First off, i live in Europe, so i honestly don’t know too much about politics in other parts of the world, other than what i sometimes see in the news. I hope my innocent question doesn’t trigger any nastiness.
My question is; in discussions i see only talk about democrats vs republicans, for instance discussions only about Biden and/or Trump. But my understanding is that there are other political parties one can vote for. However, i never see any mention of them. So, is it that most people are not interested in those? Or maybe they don’t get enough media time? Or are they seen as too extreme? Are the US basically a two-party system? And does it change over time? There are a lot of worries in the world - i don’t need to name all of them - but this seems to trigger more extreme views. Does this mean that those other parties attract more voters nowadays?
They exist, but are only really relevant at the local level, or rarely as a spoiler effect if one gets vaguely popular. This isn’t so much that people don’t want other options, but mostly because the US system is badly designed. The US has a first past the post, winner take all type system, ie, if you win the most votes in a given election, you win that spot and it’s all yours. That makes some intuitive sense, but is actually not the most democratic option, as it means that parties that have, say, 20% of the population supporting them don’t get 20% of the seats, they get none of them, because for each individual seat, they won’t win the most votes. Worse, such a party will cause the major party it is less similar to to win, because it’s voters voted for them rather than the major party it was most similar to, so even if the voters on that side of the political spectrum are in the majority, their votes are split among multiple parties where their rivals that stay as one party can then be the single largest one. The US system accidentally makes it mathematically inevitable for two and only two parties to dominate.
Historically they have switched up once or twice, when one party became so unpopular that it basically became nonviable, and a different party rose to replace it, and once the current major parties have swapped ideology more or less, but this kind of thing is very rare.
Thank you for your elaborate reply. It sounds very…disheartening to have such a system in place, both for voters and the people who are members of these other parties.
That’s because it is.
It’s a constant source of frustration to be honest
I can only imagine, i already feel frustrated reading about this while i don’t even live there!
Because the US doesn’t have proportional representation and uses “first past the post” voting, basically any vote for a third party candidate is wasted.
There are other parties but their main effect is to sway elections by “stealing” votes from the two main parties. There’s a group trying to form a party called “No Labels” right now but if you look at their financial backers, you can clearly see they only exist to try to weaken democrats.
Admittedly there are some other parties that genuinely try to get elected, such as the Green Party, but they rarely succeed in even the tiniest local elections.
Thank you for your reply, i’m starting to get a sense of how this works in the US
The rest of these posts focuses on how insignificant the third parties are, however the real reason is that our democracy was designed as an adversarial democracy, it’s been designed so that the two major parties, whatever those two major parties are, are supposed to be in a balance of compromise while also locked into a battle for control. The theory behind this is basically that through the adversarial process a measure of balance would be achieved.
Obviously the design is broken as we’re on the road to a second civil war, however that too might be by design as Jefferson, one of the architects of our democracy, can be quoted as saying “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” so maybe they just saw revolution/civil war as a natural occurrence in their design.
As for third party replacements, the Republicans, if they lose and keep bowing to trump and losing popularity, are facing the chance to be replaced by another political party, most likely it will be the Democrats that become the conservative party again, as they were prior to the civil rights movement and the Southern Strategy , as many neocon Republicans have left their now far right party to join the much more moderate democrats, so in theory a new Leftist/Liberal party would arise to take their place. So to achieve that first the Republican party would need to continue it’s downward spiral, and then a third party would need to pass a certain threshold for votes, once that’s done we would have our new two parties.
It also doesn’t help that the current most popular third parties, Green and Libertarian, are both heavily funded by both Right wing and foreign sources, so even their marginal successes currently are dubious.
Now with this all said I’m sure someone who’s actually got law degrees or political science degrees could explain this better and more accurately but this is as I understand it, overall we have a lot of hurdles to overcome but until the Republican party crumbles away we’re stuck with a party that has turned into the Qult of Donald Trump who wants to end democracy completely so that they can have all of the power and control, and that’s why we must not focus on third parties but instead focus on beating the wannabe tyrants that want to turn our country into the Trump kingdom.
That was a very interesting read, thank you. And i really do hope people will succeed in beating Trump. But honestly, the whole world saw what he did and tried to do and still he apparently has a chance in becoming president again, which makes me wonder what these kind of voters want. Do they really want what Trump wants, or do they see a vote for him as a kind of protest out of anger and frustration?
And seeing this kind of voting system in the US, it doesn’t mean half the country is voting for Trump, i take it?
Trump has never won the popular vote, not even in 2016, he won by the bullshit technicality that is the electoral college, a system set up to balance the power between rural and city voters, which now hangs on our democracy’s neck like an albatross. Hillary could have probably challenged the vote and won, but the Democrats don’t like looking like they’re pushing for control, I’m sure the line of thought was “we’ll let the dog catch the car and fall on it’s face” which Trump’s administration did time and time again.
Also another thing you have to understand is that the voting turnout is only just above 50% so there’s like 40%+ of the US population who doesn’t even vote, or takes turns not voting depending on the election. So it’s not like this is the entire US population voting, it’s just the people who actually vote, whereas Trump voters are generally a solid unwavering 45% of, and that percentage holds true for many things that pertains to this topic. So that leaves at least a solid 55% of the electorate voting against Trump, that can be bolstered by independents out of the normally non-voting populace to show up and vote to strengthen those numbers.
So no the majority of US citizens do not want Trump, but with the electoral college in play that provides a handicap for Trump if they target the right populations to help him win the electoral college, like Russia did by targeting those same populations and bombarded them with propaganda and misinformation, and even a parade float.
So the 45% of voters who want Trump just see him as a way to get back at a system that they disagree with, some of it has to do with race, some of it with religion, some of it is misogyny, and some of it is deep rooted conspiracies based in religion and racism, like the neo-confederates and Neo-Nazis among them, and a lot of it is also opportunistic twats looking for more wealth and power.
Overall it’s wealthy conservatives using their poor base to propel them to control, because that’s all they want is control, their anger at the system isn’t that it’s unfair, it’s that the system is more equal than they want it to be, and the system that exists already has a lot of problems with equality already. Right wingers only want control, they can’t govern since they are only focused on obstruction, they don’t have many good ideas, and they want to be able to control those around them, force their religion on them, force their views on sexuality on them, etc. etc.
Wow, only about 50% vote, that is very low. I did read - quite a while back - that they have all kinds of ridiculous requirements to be able to vote, apparently to prevent black people from voting, if my understanding is correct. As for the Trump voters, your description is just about what i expected. I think this is the case in our european country as well; protest voters who vote for rightwing extremist parties.
Thank you so much for your elaborate reply and the links, which i will read, very much appreciated.
Have a great weekend
There’s actually not a lot of hurdles for voting, and there’s only a few things that would hinder you from voting, like being a felon, or a dishonorable discharged from the military, because that’s essentially being a felon and probably due to something felony level, certain states have other rules about identification but outside of the monetary cost it’s not really so prohibitive, but that’s also why the left here are fighting for free identification, which makes sense if we’re forcing people to have it then it should be free, and placing a cost on it makes it hard for poor people to afford it. That’s probably part of what you mean by the voting requirements being prohibitive to black Americans, since due to some older systemically racist policies, and some racist business tactics from decades ago, black folks tend to be impoverished, but there are also historical and cultural issues at play there as well. For the most part if you’re an American citizen that hasn’t gone to prison or hasn’t been kicked out of the military you can vote, you just have to make sure you register to vote, however things still vary from state to state. Homeless people, like the poverty issue in general, tend to be the most disenfranchised when it comes to voting, because without an address they will give them a hard time about things like identification and voter registration.
Another issue that goes on with that stuff is voter registration purges, people are sometimes removed from the voter rolls for innocent or nefarious reasons, voter rolls need to get cleaned up from time to time as people pass away or move away, but sometimes it’s a cheating effort to prevent people from voting, usually Republicans purging democrats from the rolls.
I think most of the non-voting populace are just people that aren’t interested in participating in the process, there’s plenty of those types, some of them are even the loudest when it comes to their disdain about politics, yet don’t vote to help fix things, and then there’s the folks that don’t vote because they live “off the grid” on homesteads in the middle of nowhere, or in cult compounds, or are part of the militia and sovereign citizen movements, these people tend to he oppressed to the system in general so they generally have no interest in participating in it.
Another thing is how right wing led states limit polling locations, vote by mail drop offs, and voting times, in Georgia they even limited voters from being able to have water with them to wait in line, the right wing always tries lame fuckery like this to get any advantage they can.
The vast majority though are the apathetic voters, uninterested in participating for one reason or another, so they don’t bother to, the second most are probably the felons/military shitbirds, as we have many of each.
If i had my way everybody would be registered to vote at voting age, it’s 18 now but should probably wind up being 16, the right wingers are trying to raise voting age to 21+ because they hate how the youth turnout favors the left, and I would also ensure that everyone is sent ballots at home and with enough drop off points for every single ballot.
Thanks for the conversation, hope you have a good weekend as well.
Yes. Consolidation of power. It sucks. They have found we are easier to control when you just have a bad choice and a worse choice. Easier to divide into “us vs them”. And we have too many people that ate lead paint chips when they were young running things that think this is the only way and refuse to change it.
That sounds like they - democrats and republicans - would not have any incentive to change this by law, to make it more fair…
They don’t. Corporations buy them off and force their agenda through the system, further entrenching their power. Also, in America, companies have the same freedoms and rights as individuals, according to Citizens United vs FEC.. So now I’m sure foreign entities are now using this avenue as well to further their agendas.
We need a good old “French Revolution”.
