A combination of first-past-the-post and winner-take-all systems for nearly all elections, coupled with the Electoral College for the presidency.
First-past-the-post is a system wherein only the plurality candidate wins. Here is an example:
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For a given seat, be it a president, senator, representative, or local office, assume Party A wins 40%, Party B wins 30%, Party C wins 20% and Party D wins 10%.
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Despite a majority of voters preferring someone other than Party A, Party A wins and everyone else loses. This is first-past-the-post voting, and with no other considerations given to the other votes, makes it a winner-take-all system.
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The majority aren’t happy with this, but the other parties continue running their candidates and continue losing because Party A wins the greatest portion of votes each time.
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Because the other parties can’t even win any power, there’s no “coalition” or “alliance” that can be made to shut out Party A.
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Party B decides to take advantage of everyone’s dissatisfaction. They adjust some of their policies to be more favorable to Parties C and D to attract some of their voters. This is the closest thing to a “coalition” that the first-past-the-post system can achieve.
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During the next election, Party A wins 40%, party B wins 42%, Party C wins 12%, and Party D wins 6%. Party B assumes office, starts fulfilling their agenda, a lot of their voters aren’t completely happy, but at least Party A isn’t in power.
This illustrates how only 2 prevailing parties come to be, because it is not possible to win an election in the US unless you obtain the most votes.
For the presidential election, the electoral college is a winner-take-all system determined by the limited pool of national electors.
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Like all other offices, the presidential election is still first-past-the-post. Only the candidate who wins the most votes wins the election, everyone else wins nothing.
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For the presidential election, the only votes that matter are the electoral votes. Each US state is assigned a certain portion of electors which is based on population but is often very disproportionate in practice (due to a capped elector total nationally, and minimum elector thresholds for less-populous states).
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Each elector is 1 vote for the president, and the electors are supposed to vote based on how the citizens of that state voted. This is the distinction between the electoral vote and the popular vote.
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With limited exception, this is also a winner-take-all system, meaning all the electors for a given state must also vote in line with one another. If a state has 10 votes and the election is 51% Party A and 49% Party B, all 10 electors must vote for Party A even though it’s almost a clean split down the middle for the popular vote.
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This results in cases where even if a majority of voters nationally prefer Party B, Party A’s candidate could still win because they won more electors.
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Accepting the system is unfair but being unable/unwilling to change it, the two prevailing parties try to game the system any way they can to swing things in their favor. They identify a handful of states where leads are very narrow and focus all their attention there. These are swing states.
Why do people hate third parties/why do they never win?
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For the reasons illustrated above, a third-party can never win any significant amount of power under the current system.
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When a race is even remotely close, small factors like people who choose to vote third-party instead of supporting one of the other two parties can turn the tide in a swing state, and thereby turn the tide nationally.
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There is a trend of third parties getting financial/promotional support from political groups that are actually opposed to their policies, but are using the third party to attract votes away from their main competition for a given seat. This is called the spoiler effect.
This outlines how, under the current political structure of the US, there can never be a successful third party in government outside of local grassroots elections, and why there is so much hostility towards third parties. Third parties aren’t there to win, they are propped up by larger political interests who use them to take votes from their competition.
This is why you may often see “A vote for a third-party (e.g. Jill Stein) is a vote for Trump” during this election, because the Green Party is being primarily supported by right-wing interest groups this election despite being one of the more “leftist” options on paper.
The only thing I would add is that with the electoral system, it’s not the candidate with the most electoral votes that win, it’s the candidate who gets half+1 votes (270 or more currently)
If candidate A wins 250 votes, candidate B wins 200 votes and candidate C wins 88 votes, candidate A does not win. If there is no winner, the house of representatives votes for president, each state getting one vote.
Another reason why third party presidential candidates are never serious contenders.
can we just set up a bot that does nothing but reply with these two comments to every “why no 3rd parties bro” question. We’ll turn it on three months before every US election and let it travel around lemmy servers. then turn if off until this whole cycle repeats.
Wait, why aren’t you fixing the voting system? Yall clearly understand it’s faults. Don’t you believe in democracy?
“You dont get to vote how you want, and you will be reminded every election.”
Clown country.
do you think that a half dozen lemmy users are capable of changing the voting system?
there have been some initiatives passed in some states, but thats only half the election. And the people in power benefit from a first past the post voting system, so transitioning out is slow work. It is possible, and it is happening, but there’s not a magic button that says “swap to superior voting method” that a single socialist can press
because the system is working as designed and it’s incentives keep a lot of people favoring it. but the alternative fast solutions everyone loves to wax philosphical about. well that movie always ends with this really weird wide angle shot of a field. theres this big mound of fresh dirt people are celebrating the victory around. but all our favorite anarchist charaters are missing and nobody can tell me why they got written out at the last minute.
Don’t forget a little note saying "Think this is stupid? Vote for Ranked-Choice Voting!’
You said to not vote third party, so you can’t vote for rcv.
You don’t need to vote third party to get Ranked Choice Voting. There are ballot measures this election to introduce ranked choice voting, independent on who you vote for President. You can vote for Harris and RCV if you’re in one of these states:
Oregon
Oregon voters will vote on Measure 117 in November 2024 on whether they will use ranked choice voting general elections for statewide and federal offices (starting in 2028).
The Oregon Legislature passed the reform in 2023, but any change to the state constitution requires referral to the voters before enacting.
Colorado
Proposition 131 will appear on Colorado’s November 2024 ballot. If passed, it would establish an “all-candidate primary” where the top four vote getters move on to a ranked-choice general election.
Idaho
Proposition 1 has been certified to appear on Idaho’s November 2024 ballot. If passed, it would establish an “all-candidate primary” where the top four vote getters move on to a ranked-choice general election.
Nevada
Nevada voters will vote in November 2024 on whether they will use open primaries and ranked choice voting general elections (starting in 2026).
Voters already approved it in 2022, but it needs to pass in two consecutive ballot measures in order to amend the state constitution.
Washington D.C.
Initiative 83 will open up the District’s primary elections to allow voters not registered with a political party to participate (~71,000 people). General elections will use ranked-choice voting where voters can rank up to 5 candidates.
https://www.rankedvote.co/guides/understanding-ranked-choice-voting/2024-rcv-on-the-ballot
Oh that’s cute, you think the legislatures and judicial branches will allow mass adoption.
If states can override ballot measures regarding legal cannabis, and they have repeatedly, they can override this. Neither side of the duopoly has any interest in losing power.
Your point being that it’s futile to cast a vote for something that won’t come to fruition? Thanks for supporting the original point that voting for a third party candidate is a waste of your vote, and just helps Trump.
If states can override ballot measures regarding legal cannabis, and they have repeatedly, they can override this.
Has that happened? I’m not doubting you, but overall the trend has overwhelmingly been in the direction of adoption. It’s also just a bizarre example to choose since it seems to me like most of those initiatives have been successful and if anything have illustrated the connection between voting and noticeable change.
Which, come to think of it, it’s probably why trolls don’t use it anymore as an example of an issue pretend to care about when they search for reasons to tell people to disengage from democracy.
Usually RCV is an initiative or referendum depending on how your state does it. In mine, it’s just a separate issue on the back that we have to vote for, alongside things like “should we institute a tax for schools” or “should we approve building a new park”. Entirely separate from voting for candidates for any position.
You said to not vote third party, so you can’t vote for rcv.
Not only did they literally not say that… actually no, let’s just pause on this. This is so confused it’s actually kind of amazing. Explaining how first past the post works is not saying don’t vote third party. You could still like a third party the most independent of electoral concerns. And explaining the strategic reasoning for choosing one of the two major parties isn’t the same as saying you “should” vote for them in a moral sense.
Voting to enact a ranked choice voting system isn’t the same as voting for a third part. You could want rank choice voting even if you favored one of the two major parties but don’t want them to lose narrow elections when they might be the winning coalition. You could hate the third party and still want rank choice voting. You can both support a third party and support rank choice voting and understand that they are two entirely separate things.
And I suppose the cherry on top is you referred to them as “you” like it was a single person in a comment chain where it’s three comments by three different people.
Truly a magnificent multi-layered piece of confusion, chefs kiss, five stars, two thumbs up, etc etc.
This was an excellent breakdown of the American elections system, thank you
It varies by state election rules, but for me all the downballot third party candidates are eliminated in the primaries.
All local and state elections on my ballot are: Democrat v Republican, Democrat v Democrat, or Unopposed.
but for me all the downballot third party candidates are eliminated in the primaries.
What do you mean? A primary would be where Democrats narrow their choices to one nominee, and Republicans do, and third parties do and so on. You seem to be suggesting that primaries filter out third party candidates? Maybe I’m just missing something but my understanding would be that a primary would just be a way that a third party chooses a single nominee, same as the first two parties.
Top-two mixed primary regardless of partisan affiliation.
One primary ballot held, all candidates declare a party ‘preference’, all votes counted together. Top two go onto the general election.
Understood, you are exactly right about that. What you’ve described filters out third parties. I think most conceptions of ranked choice voting by contrast would give them more of a chance, but granted that’s not how it works everywhere.
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There isn’t a constitutional mandate that there only be two choices, it’s instead a consequence of poor design. The US, with the exception of a few state and local governments that have tried different things, uses something called first past the post voting: each person votes for one candidate, whoever gets the most votes wins the job. Then, we just hold an election in each of a number of geographic districts for each seat. That’s intuitive, but actually not a good way to design a democracy, because it forces a two party system. If you have multiple parties that have similar ideas, there’s no mechanism for them to form a “coalition” like you might get in other countries. If you win 30% of the votes in a state, split evenly such that you get 30% of the votes for each district, and someone else gets the rest, you don’t get 30% of the seats or 30% of the power, you get zero, because you were the loser for each of those seats, and it’s winner take all. Thus, any time you have two parties with similar ideas, it is in their interest to combine to form one party to get a higher chance of winning the most votes in a given district, and this process continues until every party of note has consolidated into one of two camps. Those two camps don’t consolidate with eachother because they represent views too different to tolerate, and anyone else must join the closest one in order to have a shot of actually winning (unless the election is local enough that personal connections can get you a majority in spite of this, which is why third parties tend to do better at local elections than national ones).
Now, there are going to be some parties left out of this, either those that idealize having more parties to the point of retaining independence at the cost of any chance to actually win at most levels, or those so different from the major ones that they just can’t fit with either. The fact that the two party system isn’t really originally intended means they still are allowed on the ballot and everything. But since most people voting care about their choice having a hope of winning, it makes pragmatic sense to not vote for them unless the election is very local in scale and you can organize enough people. Thus, only two effective choices even if more are technically on the list.
In some sense, you can say the two major parties basically are like the coalition governments you get in other countries, it’s just they’re stuck together despite not really liking it, they don’t have independent enough identities that they could easily split up and recombine into new ones, at best they could leave and watch their voters stay behind with the old party, becoming irrelevant, and at worst they could sabotage the side closest to them and ensure they get even less power than otherwise. This is why the democrats have such a wide difference in ideals between more conservative and progressive candidates, and the republicans have both “small government” people and “ban everything I don’t like” authoritarian types in one party, they’re both basically political coalitions stuck together with super glue that have to just go along with whatever most voters in their bloc do or else lose.
It is not poor design. The system is working as intended. Unless you are a white male landowner you were never supposed to have a vote and slave states were supposed to be buffered against popular will, per this restriction.
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Do Americans not understand the concept of a political alliance
We do, that’s just now how our system works…?
To add, our two major parties tend to adopt (to varying degrees of commitment) popular movements so they’re effectively already coalitions.
For example, Republicans tend to have Christian evangelicals and business interests.
For example, Republicans tend to have Christian evangelicals and business interests.
Yeah.
But at least the Christian evangelicals’ shareholders keep them so accountable to their core values that the desires of the mostly unorganized pastors leading the business owners have no meaningful say in the outcomes. (This is Sarcasm)
Yes, but we make those alliances before the election, sometimes even before the party primaries. Both big parties are coalitions of aligned factions.
and we’ve been trying for decades to reform our system for a better voting system. first past the post elections force strategic voting. that’s the kind of elections we get. the only place where vote shares matter is for distributing public campaign finance funds.
To maybe add some more detail; I live in Massachusetts. My vote basically does not count. At all. Because my state will vote blue by a landslide, no matter what. And since that is basic political knowledge to everyone, how Massachusetts votes isn’t even part of anyone’s calculus for National elections. The only states that matter here are the “purple” or swing states, where it’s uncertain. They literally decide the election. I actually voted for Gary Johnson back in 2016 (because I did not understand Libertarianism at all back then (but of course I thought I did)), but I was safe in the knowledge that not only would Gary Johnson not win, but my state’s elector’s were literally guaranteed to go to Hillary. So I voiced my minuscule bit of discontent, knowing I was absolutely not helping Trump in any way. My comments do require some background understanding of the toxic burn pit that is the Electoral College, so give a shout if you have any questions.
Sometimes a “3rd party” candidate will drop out of the race and endorse one oh the “big two” (see RFK Jr. for example) or they will remain in the race and “secretly” act as a “spoiler” to siphon votes away from their ally’s opponent.
There’s no “form a stable government” step in the US. A party with 30% of the vote can take the whole thing. The US government is already stable, it is owned by the capitalists and staffed by bureaucrats and Dem/GOP politicians. They compete to haggle over which ruling class strategy for profit maximization is best.
You are correct that there is a bargaining chip aspect, though. But that is a level of electoral calculus far beyond people that think political power is a trolley problem based on a meme.
The existence of other candidates is not the same thing as any of them having the slimmest chance in hell of winning, and the way our cursed voting system works, they’re going to end up drawing votes away from the “major” candidate that most closely aligns with them. As a result, the “major” candidate they most oppose has one less vote they need to overcome. That means that until and unless a 3rd party candidate manages to completely overshadow one of the major political parties, which is effectively never going to happen, a 3rd party vote is just one more vote your most opposed candidate doesn’t need to beat.
And no, 3rd parties are not going to overshadow the major parties. It’s just not going to happen. Look at the absolute dogshit circus that is Trump, look at how many lifelong Republicans have vowed to never vote for him, how he’s absolutely obliterated any little shred of legitimacy the GOP had as a governing party. Now recognize that with that utterly weakened, vulnerable position, that best chance ever, no 3rd party has managed to even come close to unseating them as one of the inevitable 2 contenders. If it hasn’t happened now, it won’t happen ever, not with FPTP voting.
yep. ranked choice and removing party affiliation from ballots would go a long way to help this
so there is a solution. too bad no politicians will touch it because it would hinder their golden ‘2 party stranglehold’ goose
Thankfully we can bypass the politicians and implement a better voting system via citizen ballot initiatives in most states. Maine and Alaska have already adopted ranked choice voting via ballot initiatives.
That means that until and unless a 3rd party candidate manages to completely overshadow one of the major political parties, which is effectively never going to happen,
It could happen sometimes, although it’s admittedly rare. Maine has an independent senator, Nebraska has an independent senator who’s running a strikingly close race against the Republican. In Alaska a couple of years ago the same thing happened although the independent didn’t win. I think Jesse Ventura was an independent in Minnesota. But they are one-off cases and not a systematically viable across the whole system.
Alaska has Ranked Choice voting.
Because legally there are more choices, but really, there are only two.
The neat part is that in most states, there isn’t a choice at all!
because thats the lived reality of how the us political system works right now. the actual options may not be great. telling my gay friends their marriage may need to stop existing all together for little bit, so I can pretend I took a stand against the system with a socialist party vote is some childish nonsense. yes we need systemic change. thats a conversation with receptive people who need to be in positions to do something in the first place. its that or 3rd parties take themselves seriously and focus locally. in my area there a man dress as a fucking pirate every cycle for the socialist party. its him or a democrat, those are the options on the left. we can play make believe hypotheticals or start having actual discussions about this shit next month. this is not that moment, that moment was 3 years ago but it required effort. this is act with empathy or throw a temper tantrum time.
You have other choices, yes, but it’s always going to be either the Democrat or the Republican that wins.
Like here in the UK, smaller parties get media coverage more so than in the US, but it’s still always going to be either Labour or the Conservatives that are forming a government, so they get the most coverage.
So people on the internet can get mad that you didn’t vote how they wanted instead of getting mad at you for not voting.
We like to pretend it’s a democracy.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo&pp=ygUZY2dwIGdyZXkgdHdvIHBhcnR5IHN5c3RlbQ%3D%3D This, plus we also have this thing called the electoral college that makes the problem even worse.
It’s not terribly difficult to get on the ballot. But each state has their own requirement so the third party candidates you see may not be on every ballot nation wide.
It’s not just the media that promotes the two candidates. It’s the billionaires and corporations who invest the most money in promoting someone they find favorable to their interests. Given the bankroll surrounding these two parties, the media really don’t have much choice but to reflect their advertising efforts.
In the US, we have what’s called first past the post elections. That essentially means the first person the get the most votes wins. In this case, it’s electoral votes, not individual votes.
Had the US had something like ranked choice voting or star voting in general elections, third party candidates would be given much more attention.
Given the voting system we have, we mostly vote in a manner that prevents the election of the most popular candidate we don’t like.
Honest Answer: Legal requirements.
Local offices have more competition.
The news media are for-profit. They are selling you entertainment masquerading as information. In this endeavor, they focus on two major things:
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Ratings, really just how they can make money through ad revenue.
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Branding and access. Every news media outlet projects an “angle” or “style” meant to be appealing to a subset of the “market”.
What they are covering is party duopoly horse race politics. Others have said that one of the two parties winning is a foregone conclusion, but they have not considered their own participation in this “inevitability”, nor how the media does its part to ensure it. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, really just a means of control and self-disempowerment that is only maintained by political miseducation. And this is before we get to the misconception that political power and engagement is simply how you vote.
The horse race politics aspect serves both of news media’s main interests. It gets ratings from the couch-dwelling partisans who get to feel like they are watching a battle between their good side and the other evil side. And often from a brand that confirms that they are the good side of good people. To do this most effectively they need access, they need entertaining figures representing the party duopoly. When they spend time on third parties they either slot it into this framework so that representatives of the duopoly can share their PR strategy against them or they are very short pieces for color (this is rare).
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Keeps the illusion alive.
