Fight for Democracy, Part 3: A Two-Party System Requires a Binary Choice

The United States is a has a two-party structure for many reasons, and none of those are going to be changed by a third-party vote. I, like many people, think having only two significant political parties sucks. I think there are a lot of good ideas outside the narrow windows of centrist politics. But without a major rewrite of our Constitution and voting systems we are not going to change our current reality. So we need to live in that reality and make it the best timeline we can. But, I hear you say, what if we all decided to vote third party! They’d have to listen to us then! Yeah, not going to happen. We’ve had the Green Party for decades and it hasn’t accomplished anything. Same for the Libertarians. Even in the last election, with the two least-popular main party candidates in history, the third-party vote was tiny. If any party grew from the edges (either Left or Right), it could only do so by drawing votes from the party most similar to itself, thus assuring that the most dissimilar party ends up winning. That’s because: The U.S. has a first-past-the-post voting system: In any given election, whoever gets the most votes wins and everyone else gets nothing. If two parties have the electorate split roughly fifty-fifty, then you have a mix of results that creates a sharing of power between two rivals - this ideally serves as a check on each of them and forces them to continue to respect the will of the public. It creates fairly stable parties committed to the center that shift a little bit to try to win people over. It’s an equilibrium, and it only gets changed by massive disruption, but always reverts back to a two-party equilibrium, even if the names of those parties changes. It’s structural. Let’s say we had three parties: Right, Left, Middle. If Right has 40% support, Middle has 35% support, and Left has 25% support, the Right will win everything and the Left and Center will have no power. The Middle could challenge the right by becoming more like Right and drawing some voters away, but then they’d lose some Left-leaning voters to the Left and this could continue until all three had about equal support and elections were competitive. But if that were the case, the Right could simply move a little left and take back some voters and we’d be back to where we started: Right wins everything. A similar thing would happen if the Left moved towards the Center - they could conceivably win everything with a minority. The only way to get a balance in such a situation (which is what all systems strive for) is for the Right to move left and the Left to move right, thus crowding out the Center and leaving us with two centrist parties. This two-party structure is reinforced by the fact that we get to vote for our Executive (President). There is no wrangling or deal-making in Congress, it’s simply a vote (not necessarily a popular vote, since the Electoral College makes a mockery of that, but that’s a discussion for another time). The same principle applies where the Parties will move along the spectrum to keep the race competitive and end up with fairly centrist positions. The way to change this is to change how we cast our votes and declare a winner. There are a few options: ranked choice voting, changing House of Representative apportionment, moving towards a parliamentary Executive office. None of these things are likely, none are going to be done through normal legislative processes (why would the current parties want this?). They could be done through public referendums. If that’s what you want, then go ahead and fight for it, but in the meantime recognize that third-party candidates mostly just hurt their cause, and even if they win they won’t be able to do anything to change the structure of voting without majority support. Our system has deficiencies that should be changed, but not all methods of change are realistic and not all ideal situations are possible. For the foreseeable future we are in a binary world and your vote will either help the Democrats or help the Republicans. Pick your side.