One of the iron laws of elections is that First Past The Post systems inevitably stabilize into a two party system since 3rd parties create spoiler effects that split the vote. This is true of the US General Election but I find it odd that this does not appear to be the case in the primaries. Every 4 years, each candidate starts fresh with their entirely self-run campaign and no baggage, or association with any previous election.
We had 17 candidates running for the US Republican Primary this year and while some of them were always unlikely to win, quite a number were serious contenders. Why hasn’t there emerged say, a Chamber of Commerce Party and an Evangelical Party that controls who gets access to the ballot under their banner? The Chamber of Commerce Party would decide that either Rubio or Bush or Kasich could run this cycle but not all 3 at once, the Evangelical Party would decide either Cruz or Huckabee or Walker could run but not all at once. That way, there’s not a risk of splitting the vote and letting someone else run away with it. Anyone else of course would be free to run but they would be facing a significant uphill battle as a 3rd party primary candidate without access to the resource and institutional support a party structure could offer.
I’m convinced if it were a 3 party race between Generic Establishment Republican, Generic Evangelical Republican and Donald Trump, Trump would have had a significantly harder time emerging as the front runner and almost certainly the Republican Party could have forced a contested convention and put one of their own in.
And it’s not like this is the first time this has happened either. There have been plenty of messy primaries on both sides of the aisle where candidates would have done a lot better co-operating rather than lining up in a circular firing squad.
So given that this is the state of things, why haven’t institutions arisen that are more durable than a single election cycle for the primary cycle? I think we’re starting to see it happen with certain giant Super PACs and it might soon be the case that Super PACs start directly choosing candidates rather than candidates wooing Super PACs. But given how recent of a phenomena this is, why didn’t something like this emerge sooner?
Because you have primaries in an FPTP system. The existing party “brands” are already strong enough for a range of candidates to want their endorsement, but primaries are designed to focus on that one effort, rather than on building a longer-lasting brand: to do that, your emergent new parties would have to be able to set up lasting organisations in depth, capable of and intended to capture the whole range of public offices for their brand. Do their supporters have, not only the energy of their own commitment, but also the ability to appeal outside their particular niche, across the board?
In an FPTP system, a new brand trying to break through as such, always has a high hurdle to overcome. Primaries are a way of opening up to “insurgent” ideas and interests, but not a route to creating wholly new organisations/brands. It might be that the Trump phenomenon, or in the UK the UKIP/Farage phenomenon, will do some damage to the existing two-party set-up, but it also might not (in the UK we have been here before with third party excitement).
Except that “iron law” only exists in the US. Other FPTP countries have multi-party systems, like the UK, Canada, and India. There are currently 11 parties in the UK Parliament (which recently had a coalition government), 5 parties in the Canadian Parliament, and over two dozen parties in the Lok Sabha of India. Now, those parties will tend to gravitate to two or three major parties (see the recently concluded coalition of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in Britain, with Labour in Opposition), but that is quite different from saying FPTP always produces a two-party system of the US model.
The US duopoly of two-and-only-two parties has a lot of complex reasons for it, but not an “iron law” of FPTP.
In essence, I think you’re talking about a “system”, even if loosely organized, that would prevent multiple candidates with the same general constituency base from cutting each others throats. Gosh, that would be tough to put together. I think the closest thing to that now is the so-called “money primary” where these guys do compete directly against each other and pretty much only each other for the donations of like-minded individuals.
Are you asking why there aren’t sub-parties within the major parties? That is an interesting concept. Leaving aside the minor players in the Democratic primaries there was such a kind of split between Hillary representing the establishment and Bernie as the democratic populist, though lacking any formality. It might have helped the GOP considerably in dealing with 17 different candidates with a number of them taking the establishment position and Trump and Cruz primarily appealing to the special interests within the party. Part of the reason for the free-for-all is the history of the party control over the nominations, not all that long ago decided by backroom politics. With the emergence of primaries as the controlling mechanism in deciding candidates the parties placed no limitations on their candidates, anyone could run, and they always claim to represent the heart and soul of their party. I wouldn’t think that would change easily right now, though it may be what the parties need since they’ve lost much of the American public as supporters. Party membership used to be more fluid, the parties weren’t so aligned internally on all issues, more of a collection of state parties than nationally representative, but now the parties consist primarily of die-hard members, and just as many Americans consider themselves independents as belong to either party. Following this election cycle independent status may climb even higher. Divisions within the parties could be the solution to their problems, but it’s the kind of thing that doesn’t sit well, their remaining power in politics is based on unity, the Republicans now suffer from a divisive primary process and the Democrats didn’t handle their own internal contention well either. Although I’d prefer to see the parties die on the vine if they were interested in renewing participation the ability to represent a broader constituency might be the path to take.
Sorry, I had to interrupt my earlier post. Also, big contributing factors here are ego and the knowledge that lightning may strike in early primary/caucus states like New Hampshire and Iowa, states that lend themselves to the kind of “living off the land” style of campaigning that low-money candidates are limited to. A win, or even a better-than-expected showing, in those states can create a viable national candidacy that results in money coming in.
Your question did remind me of Howard Dean’s famous line about representing the “Democratic wing of the Democratic party”.
Part of the issue would be, I’d imagine, a fear that a subparty may decide it is strong enough to go it alone and run as 3rd Party. Or because party fights can get somewhat nasty (us vs. them type of mentality) that eventually it may lead to a subparty not accepting the party nominee and running as a 3rd Party. One of the reasons that the two major parties present themselves as a coalition of interests is to prevent stuff like that.
The Minnesota ‘affiliate’ of the Democratic Party is the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) party. This was formed from a merger of the Democratic Party with the Farmer-Labor Party in 1944.
The Farmer-Labor party had become quite strong in Minnesota in the 1930’s, electing 3 governors & 4 Senators. But increasingly, the two parties were splitting the progressive vote and thus allowing the Conservative (Republican) candidate to win with a minority vote. So they merged, in time for the 1944 election. (I’ve heard that partly, this was fueled by worries that votes for the Democratic candidate for President (FDR) would not be counted together with the F-L candidate for President (FDR) by the Republican Secretary of State, thus giving the win to the Republican candidate.)
Now in the urban areas, the DFL holds most elected offices, with the Green Party in 2nd place, and the Republicans a distant 3rd. So there is some talk about merging the DFL & Green parties (not likely, IMO). But there is already an active Green Caucus within the Minnesota DFL party.
To get back to the OP: you’re vastly overestimating the power of any one group and the underestimating the enormous size of the country.
Why should any single group, say the Chamber of Commerce, be so single-minded to decide on a single candidate? It represents 3 million businesses. It must have more divisions, regional disparities, class distinctions, and fiefdoms than any other organization in the country. Handing money over to established candidates is very different from choosing one to be president. Wouldn’t the entire rest of the country revolt if they tried that? Not to mention that I can’t figure out how they would decide *before *the primaries who to back. The point of the primaries is to see who works best in front of the voters. They’d be cutting off their best source of information about the candidates.
A lot of Republicans hated Romney as a candidate because he seemed to be the representative of the Establishment business forces. What if he were the official candidate? Americans hate that. Really *hate *that. They want at least the appearance of making their own choices. The Chamber would be cutting it’s own throat. And similar logic prevents any other top-down organization from dictating a sub-party choice.
It obviously wouldn’t be a single group since any cleaving of a population into two groups is going to require multiple, uneasy alliances.
As for Americans revolting when faced with unappealing choices, it can’t have been more thoroughly debunked than with this current general election which produced two of the least liked choices since we started measuring favorability. Americans will hold their nose and dutifully vote for one of them.
Those are all (AFAICT) Parliamentary systems for which the dynamics are different due to the ability to form coalitions. I was referring to Presidential style FPTP voting.
I don’t get this. Your entire OP was the proposition that a single group would back a single candidate in the primaries.
How is that not a single group?
Americans feel they they themselves picked those choices from among many. They are unappealing mostly to the other side. No group choose a candidate and offered it to them while denying them other candidates they may have favored.
I think the distinction needs to be made between what’s good for democracy vs what are the incentives for each individual actor. As it is right now, the incentive during the early primary is to attack the other candidate who is the most similar to you. During the first phase of the race, Rubio and Bush were too busy tearing each other down that Trump emerged basically unscathed. Oddly enough, due to the complex dynamics of the primary, it was actually Kasich who lasted the longest of all of the losers because there was never a point where it made sense to attack him.
Surely there are powerful figures within the Republican party who look at this and believe that if there were some mechanism in place to co-ordinate to only run a single establishment candidate instead of three, the outcome would have been very different and there could be one of their guys running now instead of Trump.
All it would take is some mechanism that would force aspiring candidates not to run until it’s “their turn”. They don’t have to be happy about it but they have to accept it, just in the same way failed primary candidates accept they can’t run in the general.
The names are probably misleading, they were just intended as placeholders for an amorphous Party X and Party Y, not the literal Chamber of Commerce. Whatever groups that emerge would be struggling to appeal to 51% of Republican primary voters and would cobble together a disjoint set of party platforms to accomplish this, just like the Democratic and Republican party does in the general.
And even among members of their own party, the two candidates have historically high unfavorability numbers. I’m sure a lot of current Democrats would have preferred Joe Biden over Hillary Clinton but they weren’t given that choice so it wasn’t an option. If Republicans had used some kind of runoff style voting system, Trump would also not have been their candidate. The end result is that nobody really cares. As much theoretical griping the Bernie Bros and Never Trumpers make, when the election day comes they dutifully line up in the booth and pull the handle so the other guy doesn’t win. After all, what are they going to do? vote for a third party?. Don’t make me laugh.
Whether you realize it or not, this is exactly what happened during the primaries.
Because he didn’t want to run. And your groups couldn’t make him. There isn’t any mechanism to make people run nor any to keep people off the ballot. There never will be.
You don’t like the candidates (who received over 28,000,000 total votes and majorities for those parties) so you’re inventing a wish fulfillment system where somehow the “right” candidates will get picked. The world doesn’t work that way. Wish fulfillment doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously.
This has nothing to do with wish fulfilment, it’s clear in the polling. It’s not exactly a great act of observation to notice that we’re facing an election with noticeable unenthusiasm for both candidates.