Decision 2012

Remove all ads!

That's an excellent point - disaffection seems to be at an all-time high in the modern political era. You'd think that conditions would thus be ripe for a third party to move in ... except maybe people are just tired of it altogether.

 

The problem there is the closest thing we have to a 3rd party is the Tea Party. Be careful what you wish for.

 

I have said it before and now I will say it again. American politics would be well served if both the major parties split. The republicans into a proper christian/conservative/nationalistic party and a laissez-faire hardcore capitalistic market liberal party while the democrats split into a mellow middle of the road/try to please everyone/watered down centrist party and a proper left wing social democratic party.

Then people would have some options and in reality the parties already seem to be split pretty much along those lines.

 

The problem is that the first one to take this step would lose, because they'd split their voters in half.

 

I agree that it would be disasterous for whomever did it first, but I think another problem to point out is that the groups wouldn't split evenly. You wouldn't end up with four parties each containing 25% of the population.

About 20% of the population describe themselves as Christian Conservatives. Assuming they are currently Republican and that Republicans are about half of the total population, it stands to reason that free market capitalists would be about 30%.

You'd see a similar break down on the Democratic side, although I'm inclined to think the split would be even greater. There would certainly be more centrists than there would social liberals. But for ease of calculation, lets's assume a 30-20, even though I think the centrists would be closer to 35-40% of the total.

And that reason is why it won't work in the US. Remember that presidential and congressional elections are winner take all. So long as you get the most votes you win the state (or district), even if you vote total fell short of a majority. This is best illustrated in the presidential elections of 1992 and 1996, when Ross Perot ran as a 3rd party candidate. He didn't win enough votes in either election to win a single state, but he did win enough (especially in 1992 when he received nearly 20% of the popular vote) that the candidate that did win the state did so with less than 50% of the vote.

Because the party splits would be unequal, the Christian Conservatives and social liberals would only serve to further marginalize themselves. At least now, they are both latched onto a more mainstream train of thought that provided their candidate wins they might get some of the items on their agenda passed. That would be a thing of the past under this system.

The bottom line is political systems develop for a reason. Joacqins example would work perfectly fine in a nation that had a parliamentary system of representation, but that's not the US. Thomas Jefferson warned against "tyranny by the majority". This would be "tyranny by the minority". Under this proposed system (without an overhaul of the entire first eight articles of the Constitution) could ensure political dominance by a party, even if they were only representative of about 40% of the population.

 

Well yes, you would have to get a proportional system which as I understand things there are some people discussing even if it isn't very likely. Look at the UK though, the Liberal Democrats managed to break into their majority system and I think have pushed for a few steps toward a proportional system. It isn't impossible.

 

Perhaps not literally impossible, but pretty darn close. With the current system, the two major political parties enjoy quite a bit of power. In order to move to this system, the very people who have power would be the ones that would have to vote to give up some of that power. So you're asking them to relinquish it voluntarily. History shows that doesn't happen all too often.

What I really think you'll need to see to get a party to split is one of the two major parties would have to completely bottom out. It would require a philosophical change in thinking that will only occur if one party feels they can no longer win elections under their current way they are doing things.

As an example of something that could happen in the next couple of decades that could cause something like that - look at the Republican Party and the growing minority population in the US. Republicans have historically done poorly in getting votes from both African Americans and Latinos. Barack Obama won 95% of the Aftican American vote in 2008, but even when only white guys ran for president, the Democrat tended to do very well among the African American population. John Kerry received 87% of the African American vote when he ran in 2004. In the case of the Latino vote, while it is not as extreme as among African Americans, they too lean heavily Democrat - about 75%.

It's not news that every year whites make up a smaller percentage of the total US population. (Last year was the first year where the total number of non-white babies born in the US exceeded the number of white babies.) It's also no surprise that the basis of the Republican vote is white males (white females to a lesser extent).

So this isn't rocket science. If the fastest growing demographics are the ones Republicans continue to do a poor job recruiting votes from, it gets harder every year for them to win. You see states "flip" from being reliably Republican to reliably Democrat. The only case where there has happened so far is New Mexico. Arizona is the next domino. However the big one is Texas. That is still reliably Republican right now, and will be for a while - they still have several percentage points of slack there. That's why I said in the next couple of decades. It will happen in our life time that Texas votes Democrat, unless the Republican party changes philosophically. And the reason Texas is so important in national elections is because that's the only big population state that reliably votes Republican. (California and New York are reliably Democrat, and Florida can go either way.)