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Hi,it has always puzzled me why america does not have a third major political party.You have the democrats(left wing)our labour party and you have the republicans(right wing)our conservatives.We in the uk have the liberal democrats(used to be called just liberal)as the third major party as the centralist option.Do you think a third party(centralist) in the states would be a good thing to stop just the red v blue contests(and it might give you more gene pool options than the bush,clintons which seem to dominate u.s. presidential candidates) and do you think they would have enough supporters to be an other option for people.Now i have to make clear the liberals(centralists) have not solely been in govt since 1922 under lloyd george and apart from a coalition with the tories very recently have now went back to being almost irrelevant but are still very much seen as the "third party" in the uk.
A third party would be a good option especially this election cycle but it all comes down to money. We have had third party nominees that get onto the ballot but they are relatively unknown. The earliest one I can remember is Ross Perot. The tea party of more recent years tried to get rolling but they didn't make much of a splash.
It is very hard to compete with the BIG D's and R's when you consider that Hillary raised over $70 million in the month of June and Trump over $50 million.
Then again the way that our elected have been acting it seems like we actually have one party.
There really is only one party with 2 branches. That's why things never get done or better. These two have it rigged so that another party cannot get started or sustain any momentum so as not to be a threat to those in power.
I believe that it has to do with the way in which the United States elects its head of state - the Electoral College of the United States, combined with laws in nearly every state that allocate presidential electors on a winner-take-all basis. For a party to have a reasonable chance at the office of the presidency, it needs to dominate in a significant number of states as well as have a competitive chance in a majority of states. American political parties which fail to meet these qualifications (Federalists, Whigs, Prohibition Party, Bull Moose Party, Socialist Party, Libertarian Party, Reform Party, Green Party, etc.) either become marginalized or go extinct.
If the United States had a parliamentary form of national government, then there would be multiple viable national political parties, which, when elected, tend to form ruling coalitions. Instead, our political coalitions form prior to election, coalescing into either a Republican Party majority or a Democratic Party majority. Our current presidential election highlights this political dynamic. The Democratic party's social liberal wing, represented by Bernie Sanders, has lost to the centralist establishment wing, represented by Hillary Clinton. The Republican party's paleoconservative wing, led by Donald Trump, has overcome the other factions of Ronald Reagan's GOP 'Big Tent' party by defeating the establishment conservatives, religious conservatives, neoconservatives, and Libertarian-leaning conservatives.
I believe that the last time there was a major shift in the national political coalitions was when religious conservatives who voted for Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter in 1976 instead voted for Republican candidate Ronald Reagan in 1980.
The answer is really very simple: ballot access. Each State has disparate rules for ballot access and those rules are in effect controlled by the two major parties. When a third party candidate does emerge, the major parties throw a lot of resources at preventing them from getting ballot access.
Here are but four examples I witnessed:
01) Disqualify the signatures of the candidate
02) Rules that force a party to run a full slate of candidates vs for specific offices
03) Tie the third party up in legal challenges effectively keeping them in suspension until after the ballots are printed
04) Mount on baseless challenge after another to tie up the third party's generally meager resources so they never have time to mount an effective campaign.
As an example, the largest third party in the U.S. (the Libertarians)have only had full 50 state ballot access 3 times: 1980. 1992, 1996
I believe that it has to do with the way in which the United States elects its head of state - the Electoral College of the United States, combined with laws in nearly every state that allocate presidential electors on a winner-take-all basis. For a party to have a reasonable chance at the office of the presidency, it needs to dominate in a significant number of states as well as have a competitive chance in a majority of states. American political parties which fail to meet these qualifications (Federalists, Whigs, Prohibition Party, Bull Moose Party, Socialist Party, Libertarian Party, Reform Party, Green Party, etc.) either become marginalized or go extinct.
This is pretty much the reason. The Founding Fathers deliberately rejected the parliamentary system used by Britain. They did that in both the Articles of Confederation and in the US Constitution, and it wasn't controversial at the time, which suggests that this was the general preference of Americans. I'm not sure why. It may have just been a rejection of anything British. It may have been colonial legislatures were simply organized as the royal governor being advised by representatives, and Americans thought that worked well enough/better than the parliamentary model. It may have been antipathy to partisanship, ie what George Washington referred to as "factionalism".
Certainly the framers of the Constitution didn't seem to envision party politics as the Constitution originally provided for the candidate with the highest number of electoral votes to become POTUS and the one with the second highest number to be VP. That worked well for Washington, but the emergence of organized political parties caused problems in both 1796 and 1800. It took 36 ballots for the House of Representatives to pick Thomas Jefferson over Aaron Burr. The Twelfth Amendment (ratified in early 1804) provided for electors in the EC to vote separately for POTUS and VP.
The Constitutional requirement for the successful candidate to get a majority in the Electoral Congress requires political parties to have broad appeal. Minor parties have traditionally been more ideological than the major parties, and that's been their downfall. When major party coalitions seriously fray, that's when minor parties tend to become "third parties" on the presidential scene.
In the 1850s, as sectionalism and slavery threatened to rip the country apart, the Free Soilers, who were against the spread of slavery into the territories, appeared and eventually morphed into the Republican Party, which not only opposed slavery in the territories but also proposed other ideas popular with the members of the Whig Party from the north and west: a transcontinental railroad, a homestead act, state colleges supported by revenues from land sales, tariffs to protect manufacturing, etc. Whigs from the north and west bolted to the new Republican Party, including Abraham Lincoln.
No other minor party has been able to build a coalition large enough to replace a major party since. They all tend to be narrowly focused on one issue. The "third party movements" since 1860 have been disgruntled members of either the Democrats (Dixiecrats in 1948) or Republicans (Bull Moose in 1912 and Independence in 1992). The Dixiecrats failed to give the election to the Republicans but the Bull Moose and Independence Parties gave the US Democrats Woodrow Wilson and Bill Clinton.
Generally speaking, Americans are not ideologues, and the problem with the current minor parties -- and other minor parties in US history -- is that they were/are either one issue parties like the Prohibition Party or the Green Party or they were/are radical ideological parties like the Socialist Party or the Libertarian Party. Neither type appeals to enough voters to be a major player in presidential elections.
The answer is really very simple: ballot access. Each State has disparate rules for ballot access and those rules are in effect controlled by the two major parties. When a third party candidate does emerge, the major parties throw a lot of resources at preventing them from getting ballot access.
Here are but four examples I witnessed:
01) Disqualify the signatures of the candidate
02) Rules that force a party to run a full slate of candidates vs for specific offices
03) Tie the third party up in legal challenges effectively keeping them in suspension until after the ballots are printed
04) Mount on baseless challenge after another to tie up the third party's generally meager resources so they never have time to mount an effective campaign.
As an example, the largest third party in the U.S. (the Libertarians)have only had full 50 state ballot access 3 times: 1980. 1992, 1996
Sorry, but the real problem with today's minor political parties is that their self-appointed leaders only want to participate in federal elections and don't want to dirty their hands in local politics. Consequently, they try to muddle through to get their national candidate on ballots in states where they have no local presence because they're too snobby to put boots on the ground and run candidates for city councils or town supervisors or whatever ... and usually fail. Well, c'est la vie.
Your complaint is typical of the "we can't compete with the system so change the system to accommodate us" mentality that minor political parties in the US have had for decades.
There really is only one party with 2 branches. That's why things never get done or better. These two have it rigged so that another party cannot get started or sustain any momentum so as not to be a threat to those in power.
This. Basically because the rich people that run the nation don't want it to change. They don't want to give up their money or power. The US political system is very corrupt.
Short answer? The way our system works a third party doesn't work. It's not that Americans don't want them, in fact we'd probably be a lot happier with them, it's just the system is set up in such a way as you only can really support two. There probably will come a third party someday, but it will likely kill off one of the existing two after a while. So down the road it might be the Democrats and the Libertarians or the Republicans and the Greens who knows.
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