My understanding is that the US has a two-party system because of single member districts and and winner takes all elections.
The winner takes all system requires candidates to compete for a plurality of votes. This means major parties must accommodate a broad range of ideologies.
Multiparty democracies typically use a system in which representation is proportional to the number of votes received and those political parties can often get somewhere by catering to narrow interests.
In my experience even politically engaged Americans don't tend to think about this question. Not that they'd disagree with probably representation, but they'll never bring it up before the specific policy issue du jour. Our parties have done an excellent job distracting us.
Just due to the nature of the American system, it would be virtually impossible to introduce on a national basis, so there's arguably no sense in spending time talking about it.
Many states also have deeply embedded 2 parties into their various laws and legal systems in different ways. A viable third, or fourth, or whatever party would have a LOT of friction to overcome to actually happen.
I don't think American voters could understand that very well. Where I live in Massachusetts they defeated a ballot initiative for ranked choice voting, which is just clearly better (in that it reflects the will of the people), especially in a state dominated by a single party.
How would proportional representation work? Party A gets 40% of votes so they get 40% of congressional seats in a state? Party B and C each get their respective proportion? Like it re-districts a state/county/town every year?
You would likely need to increase the number of seats (or allow "fractional" representatives for smaller states) so that even the smallest state gets 3-4 representatives
And then yes, in traditional proportional systems you vote for a list of candidates rather than a single candidate, the lists are the ones getting the seats based on vote totals. The seats can be distributed based on a fixed or flexible lists model
If you have a state that now has 10 reps each party would make a list of 10 people, then if party A gets 40%, party B 35%, C 15% and D 10% you'd get 4 people from the list proposed by A, 3 (or 4) from the list for B, 2 (or 1) from C and 1 from D
Yeah and the UK is seeing the same issues as the US like extreme polarisation between parties and no incentive to reconcile.
In Holland parties have to form a coalition after the elections. This is a very complex and time-consuming process but I'm very glad we have it. It's not perfect but way better than winner takes all IMO.
> extreme polarisation between parties and no incentive to reconcile.
It's more like polarisation between party supporters. The parties themselves become virtually indistinguishable. Choosing between Tories and Labour is like choosing between Coke and Pepsi. They have very much the same agendas and are only different on minor issues (in the grand scheme of things) that are blown out of proportions.
I think what we see in the UK and the US is a really weird combo of centering politics (both parties don't want to be too much off-center to attract as many voters as possible) but also a really extreme polarisation with the 'enemy' (because they need people to vote for them and not the other party)
In addition to that, politics becomes a 'zero-sum game'. Meaning a loss for one is automatically a win for the other. In other countries in Europe we don't really have this mechanism and it takes a lot of the sharp edge off politics. Because getting the other parties to fail is not automatically a win.
I think especially in the US this latter point is very clear right now, one party is always trying to undermine the other, even at the cost of the country's interests (which was the one thing they were supposed to care about!). Using the shutdown as leverage is a typical example.
I think any system that reduces politics to a zero-sum-game should be avoided as much as possible to reduce this very phenomenon. Because while the two parties in the US are fighting in the streets over internal issues, Russia and China don't have any internal political issues and can take full advantage of this on a geopolitical scale. That's the handy thing of being a "one party system", as awful as it is.
Not saying the EU countries are perfect. Coalition forming is an awfully complex process and sometimes it takes years (I think Belgium was without a government for more than a year recently). It also leads to inaction or slow response times to external events by having too many parties at the table. But it doesn't lead to this kind of extreme infighting and stalemates.
In the history of the US, the "third party" either "spoils" in this fashion you've described -- or it subsumes the party it would've spoiled by becoming more popular.
It's not inconceivable for a new coalition to form around a new ideology and have that replace the GOP.
I was specifically thinking of the "Moral Majority" movement, Reagan doctrine, and "trickle-down economics." It was a sea change in the party and set their direction until 2016. We're still seeing the fallout from it to this day, with consolidation of wealth, pandering to extreme religious conservatives, and endless military engagements to police the globe.
It seems a plausible argument that the same happened to the Democrats beginning Bill Clinton in the 90's. Obama out-fundraised from Wall Street both his Republican opponents. Also, with their lock up on big-tech (Musk aside), and their tepid or purely rhetorical support for unions, the Democrats are the big business party.
Both the Democrats and Republicans are big business parties; they represent different factions of big business. Democrats represent finance, entertainment, and big-tech (which is, honestly, mostly finance); Republicans represent mainly manufacturing and extractive industries.
> It's not inconceivable for a new coalition to form around a new ideology and have that replace the GOP.
I mean, you could argue that that's happened with Trump anyway; the way the system works, doing it internally to a party is probably easier than completely externally.
Maybe, but the old GOP is fighting tooth and nail to oust the Trump base from the party. And while Trump may have had the presidency, it looks like most of the GOP was simply paying lipservice to his base until they got rid of him. Imo- the verdict is still out on whether it's easier done internally or externally. The DNC is not making the same mistake with RFK jr- they've just done a complete media blackout of him and pushed him to run independent instead.
The republican majority during the first two years of his presidency stalled on enacting any of his policy- and now they are much more vocally opposed to Trump- as if they always hadn't been. He's a populist candidate- but he's not at all popular with the actual politicians, who are currently the actual infrastructure of the party. His hold on the party is tenuous at best- mostly because the people that oppose him when it comes to voting will still happily campaign with him and win based on his supporters. The recent soft blacklisting of Trump support from Fox is also going to take out a chunk of his base that will continue to vote for the color red.
That’s literally what everyone does within their party to pretty much anyone. He’s still the defacto face of the GOP, no matter how much they want to change it.
As tenuous as it may be, it’s stronger than anyone else’s!
Yep, if I recall my US history correctly, it was the GOP that was the progressive one wanting to get rid of slavery and Democrats were the opposing ones.
Indeed. And there have been many, many re-alignments. The GOP was still the party of civil rights until after the 1960s, and then abortion forced a schism between the southern democrats and the democratic party, which led to the GOP increasingly being "the states right" party.
The democratic party after the Civil War was was the political wing of the KKK, in a similar relationship of Sinn Fein to the IRA.
> It's not inconceivable for a new coalition to form around a new ideology and have that replace the GOP.
Hasn’t that already happened? Since 2016 there has been frequent reportage that the GOP has increasingly been taken over by populists, that the platform that the party proclaimed before (small government and a libertarian touch, some military hawkishness) has little appeal or momentum today when it comes to deciding elections. When the candidate for president who wanted to run under that party had enough charisma to be elected (or at least defeat all other primary challengers), ideology went out the window. And all without creating a third party.
Well, yes, several times. Like I said "in the history of the US..." - because it's happened before.
But what you describe here is shifting platform of the party itself, perhaps due to gerrymandered House districts shifting the rhetoric to include ever more extreme ideals.
Yeah, I can see most people can agree on feeling that the two big parties don't meet their needs, but I highly doubt they agree on what that third party should be. And if that's the case there's a real "you go first" problem under FPTP for voting for new parties, because otherwise you've just given the established party on the opposite side to your own views an effective boost by switching from your traditional party to one that meets your views better.
You really need at least ranked voting and ideally multi-seat PR to get out of that, which is hard as it's against the interests of the two big parties.
That said, looking at the UK there does seem to be a renewed interest in moving away from FPTP in their Labour Party despite it being nominally against the parties interests, so maybe there's a way to get movement on that?
I want to vote for local representatives and a real person. I don't want to vote for Republican LLC and Democratic INC.
Parties have no standing at all within the United States Constitution. The fact that we are talking this way is reflective of the simple fact that the representative democracy (aka Republic) that the United States is has been corrupted by parties that work to their own interest, not the interest of the people.
IF you need any evidence of that, you can see it this week when Democrats voted party line with a few Republicans to remove a speaker for no other reason than it humiliated the republican party and the speaker.
What democratic nation in the world does not have political parties? It turns out from both a voter and politician perspective, the fact that banding together into parties for predictable ability to deliver results is an advantage seems to be a global phenomenon.
FPTP systems are bad for delivering only two parties, but all systems cause parties of some scale.
I think your last paragraph is leaving out a lot of context on the way the Speaker had treated Democrats up to that point. It wasn’t really about humiliation — McCarthy refused to work with the Dems and said as much.
That single member can “cross the aisle” without being instantly dismissed from their party and loosing all speaking rights, which is why we have two party. This gives the representative more ability to represent the interests of their district, by threatening to break ranks.
The winner takes all biases towards a two party system, but has actually been baked into law by the big two parties to discourage competition. Ballot access is extremely difficult unless you're one of the Big Two
.. and what upsets me the most about this and similar systems is that such status quo is not reformable without a huge crisis or a catastrophe. This may be naive, but I feel like humanity could experiment more with some artificial way of breaking and reforming "working" systems with minimum harm.
If people were serious about starting a third party, they would start with a hyper local strategy.
There are _lots_ of places in the US where one of the two major parties is a complete shambles and there are people running unopposed for races where a third party could actually come in and win elections.
Demonstrate success at the county level, work up to getting elected to the state house, demonstrate that you can govern effectively and so on.
It's a 20 or 30 year project, and it's not glamorous like running for president is, though.
Historically, this isn't true. The Republicans were founded in 1854 and won the presidency in 1864. The second-party system started in 1830 and won the presidency in 1840.
It's actually much easier to do this a national level, and then drive it downwards into the states.
The UK has it as well, and it has at least 6 viable political parties that regularly win votes in districts. But yes, it makes it harder to "grow" as 5, 10% doesn't get you a foot in the door of power the way proportional representation does.
My understanding is that the US has a two-party system because of single member districts and and winner takes all elections.
Many Westminster descendants are not this way, and never have been. Canada has multiple parties, new ones crop up and old ones die.
The current conservative party is a 20ish year old party, and a merger/takeover of the Reform, then Alliance, the Conservatove party absorbing the tattered remnants of the old party.
We have political alliances, coalition governements where more than one party holds power, minority governments, and typically at least 3 main parties, with a smattering of others around.
We typically have 5 or 6 parties sitting at one time.
And yes, to the youngsters in the room, even our 3rd main party has held power from time to time.
But most importantly, party names and controllers change.
That's on the federal level. On the provincial level, new party spring with abandon, and form governments too.
What I would suggest, is not pushing for something incredibly insane sounding to most US ears, like changing the entire voting system, but instead just push for that third party, something that sounds more tenable.
Open primaries are also a really part. In other countries the party itself decides who runs in each district but in America there is an open primary where basically anyone can run and if they win the primary then they are the parties nominee.
In other countries groups like the democratic socialists or the tea party would have to run as third parties because they could never get selected to run, but in America if you are in a fridge group it makes more sense to run in one of the two parties.
Right. It used to be the Right would swing further right during election season and the Left would swing further left. Once the election was over they both drifted back closer to center. Now, well, we can easily see that's just not the case anymore.
Most people think it's a great idea in the abstract.
When you get to the actual ballot box, it frequently becomes a "the relatively sane person needs every vote they can get to defeat the lunatic" sort of decision.
Third parties aren't going to be a real thing in the US without a change to the way we count votes.
Maybe less likely, but it still happens. E.g. Weimar: very fragmented scenario (there were at least 4 major parties, not including the Nazi), still a lunatic won. And don't get me started on the Italian experience, or the French republics... In practice, the more fragmentation you have, the more likely that the electorate will eventually converge towards a strongman lunatic who will "clean up the mess/corruption/etc etc".
The safeguards against lunacy must go well beyond the number of parties, and still might not actually work.
Not sure that's true. If you have N parties and N/2 submit lunatic candidates, are we better off? I mean, I guess we have N/2 sane ones to choose from, which is an improvement, but we also have N/2 lunatics, any of which could win.
> When you get to the actual ballot box, it frequently becomes a "the relatively sane person needs every vote they can get to defeat the lunatic" sort of decision.
Yes but it was the previous duopolistic choice of incompetent-awful vs intentional-awful led us to lunatic territory.
Or just forget the "third party" concept and jump straight to having fourth and fifth parties. The math of the three doesn't mix with US politics. The third party will always be accused of splitting either the left or right majority, giving victory to the minority. But with fourth and fifth parties in the mix that is less of a problem. So many parties would also force politicians into cross-party coalitions, but that is probably a bridge to far for US political culture.
If a Ross Perot-style challenger appears on one side of the political spectrum, the other side's prospective fourth party has very good reason to sit down and shut up that election.
Well, that wouldn't be a true multi-party system. That would be two parties (left and right) each putting forward multiple candidates until false presences. A proper party wouldn't back down like that because they would not be so influenced by the others.
Each of these are examples of what I'm saying; in a particular election, one side gets a significant third-party candidate, and the other side does not, because it's not in their interest to kick themselves in the 'nads.
No it's more of a problem. Because the winning party now has an even smaller share of the vote, and may represent no one's preferences.
First past the post voting allows only two parties: because the winner is whichever party has less competitors for it's ideological niche. It explicitly destroys any concept of a market place of ideas being possible in politics.
Having dozens of balkanized parties, each so insignificant as to be powerless, is a recipe for total corporate takeover of a democracy. I am dissatisfied with both American political parties, and I am inclined to have more parties rather than fewer, but if those parties are not strong enough to sustain political identities we will have a one party system
>a recipe for total corporate takeover of a democracy.
Do you have an example to back this up? Europe is largely multiparty and yet seems to have much more 'corporate unfriendly' consumer protections than we do today.
Third party starts to look a lot more appetizing then it's not a clear cut sane-vs-lunatic scenario. When there is no lesser of the two evils people will go looking elsewhere rather than take the easy path.
It gives me a LITTLE hope that this third party support is so high. It means we may have fewer "party no matter what" voters, and the politicians MAY have to actually pay attention to the people...
> Third party starts to look a lot more appetizing then it's not a clear cut sane-vs-lunatic scenario.
There are always lunatics; there'll be folks in NY who hold their nose and vote for a Democrat because the House is tight and they've heard of Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. (Or for a Republican in Kansas, because they don't want AOC being in the majority. As someone pointed out elsewhere in the thread, one person's lunatic is another's hero.)
> It gives me a LITTLE hope that this third party support is so high.
It shouldn't. Look past the headline (to the first chart); polls have showed fairly consistent majority support for a third party for decades.
It's the curse of the third party. Most people imagine themselves to be fairly moderate and centrist, but when push comes to shove, about 70-80% of the population would rather vote for the extremist on their side of the aisle over the moderate on the other side of the aisle.
That's not it. It may be helpful for the Americans in this thread to look at the UK, which uses FPTP but has meaningfully successful third parties anyway. The lack of them in the USA isn't to do with FPTP but more fundamental.
The reality is that politics is essentially bipartisan. The left/right divide is the core of politics and the only one that actually matters in the absence of regional independence movements. Therefore, what we see is that third parties usually struggle to differentiate themselves to voters.
This can be seen most clearly with the Lib Dems who are one of the main third parties in the UK. They tend to be used as a protest vote and few would be able to articulate what they actually believe. Arguably they believe nothing at all, as they have in the past reversed their position on core manifesto promises, fought against implementing referendum results (despite having "democrats" in the name) and so on. What do the Lib Dems actually stand for? What is the big difference between them and Labour or the Tories? It's unclear.
This doesn't mean you can't have different third parties. You can. The SNP is a clear example of a third party that grew from nothing to take over Scottish politics. But it seems that regional independence is one of the only things that is big enough to cause this, as typically the national level parties will not want to support a regional independence movement (would reduce their own power and take up a lot of time), but voting is regional.
Even there though, the SNP is basically just a clone of Labour plus that one additional policy. If Scotland were to become independent, you'd rapidly see the two party system re-establish itself there along left-wing and really-left-wing lines, because this is the only axis that matters.
In Europe where FPTP often isn't being used, you do see more parties, but this doesn't result in less partisan or more harmonious politics. If anything it seems to be slightly the opposite. Germany for example has major problems with people publicly debating whether the AfD should be banned, there are physical attacks on its members, and although PR is supposed to encourage collaboration and compromise none of the other parties are willing to work with it despite it being the second most popular party or even in some parts the first most popular party. The AfD is not particularly extreme though, and its policies aren't so different to the Republicans in many ways. This problem crops up in other European countries as well, it's not unique to Germany.
So a third party wouldn't fix anything in the USA. Nor would PR or more exotic voting schemes. People might occasionally use them as a protest vote, as they do already today, but there's no fundamental third ideology for a third party to express, and anyway who needs a new party when the two big ones are so internally democratic? Easier to take over one of them than make a new one.
You're getting everything wrong. Your whole logic rests on a fundamentally myopic statement: that politics are bipartisan. They're not. Simple exploration of politics in the US and around the world reveal that politics are a fluid dynamic and are reduced to bipartisan ideas because it helps to explain them. It doesn't define them.
The reason third parties exist in other democracies is because of whipping. In the UK, in Australia, in France, in Canada, in Germany, in Israel, the MPs are whipped.
What does that mean? That means that party representatives have to vote with their group, otherwise they run the very real risk of being evicted from that group. When was the last time that a Democrat lost their (D), have been evicted from the Democrats because they voted differently? Even now, no Democrat would get evicted from the party for voting for a Republican Speaker.
The US whips very differently, and so all the fuel of the third parties exists within the two big political families.
You're agreeing with me, the reason the US has two parties is because they barely have any specific identities or policies beyond being left/right. They don't really bother with manifestos, they routinely see people totally at odds with the party elites mount leadership challenges - which can work - and they don't whip, as you observe.
In a system in which parties stand for little, you don't develop third parties. But even in countries with tighter party discipline, like the UK, third parties struggle to justify their existence and stand out from the crowd.
The only way it gets to the lunatic vs sane stage is because the primary failed or was biased. Fixing that (especially at the presidential level since it spans states and time) would help immensely.
Also, each side is voting for the person they think is more sane, so it's partially a perspective problem. There may be some people in the middle, but not enough to win a 3rd party because that 63% who support the idea of a 3rd party all envision something different.
> It means we may have fewer "party no matter what" voters, and the politicians MAY have to actually pay attention to the people...
Unless it means that those people view "their party" as being too moderate. On the left you have groups like the Green Party who view the Democrats as being too far right. On the right you have MAGAs who view Republicans as the radical left.
> If we had Condorcet voting, we would have elected much more reasonable candidates a long time ago.
Honestly, I think any voting system with an algorithm more complicated than counting simple votes will just lead to more mistrust and further empower people who want to claim election fraud. They just scream "technical solution to a social problem."
I have a feeling there's probably a contradiction at the heart of democratic politics: it needs a broad consensus to be successful, but tends to remove the mechanisms for maintaining the needed consensus amongst the people, and decays to hostile factions which will eventually destroy it.
> If we had Condorcet voting, we would have elected much more reasonable candidates a long time ago.
I don't think that's true. Candidates, even lunatics, adapt their strategy to whatever the voting system happens to be. If a lunatic can win against a sane person in a two-party contest, I have no doubt whatsoever that a lunatic can also win under Condorcet with many more candidates.
Condorcet methods could help if the problem was that the preferences of people are not being met. But that is not the problem, that has never been the problem. The problem is that people do not know how to optimize their own self-interest and genuinely prefer simple narratives that tell them what they want to hear, or what the media they listen to tells them to think.
Garbage in, garbage out. Doesn't matter what the voting system is.
It is a bit overly simplistic to say that voters are the true problem with American politics. Sure, people are easy to manipulate, and, at the end of the day, voters are the ones actually electing these folks into power. However, the current two-party-system has done a very effective job of eliminating any kind of meaningful choice for voters in most places. (Not saying there are not differences between candidates/parties, but the gap between my policy positions and the positions of either of the candidate is greater than the gap between the policy positions of the two candidates....)
That's not exactly what I want to say. What I am saying is that voters do not know what they are doing. At a glance that might suggest that they are the problem, but only if you think "knowing what they are doing" is a low bar that voters fail to clear. I disagree. The bar is very high. And that's the real problem.
Look, choosing a party requires you to figure out which economic policies best spur economic growth, which ones might make the climate crisis worse, what the long term consequences of increased immigration might be, and so on, and so forth. On your time. Through the distorting lens of media. Of course the average voter can't make heads or tails of this stuff. It's not their fault. Even if they could, they wouldn't have time because they work all day.
So the best strategy the voter has is not to understand the issues, but to delegate their choice to someone they trust who ostensibly knows the issues. That's media, scientists, influencers, church leaders, etc. Regardless of the voting system, the public opinion will be modulated by the landscape of influencers they trust. If that landscape is broken, the votes will go in the wrong direction regardless of how many choices there are, I'm afraid.
Or they cast a mostly meaningless protest vote because they don't like either of the major candidates and the result in their state is a foregone conclusion.
Third parties have been a thing in the US in times past but you probably need some distinct coalition of states to make one meaningful.
the "sane vs lunatic" was always a media construction. In US politics, for half a century, it was always "warhungry imperialist vs warhungry imperialist", only with a different color (and sometimes one of the warmongers had a nobel peace price). I mean, the Simpsons famously spoofed that in, what, 1996?
It is not a media construction that my mother/wife/sister/daughter can get the necessary healthcare in the event they have a problem during pregnancy. Nor is it a media construction my wife got 5 months of paid leave versus just 3 months of unpaid leave per federal rules. Etc etc.
For real. I speak as someone who has voted for both sides in the past; One party has very much went off the rails and radicalized into something I can no longer support.
There's also a difference between "I want a third party so I can vote for them" and "I want a third party, some of my political opponents would vote for them because surely they can't all be insane enough to like Current Incumbent X"
This is literally the entire point that ranked choice voting is designed to solve.
The fact that most Americans don't seem keen/prioritized on implementing it, despite wide-scale disillusion at the two party system is mind-boggling to me.
> Slavery is the original sin of the American Consitution - parties are the second sin.
How can parties be the second sin of the Constitution? The Constitution literally doesn't even envision their existence, to the point that the procedure for electing the president and vice president had to be changed to account for their existence.
Not acting to constrain them. If you read the federalist papers, you will see that they considered it. They just couldn't figure out how to resolve that.
I worry that a populace that can't understand "large urban counties take longer to count their many votes, leading to big vote swings hours after the polls change" and storms Congress over it will have even more challenges understanding the ranked choice setup, though.
Good enough that IMHO the benefits clearly outweigh the concerns. The beauty of the fragmentation of voting in the US, is that we can roll out different voting systems incrementally and be able to collect data on how they work without "betting the farm" on one election.
We should not hold our process hostage to those loons. I hope the capital police have learned their lesson and will use whatever means necessary to keep the capital safe
Honest question: are you speaking from direct experience of RCV here? To me, the question of "which of these is your favorite" and "put these in order according to which is your favorite" is pretty simple. Most scenarios of "surprise" winners seem either contrived, or not very surprising.
I am very interested in the amount of negative sentiment to RCV in the zeitgeist and am trying to determine if it is coming from lived experience of issues with the voting system or from somewhere else....
You may disagree with that take and say it only happens sometimes. I think we can at least agree it's not settled that it results in better election cycles.
Very interesting! Thanks for sharing! And yes, I 100% agree that more data is needed before drawing broad conclusions regarding the effectiveness of RCV (particularly when compared to FPTP).
I found the discussion in the Deseret piece regarding how the result of the Alaska senatorial election seemed "unintuitive" to many voters to be very interesting! When I look at the numbers and results in that election is seems clear that the outcome is exactly what I would hope to see (and seemingly is a text-book case of RCV in action). But alas, when you deploy to production, things rarely go as planned and it is clear that I need to give more weight to the human element in all of this. Even if the results are statistically desirable, that does not mean that voters will actually feel good about the result of the election....
Assertions like this need to be challenged. So, with no more explanation than you offered, I challenge this claim and offer an equally baseless assertion.
It works in a super intuitive way that leads to the least dissatisfaction among voters.
I think a lot of it is because most people don't understand it. The people who do understand it have questions about which methodology to implement it would be best. There are some places starting to use it in the US. It could be good to learn from their experience before rolling out nationally.
We have rank choice voting in my city and it is amazing. I was effectively able to vote for my two favorite candidates who have very similar views with no fear of splitting a vote.
Interestingly though (but not surprisingly) there is a lot of anti rank choice media coverage of the process.
When I tell people my city does that, some respond with “oh that sounds terrible! I heard the news that system is so complicated and hard to run! It probably took you weeks to find out who won!?”
This disconnect between my great experience with the system and the general perception of the process much bigger than I expected.
Now we just have to ask… who benefits from pushing a bad narrative about rank choice voting
Both major parties benefit from the status quo, regardless of which one's on top at any given moment or in any given district. I don't even know that it's about who ultimately wins the elections. It's probably even more directly about maximizing the amount of money that gets sent their way.
This suggests a short-term vision. I think it misses the mark.
Your opposition to RCV should increase with your distance from the center. RCV reduces the chances of fringe candidates being successful. Traditional U.S. systems reduce the chances of centrists.
Most intelligent strategists prefer to lose 50% of elections than to lose 90% of elections.
> Any party that already has high likelihoods of winning the election will be hurt by RCV.
No, it won't. RCV doesn’t hurt duopoly at all. It generally rewards the more centrist subfactions of whatever the two dominant factions would be without it, so if (in the USA) you views are best represented by a blend of the corporate capitalist neoliberal wing of the Democratic and the anti-Trump wing of the Republican Party, RCV is a boon for you.
If your views are not well represented in the current system, they will be even less represented with winner-take-all elections under RCV. For that, you need multiwinner elections producing proportional-ish results, whether party list, STV (the multiwinner system of which RCV/IRV is the single-winner form), MMP, or some other system.
> The fact that most Americans don't seem keen/prioritized on implementing it, despite wide-scale disillusion at the two party system is mind-boggling to me.
The people in power are not incentivized to do this. Thus they convince the masses that it's a bad thing.
Ranked choice is one of those policies that people on the internet and the academy are really into that is less rosey in practice. I’ve seen a number of elections where a candidate wins without a clear mandate and a lot of people have a sense of confusion about the winner. The psychological aspect is never studied in the theoretical literature. The main candidates get a lot of coverage and are naturally more polarizing. Down ballot candidates seem less extreme just because nobody knows them. People who don’t care that much will read “democrat I haven’t heard anything bad about” to be a calm centerist, when they could just be a second runner who is actually a bit insane. Maybe if people were more familiar with this voting scheme it would be better, but given that the media/politico elites who should be well versed in these topics have trouble coordinating media coverage and campaigns accordingly, I am not so sure that it is an easy change.
Ranked choice is a great thing. The most common implementation of it, Instant Runoff Voting, is terrible; it just throws away all preferences that aren't the top preference. So if you rank A over B over C, the fact that you prefer B over C is completely ignored unless A is eliminated. Better voting systems take all preferences into account.
I think people would be disappointed if they did try it.
Even if people agree that they don't like the two parties, it doesn't mean that they agree on the same third party. Most likely, their last-ranked choice, but it's going to be named by the most people. The winner will probably be one of those two.
I'm all for it, especially if it makes people feel heard. Maybe somebody who made a strong showing can leverage that in future elections. Perhaps there will be a few candidates who can put on strong campaigns without a party support, and that will bolster confidence.
But I predict that the most likely outcome is that people say "It's rigged and there's no difference from the old way".
In practice, ranked-choice voting means instant runoff voting, where you basically throw out candidates who didn't get enough votes until you get someone who wins. In the US, this means that it's still going to be a choice between the Democrat and the Republican, but you'll get 10% or so of the population to feel comfortable voting for $THIRD_PARTY knowing they can still express their opinion in the Democrat-Republican race. It's political placebo, except if the results are even somewhat messy, you'll get bellyaching from people who do bad statistics to say they should have won (witness the recent Alaskan election decided in this manner).
There's another set of ranked-choice voting based on Condorcet methods, which run all two-way races simultaneously and picks the candidate who wins all of their races (with different variants for handling the case who no one can do this [1]). The downside of these methods is that they're more confusing and, if you thought that instant runoff produces unclear mandates, Condorcet methods are going to render those results even less clear.
Ultimately, the ills of American politics have very little to do with its use of the first-past-the-post voting system; switching to different systems are likely to produce the exact same results [2].
[1] The most intellectually honest, IMHO, is to just declare the race at a tie in this case. I imagine that politics would be better if we were more honest about very close results indicating ties rather than pretending that it's a decisive mandate for victory.
[2] Another statistic to remember is the vast majority of people will vote for an extremist on their side of the aisle over the moderate on the other side.
But if you have a 2-stage election, where the first stage is not siloed by private club affiliation, you could have two Republicans and a Democrat advance to the final round. Or perhaps three Democrats. And they are all more appealling to the general population than what we get now.
I would prefer a candidate who was the first choice of 30% of Party A voters and the second choice of 40% of Party B voters over a candidate who was the first choice of 65% of Party A voters and the second choice of 2% of Party B voters.
Admittedly, RCV doesn't guarantee this, but it seems much more promising. If you can get winners that 70% of voters can live with, that seems better than the current situation. And it would change strategies dramatically. I would expect fewer appeals to mobilize extremist bases.
I think it would also make voting more granular. People would focus on individual issues more. Their first choice might look the same as today, but for their second choice should they choose the guns-rights abortionst or the gun-control pro-lifer? That second choice now impacts the election result in a meaningful way.
If there is a Condorcet winner, it seems easy to explain why that option should be selected and I think it's a clearer winner than FPTP with the level of sophistication of the typical voter.
It's when a Condorcet winner does not exist that Condorcet compliant methods get hard to explain.
Conflating ranked choice with IRV is like conflating Maoism with socialism because you're unable to disentangle concrete implementations from their abstract reasoning.
There are alternatives to IRV, almost every single one of which is better. IRV is a bolt-on plug-n-play implementation to existing winner-take-all voting for lazy bureaucrats.
Ranked choice voting has gained a bit of a bad reputation in Republican circles recently as a result of a contentious 2022 congressional election in Alaska where their specific implementation[1] resulted in a Democratic candidate winning in the final round of a 4-way race despite the state historically leaning heavily Republican prior to RCV's implementation[2][3], and there being a clear majority of Republican voters in the previous round[4].
Looking into the details it seems the results can't be blamed on voter exhaustion, as the Democratic candidate would have won even if all exhausted votes in the second-to-last round would have gone to the remaining Republican candidate, so I'm open to the idea that this wasn't a failure of ranked choice voting, but rather a genuine shift in Alaskan politics. Still, it doesn't seem very likely. Alaska went for Donald Trump by a comfortable margin in the 2020 elections, and a Republican hasn't lost a statewide race there since 1972 - until now. But on the other hand, it's hard to look at the election results and see how the Republican candidate could have beat the Democrat candidate in a head-to-head first-past-the-post election.
So... I don't know. Maybe people just vote differently when forced to pick between two candidates than they do when ranking candidates on a ballot with multiple choices? Perhaps the 2024 election results will bring more clarity...
What I worry about with IRV (which is usually how rank choice ballots are counted) is that if we assume that the proper compromise between people in a legitimate disagreement is usually no one's first choice, IRV specifically excludes that compromise.
In a hypothetical world, roughly evenly split on religion, where everyone would be pretty okay with secular tolerance, picking secular tolerance seems like the way to go.
But if most people would somewhat prefer to try and force their particular religion on everyone if they can get away with it, secular tolerance will be everyone's second choice and will be discarded in the first round of voting... unless enough people recognize the dynamic and vote strategically rather than honestly, but that undermines the point of RCV.
I'll leave it to you to decide for yourself how much the real world resembles that hypothetical, but as I said it worries me.
In terms of improving democratic ideals, getting rid of the electoral college for the presidential election is far more important than implementing ranked choice for any other election.
As I mentioned in another comment, they voted down ranked choice voting in Massachusetts where I live, which really made me sad.
In the next election there was an open seat for my Congress person. There were something like 5 progressive candidates, and one more conservative democrat. Of course, the progressive vote split and the conservative candidate won, even though he was probably the last choice among a majority of voters. I found that super ironic.
Agree, and then youbhave the practical situation of the GOP basically being at least two, if not three, different parties. Same kind of goes for the dems. Other countries do the coalition forming in parliament, the US does it before elections.
And given the current fiasco in the House, it turns out cramming so many competing ideologies into your circus tent with no plan for cooperation or compromise does not work super great....
> it frequently becomes a "the relatively sane person needs every vote they can get to defeat the lunatic" sort of decision.
Until it becomes the a "both people are lunatics" sort of decision....
> Third parties aren't going to be a real thing in the US without a change to the way we count votes.
Exactly. Perhaps the single most important (feasible) improvement that could be made in US politics is broader adoption of Instant-Runoff Voting! It keeps things simple, maintains single-representation, but avoids the absurdity of first-past-the-post voting.
And so, from a game theory perspective, we understand why the sane person does everything in their power to avoid defeating the lunatic. The lunatic guarantees their reelection. They need the lunatic and the threat of the lunatic is what keeps them in power.
And conveniently, the lunatic, despite appearing to be radically different on the surface, holds similar policy positions when it comes time to vote. Either way, the ruling class gets their legislation - further incentive to keep the political clown show going.
Biggest issue is most third parties tend to put up candidates that are either: complete cranks or well-meaning candidates that focus on issues with limited salience with voters. That, and the framers of the US government basically wanted the US to operate with 2 parties because democracy was still considered fairly experimental at that time.
I used to think so. Yet I am not sure now that only the election system is to blame.
Australian way to count votes was specifically designed to avoid favoring a two-party system (basically, instead of selecting one candidate, you vote for multiple and give your preference order). Yet in effect Australia has a 2-party system, too.
Because the voting isn't the main resource required to get someone elected, it is all the time, money, and effort it takes to make a candidate known. Unlike with ranked choice or some other vote system that allows you to vote for multiple candidates, you can't put your time, money, and energy into multiple candidates at the same time. You have to split it between however many candidates you want to support, and splitting your resources like that means any one of those candidates has less of a chance than if you put your resources into a single candidate. Consciously or unconsciously, people recognize this, and so focus on a single candidate, one of two, to maximize their odds of getting their candidate elected.
It is my depressing realization after wondering the same thing as you and discovering that these alternate voting systems actually don't help, in the end, with electing someone to a position of singular power. They seem to help in other situations, though.
The sentiment that the other side is crazy goes both ways. 60% doesn’t mean your favorite 3rd party candidate, it means 20% want Trump, 20% want Bernie and 20% think that exhuming Ross Perot and running his corpse is still better than anything the major parties will offer.
3rd party isn't answer. Founding fathers already hinted public unalivement is the way to go. That is why public can get fire power and conduct operations to wipe clean disobedient politician similar nature to sicario. I have seen terminally ill veterans who are very patriotic but just gave up with a sigh and let USA runs its course like Rome.
Folks jump to the presidency, but seems like the biggest value prop for a third party is winning a few Senate seats. Target 10 smaller, purple states with one major media market. 2-3 wins in one year gives six years to build momentum.
With each added Senate seat in subsequent years, the third party builds relevance by setting the Senate agenda. Given how evenly split the country is, just a few Senate seats have outsized influence. House is possible too, but with only 2 year terms, the value is harder to maintain and build upon.
Winning a Senate seat has the same problems as trying to win the presidency. They should be running for state representative. Take over a state house after a few election cycles, then work on getting a governor elected, then go from there to federal elections and other states.
Same problems? I don’t see that, it’s a local-ish constituency powered by national trends. States like New Jersey, Maryland, and Massachusetts all regularly flip governors between the two parties. Adding states like Colorado, Arizona, Delaware, New Hampshire, etc isn’t crazy for down a middle agenda.
People over the last couple of years are starting to reduce politics to the annoying people they have to deal with on a daily basis that think politics is the most important part of ones identity.
Wait, I thought conservatives were critical of Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan. Good to see you support it. Also, every time I hear about immigration reform, why is it always being pushed by liberals and not conservatives?
There's a lot of sarcasm in the above, but you get my point. Conservatives got us into our last two wars (though honestly, I'll excuse Afghanistan and agree the withdrawal was completely botched). Conservatives could absolutely get more funding to secure the southern border if they agreed to work with liberals to reform immigration and make a more streamlined legal process for immigration to this country. Maybe a points based system like Canada's, but a bit less permissive?
I don’t see why we need a complete plan of how to let people in before we can secure it. Secure it first, then figure out who to let in.
It’s as if you were in control of IT for a company and had discovered your networks were filled with hackers, but refused to do anything about it until you had a plan for how to allow future new hires access.
Secure the walls, kick out the unauthorized, then grant new authorization as needed. It’s obvious, really.
Come on man, you have to realize that the dems want to reform immigration as badly as the republicans want to crack down on illegal immigration. If you work together, it's a win win where both sides get what they ostensibly want.
I suspect the truth of the matter is republican politicians are terrified of being seen as pro any immigration.
Note the several guest worker/etc. programs he has voted yes for.
As for the borders, it’s beyond ridiculous that border patrol was ordered to stand down and watch immigrants stream in. It’s an offense to the many hard workers who put in the effort to come here legally. And liberals are finally staring to understand the issue, but it took conservatives hissing their huddled masses to the so called “sanctuary cities” for them to get it.
When others are informed by sources that don't know what they are talking about, no need to learn from them.
But when they are rational and informed, you would be wise not too. Looking at this thread, you can make your own judgement as to what of the two extremes this is closest too.
IIRC, there's some political science theory that says that certain electoral systems -- I don't know if the US counts -- tend towards a two-party steady state.
We desperately need to double the number of Representatives in the House. Or quadruple.
And we need a National Popular Vote for President. No more ignoring solidly blue or solidly red states.
We should also force anyone who wants a nomination from one of the major parties (however many there are) for office in the Federal government to pledge to live only and entirely on their pension. They must completely divest of anything but Index Funds. No more paid lobbying retirement for politicians. It's killing this country.
You can't do that in the US, because we have freedom of speech and freedom of association - the latter of which inevitably leads to partisanship. If the party wants the President to be their leader, they have the right to decide that, and the President likewise has the right to be as partisan as they wish.
Solutions that require forcing people to adhere to a specific ideological or political framework (or not to) tend towards authoritarianism. You can't stop people in a free society from acting in aggregate to further their own common interests.
We have oaths that keep people from acting in foreign countries' interest. The same can apply here. No mandatory party-line votes. No ordering representatives how to vote on issues.
Everything you've listed is still perfectly legal, nonviolent consensual speech from people acting in what they believe to be theirs and their country's best interests, and party members are perfectly within their rights to break ranks if they want. That isn't the same class of behavior as sedition or espionage.
The only solution I can see is if the parties themselves decided to change their rules, but they have no reason to. Things are only the way they are now because that is what wins votes and concentrates power.
I think there is a place for a party which is not quite as socially liberal as democrats or socially conservative as republicans, pro-worker (somewhat protectionist and anti-free trade), and less authoritarian than the extremes of either major party.
That said, every effort at a third party has started at the top, with the presidency, the only way to build a party is from the bottom up - the Forwardists are trying to do this - but its a many many year effort to do so.
Third parties, as of late, are all on the "left" side of the political spectrum. The article states that support for third parties by Democrats is 46% while Republicans support for third parties is 58% and "independents" at 75%.
It seems like a "centrist" third party is the only type that would have a chance at winning anything. But nobody is stepping forward to create that party.
If people were serious about change, they'd vote more in primary elections. That's where the actual power is. But non-presidential primaries have hilariously low turnouts, dominated by the most partisan voters, so we get bad choices in the general election because we cede nominating power to crazies.
Change doesn't require major structural moves. It just requires less apathy towards the "boring" aspects of politics where the true power lies.
If you're dissatisfied with the direction of your preferred party, get out and vote in primaries. A lot of people have become Independent out of disgust, but if you're in a closed primary state, you just gave away your vote.
If you live in a one-party state like West Virginia or Maryland, it might make sense to tactically switch to the dominant party. I've done that in my state.
In a perfect world, elections reform would be great:
- adopt ranked-choice voting
- increase access to the ballot box (motor voter auto-registration, early voting, etc)
- adopt compulsory elections (probably would never happen in the States)
These polls are almost meaningless. Why? Because its city, county and state politics is where most (not all) party power resides, particularly on election day when "get out the vote" and election integrity is determined. Trump's election in 2016 stands out as a notable exception to this general rule, but his defeat in 2020 was very much a return to the rule. Also, US elections currently come down a few dozen or so counties in the US where grass roots party activities make the biggest difference.
Then, importantly, its from the State/County organizations that many political and judicial appointments are made by new administrations. A third party lacks the depth and roster of qualified applications for those roles. The problems this creates are well illustrated, again, by the Trump administration that struggled to fill positions.
None of this is intended to take sides pro or con a party or person. I'm just pointing out reality having worked in a city and statewide campaign, among other related experiences.
People want another option, but the problem is that different people want different things from this new option, so I don't think a single third major party is going to be feasible any time soon. There are already a bunch of minor parties out there. For example libertarian party and green party, but their ideologies are polar opposite and they never get any significant results.
Third parties will never happen in first past the post elections. 2 parties will have enough of the general platforms to get 51% and 49% of the every single time. And if you’re a voter who can think rationally, you’ll vote for the big party that’s close enough rather than throw your vote away on a 3rd party vote.
If there are any flash in the pan third parties, their platform will get absorbed by the big 2 and it’ll disappear.
A third party is fundamentally irrelevant in the design of our democracy. This poll should be 0% support.
I had been a democrat my whole adult life, contributing to democratic candidates dozens of times.
I left the Democratic Party a few years ago. My reasoning is that it makes it easier for special interests to game the system if everyone is caged into just one of our two major political parties. The DNC and RNC shamefully service special interests, not public interests. If you disagree, I would be happy to debate this all day.
I still do occasionally make donations to democrats who I think are exceptional and once to a republican candidate in my state who I thought was also exceptional, but I make sure that none of my contributions every again go to DNC (or RNC if I was not liberal).
EDIT: what I am suggesting is that it would be best for our representative democracy if everyone registered independent.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadThe winner takes all system requires candidates to compete for a plurality of votes. This means major parties must accommodate a broad range of ideologies.
Multiparty democracies typically use a system in which representation is proportional to the number of votes received and those political parties can often get somewhere by catering to narrow interests.
And then yes, in traditional proportional systems you vote for a list of candidates rather than a single candidate, the lists are the ones getting the seats based on vote totals. The seats can be distributed based on a fixed or flexible lists model
If you have a state that now has 10 reps each party would make a list of 10 people, then if party A gets 40%, party B 35%, C 15% and D 10% you'd get 4 people from the list proposed by A, 3 (or 4) from the list for B, 2 (or 1) from C and 1 from D
In Holland parties have to form a coalition after the elections. This is a very complex and time-consuming process but I'm very glad we have it. It's not perfect but way better than winner takes all IMO.
It's more like polarisation between party supporters. The parties themselves become virtually indistinguishable. Choosing between Tories and Labour is like choosing between Coke and Pepsi. They have very much the same agendas and are only different on minor issues (in the grand scheme of things) that are blown out of proportions.
In addition to that, politics becomes a 'zero-sum game'. Meaning a loss for one is automatically a win for the other. In other countries in Europe we don't really have this mechanism and it takes a lot of the sharp edge off politics. Because getting the other parties to fail is not automatically a win.
I think especially in the US this latter point is very clear right now, one party is always trying to undermine the other, even at the cost of the country's interests (which was the one thing they were supposed to care about!). Using the shutdown as leverage is a typical example.
I think any system that reduces politics to a zero-sum-game should be avoided as much as possible to reduce this very phenomenon. Because while the two parties in the US are fighting in the streets over internal issues, Russia and China don't have any internal political issues and can take full advantage of this on a geopolitical scale. That's the handy thing of being a "one party system", as awful as it is.
Not saying the EU countries are perfect. Coalition forming is an awfully complex process and sometimes it takes years (I think Belgium was without a government for more than a year recently). It also leads to inaction or slow response times to external events by having too many parties at the table. But it doesn't lead to this kind of extreme infighting and stalemates.
It's not inconceivable for a new coalition to form around a new ideology and have that replace the GOP.
I mean, you could argue that that's happened with Trump anyway; the way the system works, doing it internally to a party is probably easier than completely externally.
As tenuous as it may be, it’s stronger than anyone else’s!
The democratic party after the Civil War was was the political wing of the KKK, in a similar relationship of Sinn Fein to the IRA.
Hasn’t that already happened? Since 2016 there has been frequent reportage that the GOP has increasingly been taken over by populists, that the platform that the party proclaimed before (small government and a libertarian touch, some military hawkishness) has little appeal or momentum today when it comes to deciding elections. When the candidate for president who wanted to run under that party had enough charisma to be elected (or at least defeat all other primary challengers), ideology went out the window. And all without creating a third party.
True replacement would be an entirely new party, from the ground up eventually forming government.
Well, yes, several times. Like I said "in the history of the US..." - because it's happened before.
But what you describe here is shifting platform of the party itself, perhaps due to gerrymandered House districts shifting the rhetoric to include ever more extreme ideals.
You really need at least ranked voting and ideally multi-seat PR to get out of that, which is hard as it's against the interests of the two big parties.
That said, looking at the UK there does seem to be a renewed interest in moving away from FPTP in their Labour Party despite it being nominally against the parties interests, so maybe there's a way to get movement on that?
Parties have no standing at all within the United States Constitution. The fact that we are talking this way is reflective of the simple fact that the representative democracy (aka Republic) that the United States is has been corrupted by parties that work to their own interest, not the interest of the people.
IF you need any evidence of that, you can see it this week when Democrats voted party line with a few Republicans to remove a speaker for no other reason than it humiliated the republican party and the speaker.
FPTP systems are bad for delivering only two parties, but all systems cause parties of some scale.
That single member can “cross the aisle” without being instantly dismissed from their party and loosing all speaking rights, which is why we have two party. This gives the representative more ability to represent the interests of their district, by threatening to break ranks.
…apart from all others.
There are _lots_ of places in the US where one of the two major parties is a complete shambles and there are people running unopposed for races where a third party could actually come in and win elections.
Demonstrate success at the county level, work up to getting elected to the state house, demonstrate that you can govern effectively and so on.
It's a 20 or 30 year project, and it's not glamorous like running for president is, though.
It's actually much easier to do this a national level, and then drive it downwards into the states.
Also, getting elected to state houses requires a lot of non-monetary support for field work and independent candidates won't have the resources.
That depends on how the party primaries are arranged.
Current conditions seem to favor general elections with two extremists rather than a moderate who can win a plurality.
Many Westminster descendants are not this way, and never have been. Canada has multiple parties, new ones crop up and old ones die.
The current conservative party is a 20ish year old party, and a merger/takeover of the Reform, then Alliance, the Conservatove party absorbing the tattered remnants of the old party.
We have political alliances, coalition governements where more than one party holds power, minority governments, and typically at least 3 main parties, with a smattering of others around.
We typically have 5 or 6 parties sitting at one time.
And yes, to the youngsters in the room, even our 3rd main party has held power from time to time.
But most importantly, party names and controllers change.
That's on the federal level. On the provincial level, new party spring with abandon, and form governments too.
What I would suggest, is not pushing for something incredibly insane sounding to most US ears, like changing the entire voting system, but instead just push for that third party, something that sounds more tenable.
In other countries groups like the democratic socialists or the tea party would have to run as third parties because they could never get selected to run, but in America if you are in a fridge group it makes more sense to run in one of the two parties.
When you get to the actual ballot box, it frequently becomes a "the relatively sane person needs every vote they can get to defeat the lunatic" sort of decision.
Third parties aren't going to be a real thing in the US without a change to the way we count votes.
But it's kind of a chicken and egg problem.
The safeguards against lunacy must go well beyond the number of parties, and still might not actually work.
Yes but it was the previous duopolistic choice of incompetent-awful vs intentional-awful led us to lunatic territory.
"The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them." - Julius Nyerere
- Ralph Nader and Al Gore
- Ross Perot got Bush I
- Third party candidates received around 6 million votes in 2016
First past the post voting allows only two parties: because the winner is whichever party has less competitors for it's ideological niche. It explicitly destroys any concept of a market place of ideas being possible in politics.
Do you have an example to back this up? Europe is largely multiparty and yet seems to have much more 'corporate unfriendly' consumer protections than we do today.
Fear is always more effective then hope in ensuring voters don't vote in their own interest.
It gives me a LITTLE hope that this third party support is so high. It means we may have fewer "party no matter what" voters, and the politicians MAY have to actually pay attention to the people...
There are always lunatics; there'll be folks in NY who hold their nose and vote for a Democrat because the House is tight and they've heard of Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. (Or for a Republican in Kansas, because they don't want AOC being in the majority. As someone pointed out elsewhere in the thread, one person's lunatic is another's hero.)
> It gives me a LITTLE hope that this third party support is so high.
It shouldn't. Look past the headline (to the first chart); polls have showed fairly consistent majority support for a third party for decades.
The reality is that politics is essentially bipartisan. The left/right divide is the core of politics and the only one that actually matters in the absence of regional independence movements. Therefore, what we see is that third parties usually struggle to differentiate themselves to voters.
This can be seen most clearly with the Lib Dems who are one of the main third parties in the UK. They tend to be used as a protest vote and few would be able to articulate what they actually believe. Arguably they believe nothing at all, as they have in the past reversed their position on core manifesto promises, fought against implementing referendum results (despite having "democrats" in the name) and so on. What do the Lib Dems actually stand for? What is the big difference between them and Labour or the Tories? It's unclear.
This doesn't mean you can't have different third parties. You can. The SNP is a clear example of a third party that grew from nothing to take over Scottish politics. But it seems that regional independence is one of the only things that is big enough to cause this, as typically the national level parties will not want to support a regional independence movement (would reduce their own power and take up a lot of time), but voting is regional.
Even there though, the SNP is basically just a clone of Labour plus that one additional policy. If Scotland were to become independent, you'd rapidly see the two party system re-establish itself there along left-wing and really-left-wing lines, because this is the only axis that matters.
In Europe where FPTP often isn't being used, you do see more parties, but this doesn't result in less partisan or more harmonious politics. If anything it seems to be slightly the opposite. Germany for example has major problems with people publicly debating whether the AfD should be banned, there are physical attacks on its members, and although PR is supposed to encourage collaboration and compromise none of the other parties are willing to work with it despite it being the second most popular party or even in some parts the first most popular party. The AfD is not particularly extreme though, and its policies aren't so different to the Republicans in many ways. This problem crops up in other European countries as well, it's not unique to Germany.
So a third party wouldn't fix anything in the USA. Nor would PR or more exotic voting schemes. People might occasionally use them as a protest vote, as they do already today, but there's no fundamental third ideology for a third party to express, and anyway who needs a new party when the two big ones are so internally democratic? Easier to take over one of them than make a new one.
One of these two subclauses has to be false, lol.
(It's the first one. The first one is false.)
The reason third parties exist in other democracies is because of whipping. In the UK, in Australia, in France, in Canada, in Germany, in Israel, the MPs are whipped.
What does that mean? That means that party representatives have to vote with their group, otherwise they run the very real risk of being evicted from that group. When was the last time that a Democrat lost their (D), have been evicted from the Democrats because they voted differently? Even now, no Democrat would get evicted from the party for voting for a Republican Speaker.
The US whips very differently, and so all the fuel of the third parties exists within the two big political families.
In a system in which parties stand for little, you don't develop third parties. But even in countries with tighter party discipline, like the UK, third parties struggle to justify their existence and stand out from the crowd.
Also, each side is voting for the person they think is more sane, so it's partially a perspective problem. There may be some people in the middle, but not enough to win a 3rd party because that 63% who support the idea of a 3rd party all envision something different.
Unless it means that those people view "their party" as being too moderate. On the left you have groups like the Green Party who view the Democrats as being too far right. On the right you have MAGAs who view Republicans as the radical left.
If we had Condorcet voting, we would have elected much more reasonable candidates a long time ago.
Honestly, I think any voting system with an algorithm more complicated than counting simple votes will just lead to more mistrust and further empower people who want to claim election fraud. They just scream "technical solution to a social problem."
I have a feeling there's probably a contradiction at the heart of democratic politics: it needs a broad consensus to be successful, but tends to remove the mechanisms for maintaining the needed consensus amongst the people, and decays to hostile factions which will eventually destroy it.
I don't think that's true. Candidates, even lunatics, adapt their strategy to whatever the voting system happens to be. If a lunatic can win against a sane person in a two-party contest, I have no doubt whatsoever that a lunatic can also win under Condorcet with many more candidates.
Condorcet methods could help if the problem was that the preferences of people are not being met. But that is not the problem, that has never been the problem. The problem is that people do not know how to optimize their own self-interest and genuinely prefer simple narratives that tell them what they want to hear, or what the media they listen to tells them to think.
Garbage in, garbage out. Doesn't matter what the voting system is.
Look, choosing a party requires you to figure out which economic policies best spur economic growth, which ones might make the climate crisis worse, what the long term consequences of increased immigration might be, and so on, and so forth. On your time. Through the distorting lens of media. Of course the average voter can't make heads or tails of this stuff. It's not their fault. Even if they could, they wouldn't have time because they work all day.
So the best strategy the voter has is not to understand the issues, but to delegate their choice to someone they trust who ostensibly knows the issues. That's media, scientists, influencers, church leaders, etc. Regardless of the voting system, the public opinion will be modulated by the landscape of influencers they trust. If that landscape is broken, the votes will go in the wrong direction regardless of how many choices there are, I'm afraid.
Third parties have been a thing in the US in times past but you probably need some distinct coalition of states to make one meaningful.
“Sane vs lunatic” may have been a media construction at some point, but it sure is real now.
The fact that most Americans don't seem keen/prioritized on implementing it, despite wide-scale disillusion at the two party system is mind-boggling to me.
Slavery is the original sin of the American Consitution - parties are the second sin.
How can parties be the second sin of the Constitution? The Constitution literally doesn't even envision their existence, to the point that the procedure for electing the president and vice president had to be changed to account for their existence.
I worry that a populace that can't understand "large urban counties take longer to count their many votes, leading to big vote swings hours after the polls change" and storms Congress over it will have even more challenges understanding the ranked choice setup, though.
Good enough that IMHO the benefits clearly outweigh the concerns. The beauty of the fragmentation of voting in the US, is that we can roll out different voting systems incrementally and be able to collect data on how they work without "betting the farm" on one election.
So while it can upset the first to the post strategies, thd electorate can be disappointed in the results.
I am very interested in the amount of negative sentiment to RCV in the zeitgeist and am trying to determine if it is coming from lived experience of issues with the voting system or from somewhere else....
You may disagree with that take and say it only happens sometimes. I think we can at least agree it's not settled that it results in better election cycles.
I found the discussion in the Deseret piece regarding how the result of the Alaska senatorial election seemed "unintuitive" to many voters to be very interesting! When I look at the numbers and results in that election is seems clear that the outcome is exactly what I would hope to see (and seemingly is a text-book case of RCV in action). But alas, when you deploy to production, things rarely go as planned and it is clear that I need to give more weight to the human element in all of this. Even if the results are statistically desirable, that does not mean that voters will actually feel good about the result of the election....
It works in a super intuitive way that leads to the least dissatisfaction among voters.
Interestingly though (but not surprisingly) there is a lot of anti rank choice media coverage of the process.
When I tell people my city does that, some respond with “oh that sounds terrible! I heard the news that system is so complicated and hard to run! It probably took you weeks to find out who won!?”
This disconnect between my great experience with the system and the general perception of the process much bigger than I expected.
Now we just have to ask… who benefits from pushing a bad narrative about rank choice voting
Any party that already has high likelihoods of winning the election will be hurt by RCV.
Your opposition to RCV should increase with your distance from the center. RCV reduces the chances of fringe candidates being successful. Traditional U.S. systems reduce the chances of centrists.
Most intelligent strategists prefer to lose 50% of elections than to lose 90% of elections.
No, it won't. RCV doesn’t hurt duopoly at all. It generally rewards the more centrist subfactions of whatever the two dominant factions would be without it, so if (in the USA) you views are best represented by a blend of the corporate capitalist neoliberal wing of the Democratic and the anti-Trump wing of the Republican Party, RCV is a boon for you.
If your views are not well represented in the current system, they will be even less represented with winner-take-all elections under RCV. For that, you need multiwinner elections producing proportional-ish results, whether party list, STV (the multiwinner system of which RCV/IRV is the single-winner form), MMP, or some other system.
The people in power are not incentivized to do this. Thus they convince the masses that it's a bad thing.
1. ranked choice voting (to eliminate the spoiler effect, truly opening the way for a non-duopolistic political environment)
2. open, non-partisan primaries
3. independent redistricting commissions (to eliminate gerrymandering)
Even if people agree that they don't like the two parties, it doesn't mean that they agree on the same third party. Most likely, their last-ranked choice, but it's going to be named by the most people. The winner will probably be one of those two.
I'm all for it, especially if it makes people feel heard. Maybe somebody who made a strong showing can leverage that in future elections. Perhaps there will be a few candidates who can put on strong campaigns without a party support, and that will bolster confidence.
But I predict that the most likely outcome is that people say "It's rigged and there's no difference from the old way".
In practice, ranked-choice voting means instant runoff voting, where you basically throw out candidates who didn't get enough votes until you get someone who wins. In the US, this means that it's still going to be a choice between the Democrat and the Republican, but you'll get 10% or so of the population to feel comfortable voting for $THIRD_PARTY knowing they can still express their opinion in the Democrat-Republican race. It's political placebo, except if the results are even somewhat messy, you'll get bellyaching from people who do bad statistics to say they should have won (witness the recent Alaskan election decided in this manner).
There's another set of ranked-choice voting based on Condorcet methods, which run all two-way races simultaneously and picks the candidate who wins all of their races (with different variants for handling the case who no one can do this [1]). The downside of these methods is that they're more confusing and, if you thought that instant runoff produces unclear mandates, Condorcet methods are going to render those results even less clear.
Ultimately, the ills of American politics have very little to do with its use of the first-past-the-post voting system; switching to different systems are likely to produce the exact same results [2].
[1] The most intellectually honest, IMHO, is to just declare the race at a tie in this case. I imagine that politics would be better if we were more honest about very close results indicating ties rather than pretending that it's a decisive mandate for victory.
[2] Another statistic to remember is the vast majority of people will vote for an extremist on their side of the aisle over the moderate on the other side.
I would prefer a candidate who was the first choice of 30% of Party A voters and the second choice of 40% of Party B voters over a candidate who was the first choice of 65% of Party A voters and the second choice of 2% of Party B voters.
Admittedly, RCV doesn't guarantee this, but it seems much more promising. If you can get winners that 70% of voters can live with, that seems better than the current situation. And it would change strategies dramatically. I would expect fewer appeals to mobilize extremist bases.
I think it would also make voting more granular. People would focus on individual issues more. Their first choice might look the same as today, but for their second choice should they choose the guns-rights abortionst or the gun-control pro-lifer? That second choice now impacts the election result in a meaningful way.
It's when a Condorcet winner does not exist that Condorcet compliant methods get hard to explain.
There are alternatives to IRV, almost every single one of which is better. IRV is a bolt-on plug-n-play implementation to existing winner-take-all voting for lazy bureaucrats.
Looking into the details it seems the results can't be blamed on voter exhaustion, as the Democratic candidate would have won even if all exhausted votes in the second-to-last round would have gone to the remaining Republican candidate, so I'm open to the idea that this wasn't a failure of ranked choice voting, but rather a genuine shift in Alaskan politics. Still, it doesn't seem very likely. Alaska went for Donald Trump by a comfortable margin in the 2020 elections, and a Republican hasn't lost a statewide race there since 1972 - until now. But on the other hand, it's hard to look at the election results and see how the Republican candidate could have beat the Democrat candidate in a head-to-head first-past-the-post election.
So... I don't know. Maybe people just vote differently when forced to pick between two candidates than they do when ranking candidates on a ballot with multiple choices? Perhaps the 2024 election results will bring more clarity...
[1]: https://www.elections.alaska.gov/RCV.php
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska%27s_at-large_congressio...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
[4]: https://www.elections.alaska.gov/results/22GENR/US%20REP.pdf
In a hypothetical world, roughly evenly split on religion, where everyone would be pretty okay with secular tolerance, picking secular tolerance seems like the way to go. But if most people would somewhat prefer to try and force their particular religion on everyone if they can get away with it, secular tolerance will be everyone's second choice and will be discarded in the first round of voting... unless enough people recognize the dynamic and vote strategically rather than honestly, but that undermines the point of RCV.
I'll leave it to you to decide for yourself how much the real world resembles that hypothetical, but as I said it worries me.
In the next election there was an open seat for my Congress person. There were something like 5 progressive candidates, and one more conservative democrat. Of course, the progressive vote split and the conservative candidate won, even though he was probably the last choice among a majority of voters. I found that super ironic.
Until it becomes the a "both people are lunatics" sort of decision....
> Third parties aren't going to be a real thing in the US without a change to the way we count votes.
Exactly. Perhaps the single most important (feasible) improvement that could be made in US politics is broader adoption of Instant-Runoff Voting! It keeps things simple, maintains single-representation, but avoids the absurdity of first-past-the-post voting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
Australian way to count votes was specifically designed to avoid favoring a two-party system (basically, instead of selecting one candidate, you vote for multiple and give your preference order). Yet in effect Australia has a 2-party system, too.
Why is that, I don't know.
Big money, I suspect.
It is my depressing realization after wondering the same thing as you and discovering that these alternate voting systems actually don't help, in the end, with electing someone to a position of singular power. They seem to help in other situations, though.
With each added Senate seat in subsequent years, the third party builds relevance by setting the Senate agenda. Given how evenly split the country is, just a few Senate seats have outsized influence. House is possible too, but with only 2 year terms, the value is harder to maintain and build upon.
Why, do you support the woke mind virus?
There's a lot of sarcasm in the above, but you get my point. Conservatives got us into our last two wars (though honestly, I'll excuse Afghanistan and agree the withdrawal was completely botched). Conservatives could absolutely get more funding to secure the southern border if they agreed to work with liberals to reform immigration and make a more streamlined legal process for immigration to this country. Maybe a points based system like Canada's, but a bit less permissive?
It’s as if you were in control of IT for a company and had discovered your networks were filled with hackers, but refused to do anything about it until you had a plan for how to allow future new hires access.
Secure the walls, kick out the unauthorized, then grant new authorization as needed. It’s obvious, really.
I suspect the truth of the matter is republican politicians are terrified of being seen as pro any immigration.
Note the several guest worker/etc. programs he has voted yes for.
As for the borders, it’s beyond ridiculous that border patrol was ordered to stand down and watch immigrants stream in. It’s an offense to the many hard workers who put in the effort to come here legally. And liberals are finally staring to understand the issue, but it took conservatives hissing their huddled masses to the so called “sanctuary cities” for them to get it.
But when they are rational and informed, you would be wise not too. Looking at this thread, you can make your own judgement as to what of the two extremes this is closest too.
And we need a National Popular Vote for President. No more ignoring solidly blue or solidly red states.
We should also force anyone who wants a nomination from one of the major parties (however many there are) for office in the Federal government to pledge to live only and entirely on their pension. They must completely divest of anything but Index Funds. No more paid lobbying retirement for politicians. It's killing this country.
Partisanship in America is a bug, not a feature.
Solutions that require forcing people to adhere to a specific ideological or political framework (or not to) tend towards authoritarianism. You can't stop people in a free society from acting in aggregate to further their own common interests.
The only solution I can see is if the parties themselves decided to change their rules, but they have no reason to. Things are only the way they are now because that is what wins votes and concentrates power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
But the Republicans will never pass it because it would hurt them.
That said, every effort at a third party has started at the top, with the presidency, the only way to build a party is from the bottom up - the Forwardists are trying to do this - but its a many many year effort to do so.
It seems like a "centrist" third party is the only type that would have a chance at winning anything. But nobody is stepping forward to create that party.
The moment someone started to get popular, both big parties would start;
1 - flinging whatever crap they could at them.
2 - try to steal any policy differentiation they tried to do that seemed popular.
3 - would crack down on their own loyalists.
4 - use all their existing leverage to sabotage them.
It’s the ‘of course I care about the environment!’ choice. It will be popular as long as it isn’t concrete and doesn’t require any real sacrifices.
Change doesn't require major structural moves. It just requires less apathy towards the "boring" aspects of politics where the true power lies.
If you live in a one-party state like West Virginia or Maryland, it might make sense to tactically switch to the dominant party. I've done that in my state.
In a perfect world, elections reform would be great: - adopt ranked-choice voting - increase access to the ballot box (motor voter auto-registration, early voting, etc) - adopt compulsory elections (probably would never happen in the States)
These polls are almost meaningless. Why? Because its city, county and state politics is where most (not all) party power resides, particularly on election day when "get out the vote" and election integrity is determined. Trump's election in 2016 stands out as a notable exception to this general rule, but his defeat in 2020 was very much a return to the rule. Also, US elections currently come down a few dozen or so counties in the US where grass roots party activities make the biggest difference.
Then, importantly, its from the State/County organizations that many political and judicial appointments are made by new administrations. A third party lacks the depth and roster of qualified applications for those roles. The problems this creates are well illustrated, again, by the Trump administration that struggled to fill positions.
None of this is intended to take sides pro or con a party or person. I'm just pointing out reality having worked in a city and statewide campaign, among other related experiences.
If there are any flash in the pan third parties, their platform will get absorbed by the big 2 and it’ll disappear.
A third party is fundamentally irrelevant in the design of our democracy. This poll should be 0% support.
I left the Democratic Party a few years ago. My reasoning is that it makes it easier for special interests to game the system if everyone is caged into just one of our two major political parties. The DNC and RNC shamefully service special interests, not public interests. If you disagree, I would be happy to debate this all day.
I still do occasionally make donations to democrats who I think are exceptional and once to a republican candidate in my state who I thought was also exceptional, but I make sure that none of my contributions every again go to DNC (or RNC if I was not liberal).
EDIT: what I am suggesting is that it would be best for our representative democracy if everyone registered independent.
Until then, anytime spent endorsing voting for contributing to a third party is moot.