America's Two Party Problem

Every few years, us Americans rediscover that our political system was designed to produce exactly two parties, and we spend considerable energy being surprised by this.

From the Federalists vs Anti-Federalists to the Democratic-Republicans and Whigs to today's Democrats vs Republicans, this binary choice has never changed. New parties only rise when one of the existing ones implode.

Besides the UK, it's not the same in Europe. You have parties ranging from the same "big government versus small government" split that we have here to the Greens, to splinter parties along the right and left because the previous party was not right nor left enough, to niche parties like the Dutch "Party for Animals" that all get elected to their national assemblies. Most European countries use proportional representation, party lists, or multiple rounds of voting that ensure more voters' views are at least represented in their parliaments. France's two round system ensures that the eventual winner has an absolute majority of voters.

But the United States and the United Kingdom both use "first past the post," meaning the candidate that gets the largest number of votes, even if not an absolute majority, gets the win. Not only does this ensure that the views of smaller parties are not reflected in our House of Representatives or Commons, but the victor often wins fewer votes than their opponents combined. And if you combine First Past the Post with the American electoral college, then you get Presidents that come in second, but because they won the right states, they win the White House. That's happened four times in US history. Rutherford B Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, George W Bush in 2000, and yes, Donald Trump in 2016 are all guilty of this.

The results of the 2024 British General Election showing Labour receiving 65% of the seats on only 33% of the vote thanks to right-wing vote splitting and First Past the Post.

In the last UK election, only 95 of the 650 members of the House of Commons won their seat with a majority of voters in their constituencies (that's what they call their districts). The victorious Labour Party won 411 seats, or 63 percent of the total, while only winning 33 percent of the vote. That is only possible thanks to first past the post and two strong parties on the political right splitting right-wing voters.

Normally here in the US (with exceptions in a few states such as California, Georgia, and Maine), there's a contest between the two major parties getting 95 percent or more of the vote, with a handful of smaller parties maybe getting five percent if they're lucky. But voters reward success, and a party that never gets elected never becomes successful, so they're never rewarded with more voters. First past the post puts a limit on how far minor parties can realistically go. They didn't get enough votes in the previous election, so it's harder to raise money for the next one, and they're stuck in the single digits for the most part.

But what does happen is that the major parties adopt policies first proposed by the smaller ones. Democrats embraced welfare policies that originated across various socialist or left wing parties in the early 1900s. About fifty years later, Republicans adopted libertarian ideas to counter the Democrats. This doesn't leave much room for smaller parties to make their case for how they would improve anything.

Another reason third parties don't break through in the US is that we're a presidential system where the executive is a separate branch from the legislative. This is different from the vast majority of Europe, where the heads of government come from their legislature or their parliaments. France is a little of both, which might explain why they have that unique two-round system of voting, but France is often a special case when it comes to politics.

Parliaments often work by forming coalitions, different parties coming together toward a common governing agenda and getting a majority of members on board. Voters in Germany, Spain, or Italy are used to this. It doesn't happen often in the UK, thanks to their two major parties usually not needing to form a coalition, but it does happen. The last time was 2010. We simply don't need that in the US in order to get a functioning government.

In the US, our government is formed by the president, who picks their cabinet from their political allies, usually within their own party, though cabinet picks have to be confirmed by the Senate. While that's easier when the President and the Senate are on the same team, until the 1990s, the Senate usually just deferred to the President's choices even when not politically aligned, because the President in theory has a popular mandate to govern.

Americans are also generally wary of all-powerful governments. Call it our cultural DNA, rooted in being thousands of miles away from the seat of government, the Stamp Act, the Boston Massacre, the Battle of Yorktown in 1781, and all that. We never really shook that off, and even the party more tolerant of stronger central government tends to see its President checked at the next midterm. In the 80 years since the parties settled into roughly their current ideological positions, we've only had a trifecta, meaning control of the White House, House, and Senate, for 30 of those years, and that correction back to divided government typically happens fast, usually in a new President's first midterm. Even when a President governs exactly as promised, voters from an energized opposition slam on the brakes and give Congress to the non-presidential party, or at the very least, make things closer.

But there are times when the previous version of a party effectively died, the name hung around, but basically everything else changed. Republicans were punished severely during the Great Depression. FDR carried 42 of the 48 states in his first election in 1932. Democrats picked up 12 Senate seats and 96 House seats, and the Republican Senate Majority Leader lost his own election. That was the political reality in DC for almost 20 years, all the way through World War Two. In Europe, that Republican Party would simply have been replaced by another party with similar or slightly tweaked ideas. But, like dollar bills, ignoring the metric system, and tipping, we Americans love our silly traditions, especially ones that other countries have long since thrown away.

Between the Civil War in 1860 and FDR's election in 1932, Republicans had held the White House for 52 of those 72 years, but when they emerged from the political wilderness in the late 1940s, they were starting to become more aligned with Southern conservatives rather than their previous power base in the Northeast, ignoring largely everything that made them dominate American politics before the Great Depression. That realignment was set in stone after the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, and today's Southern conservatives are the fiscally and socially conservative Republicans, not the Democrats of the 19th century.

Europe's only first-past-the-post analogue, the UK, is currently undergoing a similar shift. New parties are forming across the right and drawing in formerly loyal Conservative voters. On the left, thanks to widespread dissatisfaction with Starmer's Labour government, an ascendant Green Party is becoming a real threat to Labour's left flank. Nigel Farage's Reform UK is leading in the polls while the Greens hoover up left-wing voters. With several years still remaining before the 2029 election, unless both the Conservatives and Labour adjust course, Britain is looking at a political realignment not seen since the Liberal Party was replaced by Labour over 100 years ago. Perhaps even larger, because the Conservative party (or their ancestral Tories) have been either the largest or second largest party since before they really had formal parties, going all the way back to the late 1600s.

Here in the US, we're experiencing our own internal drama. MAGA's takeover of the Republican Party is complete, but many traditional Republicans feel politically homeless. On the left, the Democratic Party is struggling with its stance on Israel, with younger voters demanding a clean break while older, more centrist leadership looks for room to maneuver or maybe tack center to win over those disaffected Republicans. The debate around supporting Israel in Gaza has been cited as one of the reasons Harris fell short in 2024. This tension within each party means there's a constant tug-of-war between its right and left flanks.

Generally, the left pulls the Democrats towards its left, but usually only if and when the Republicans implode, like in 1932 and 1964, giving them a window of opportunity to make a big shift. For Republicans, it gets pulled to the right, like after Carter's unpopularity in 1980, or Gingrich's Contract with America in Clinton's first midterm in 1994. For American political parties, the status quo is only possible to overcome if the opportunity is presented by an inept other party. After some soul-searching in the minority, new ideas are adopted and implemented in the next election. If the new ideas help win the election, then they're adopted as party doctrine, like Democrats being in favor of an expanded safety net with Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, and Republicans supporting limited government since 1980.

While many Americans may look to Europe's embrace of multi-party politics, there are simply too many structural and cultural roadblocks to make the same possible in the United States. The Presidential form of government removes the need for parliamentary coalitions to form a majority. European parties come and go, yet the US allows existing parties to be taken over by new ideologies every few decades thanks to First Past the Post, meaning candidates can win even if most people vote for other people.

But don't confuse stability for continuity. Formerly the home of disaffected Confederates, today's Democratic Party counts African Americans as one of its most loyal constituencies, while the former isolationist, metropolitan Republican Party is the modern home of interventionists and southern conservatives. The Democrats dominated the solid south before the 1960s. Then they flipped, with Republicans dominating those same voters for the past 50 years. And yes, we flip our colors here in the US.

While Europe's need for coalitions allows new parties to break through and get a seat at the table, America's majoritarian government and electoral systems create coalitions within parties that European parties lack.

To quote Battlestar Galactica: "all of this has happened before."

While minor parties can spoil results, they rarely win office on their own. In the 1860 election, the Republican Party, less than a decade old, was the only anti-slavery party. They dominated the north, winning 18 states but only 39 percent of the vote. That disparity is thanks to the Democratic party being split in two over slavery, with Northern and Southern Democratic parties and a fourth Constitutional Union Party taking a moderate approach toward slavery. Lincoln dominated the north, a pro-slavery Southern Democrat dominated the South, and the Northern Democratic and Constitutional Union parties won a handful of what would become the border states.

Fast forward to 1912, and former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt wanted to get back into the White House. He and sitting President William Howard Taft split the Republican vote so badly that Woodrow Wilson won 40 states while only winning 41 percent of the vote, becoming the first Democrat to win the White House in 20 years.

Ross Perot demonstrated the same dynamic in the 1990s, splitting the libertarian, small government, right-wing vote with Republican George Bush just enough that Bill Clinton won a massive electoral victory while only winning 43 percent of the popular vote in 1992.

These parties in the US simply lack the organization or bench strength to mount a national campaign. Jill Stein's Green Party shows up every four years and may pull enough voters on the left to hand Republicans victories they otherwise would have lost. Even in the best case for Stein, she would be elected President alongside a Republican supermajority in the House and Senate, because the Greens simply do not run enough candidates to hold a congressional majority.

That is the reality of first past the post. If you reject the lesser of two evils on principle, the greater of two evils will sneak through.