That's the title anyway. Its an interesting discussion of the two parties having trouble holding their coalitions together. But their conclusion is that it will remain two parties with power swinging back and forth.
Quote:I’m not optimistic about the Democratic Party. The challenges of holding together a biracial, multiethnic coalition spearheaded by a culturally liberal, relatively affluent white cosmopolitan vanguard are daunting
In terms of voting I think the 2 party system is too engrained. In a national election like the president you need the GOP or Dem tag in order to have any feasible chance of winning. This is why Trump ran as a GOPer and Sanders a Dem. Neither were what the party leadership would have wanted but in a two party system you gotta pick the one closest to you.
If third parties would work on winning local and congressional elections you might see a change but it would have to be from the ground up. Finding quality candidates willing to run under a 3rd party banner is hard too as it is easier to run as unaffiliated for local and congressional elections than trying to explain and defend a 3rd party.
So many things over such a long period of time have gone into engraining the two party system in our political culture and practices. Simply having a lot of people hating the two parties is not going to change that
(10-18-2017 10:05 AM)solohawks Wrote: So many things over such a long period of time have gone into engraining the two party system in our political culture and practices. Simply having a lot of people hating the two parties is not going to change that
There's also the fact that a First Past the Post Election system will always trend to two parties.
I am big fan of the ranked voting system/instant runoff voting.
From WIKI: Used in national elections in Australia, this system is said to simulate a series of runoff elections. If no candidate is the first choice of more than half of the voters, then all votes cast for the candidate with the lowest number of first choices are redistributed to the remaining candidates based on who is ranked next on each ballot. If this does not result in any candidate receiving a majority, further rounds of redistribution occur. Or, in other words, "[...] voters would rank their first, second and subsequent choices on the ballot. The candidate with the fewest votes would be dropped and his or her supporters’ second choices would be counted and so on until one candidate emerged with more than 50 per cent."
This would greatly fight the correct notion that voting for a third party candidate results in a spoiler.
Under the current system: D gets 40%, R gets 35%, L gets 25%: D WINS
Under the instant runoff system the L would be eliminated and the second choice of L voters would kick in leaving a likely result of:
D gets 43%, R gets 57%: R WINS
Migrating to this type of system would greatly encourage the rise of more political parties and the breakup of the duopoly we have now.
Voting however is a state matter so 50 different election laws would have to change plus DC in order for this to become a national way to chose the president.
(10-18-2017 10:05 AM)solohawks Wrote: In terms of voting I think the 2 party system is too engrained. In a national election like the president you need the GOP or Dem tag in order to have any feasible chance of winning. This is why Trump ran as a GOPer and Sanders a Dem. Neither were what the party leadership would have wanted but in a two party system you gotta pick the one closest to you.
If third parties would work on winning local and congressional elections you might see a change but it would have to be from the ground up. Finding quality candidates willing to run under a 3rd party banner is hard too as it is easier to run as unaffiliated for local and congressional elections than trying to explain and defend a 3rd party.
So many things over such a long period of time have gone into engraining the two party system in our political culture and practices. Simply having a lot of people hating the two parties is not going to change that
Agree.
The 2 party system is also hard to break because they are "informal associations" with informal stances. They can pivot on an issue at any time, unlike parties in other countries.
Will the parties survive.......of course they will. It's a rigged political system set-up by the 2 parties to make sure no one else can reasonably "crash the party"!
