The two-party system, even though discouraged by the Founding Fathers themselves, came to be the predominant system here, because of the way elections work. In an election, the winner takes all and the loser loses everything, because there is only one winner, we divide ourselves into two teams because that is our best chance of winning. You have to try to include everyone possible or you lose your chance of winning. It's a bad system because it forces you to compromise on your values to try and get a candidate who at least shares something with you. The worst part about this that its not even majority vote, its plurality. Plurality is when you have the most votes out of all the candidates, not more than 50%. This is shown in the Republican primaries where Donald Trump did not get the majority of votes, but rather 45%. He had more than any other candidate, but not the majority of Republicans. As a result, a lot of people were forced to endorse a candidate they didn't like simply out of hate for the opposing party. Some might be saying, "well 45% is a lot he sounds like he was pretty popular, and just cause they didn't vote for him doesn't mean they didn't like him". While yes that is true, there are other indicators that a majority of Republicans didn't like Trump, such as the various other candidates bashing Trump as a crazy and opposing him, until he won the primaries that is. Trump won the primaries simply because the rest of the votes were split between other candidates
The other problem with the two-party system is that it creates parties that are too big. The Democratic party is a huge party because they need to be all-inclusive to get the votes they need to win literally anything. The way that the votes among states are spread out means that Democrats need to get large amounts of people to vote for them because the Republicans already have a big advantage. It causes the party to just stick to vague promises and almost no chance of actually pushing issues that you want because they're too busy trying to appease everyone. It makes the party really unorganized and kind of patched together. They can't make their own party because then they would have no chance of winning anything. Once again, this whole system is perpetuated by the us against them mentality, which an effect of the winner takes all elections.
Is there any hope to fix this? Maybe. One way to address this issue is by ranked-choice voting. Ranked-choice voting is when you vote for several candidates by order of rank. Your first pick would be the one you like most. When tallying the votes whoever has more than 50% wins, if no one has majority, then remove the lowest voted for candidate, count the secondary vote of all the people who voted for him and then see who has majority, continue until someone has a majority. This kind of voting would have likely prevented Trump from winning the primaries and actual presidential election. This kind of voting would also remove the need for mega-parties as your vote is no longer wasted if you didn't vote for the guy closes to beating the one you don't like, as he would be your second vote. It would also allow for the growth of third parties for that same reason. Obviously, this isn't the only or best solution, but I think it works better than what we have now. What about you, do you think things are fine as they are? Maybe you can think of a better solution? Post a comment and let us all know. Sorry this was long but I needed to show the drawbacks of the two-party system entirely, and not just for one side.
Hi Sebastian !
ReplyDeleteI think the idea of a ranked choice voting is great. It would encourage people to compare and really think deeply about each candidate versus another. In addition, I think this sort of voting would give other lesser known names a chance since they'd be considered more, bringing fresh and new ideas to help our country.