be unfathomable. To maintain an even split exactly half the country has to vote left and half the country right. That’s also unfathomable. It will change. Internal migration, differential growth, immigration, minority growth patterns, aging of cohorts, and the other myriad of factors that tend to predict where people vote on the left-right spectrum will all shift with time. That all the factors will balance out for a long period is as unlikely as a meteor landing quietly in your pocket.
I do not think the country is evenly spilt. Republican presidents regularly lose the popular vote these days. They win via the electoral college.
We can also see the really overt efforts republicans make to make it harder to vote. That has kept them in contention but, if we got rid of Gerrymandering and other restrictive measures to keep people from voting they’d lose massively.
The City of Chicago has used a similar system for its mayoral primary since 1999, though there is a second electoral round (with the top two finishers from the primary) only if no one candidate wins a majority in the primary.
Still a problem, because the riding system for regular parliaments ensured - like Congress House members - you had local constituents and had to at least pay some attention to the issues they complained about. Winning an at-large election/selection means that one large bloc likes you - i.e. let’s say the people in NYC, not upstate.
Israel, for example, is the poster child for proportional representation and disfunction. They have single-issue religious parties who have forced the government, as a price of their support, to enact things like Sabbath closings. (the tram doesn’t run on Sunday - but fortunately, the Palestinian taxi drivers have no such hesitation) The parties only have to get a small threshold of vote (4%), and then have an excessive power, since the process guarantees minority government that has to bargain with them.
Imagine if this were the case in the USA - think of the single-issue parties. There would be an anti-abortion party, an NRA party, a UHC party… name your issue, imagine a party. A close-the-border party, a citizenship-for-illegals party, a Texas or California independence party, a legalize pot party. Which of these could get 4% of the vote nationwide? Plus, knowing that’s how the vote works, of course nobody’s vote is “wasted”. With neither main party getting a majority, which single-issue party would one or the other main parties cozy up to (polite term) to get designated the majority leader? What would they have to trade?