Is the party over for the two party system?
Will bringing down the two-party system be among President Biden's and former President Trump's most notable achievements?
The two-party system is one of the more unique features of American Democracy, and an outlier among world governments – to the point where in America it is almost synonymous with democracy itself. To many, especially Democrat and Republican elected officials, the two-party system is sacrosanct. Not long ago, former US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for example, called a possible third-party Presidential challenge “perilous to democracy.”
Seriously Nancy? MORE democracy is perilous to democracy?
Why would ANYONE want to be President?
The upstart political party No Labels recently announced they were abandoning their third-party presidential challenge following the recent passing of one of its founders, former US Senator Joe Lieberman, and the decision by current US Senator Joe Manchin, a centrist Democrat, that he would not seek the party’s nomination.
No Label’s CEO, Nancy Jacobson, said in a statement explaining the decision that “The difficulty of attaining ballot access in all 50 states wasn’t it. Neither was the data, which revealed a historic and viable lane for a third-party option. The trouble was that no one was willing to take the hellish job we were offering…”
“Why,” Presidential historian Elizabeth Drew, wondered aloud in a Project Syndicate essay, Would Anyone Want to be President?” We’ll save that for another time.
But that doesn’t mean a third-party challenge is over. Kennedy family scion Robert Kennedy Jr. has been accelerating his efforts to mount an alternative to Biden-Trump, the sequel. Kennedy recently announced that he will be on the presidential ballot in Michigan — a key battleground state. He is already on the ballot in Utah and, according to his campaign, has collected all the necessary signatures to be on the ballot in New Hampshire, Nevada, Hawaii, North Carolina, Idaho, Nebraska, and Iowa.
Is more Democracy perilous to…Democracy?
Back in July 2023 Politico reported that “Democrats are mounting a coordinated mission to kill a third-party presidential bid.” According to Politico, “Officials from the progressive group MoveOn and centrist group Third Way are planning to brief Senate Democratic chiefs of staff,” as “part of an effort to educate Democrats about the risk that a third-party bid funded by the well-heeled group No Labels could pose to President Joe Biden.”
So while Nancy Pelosi, and currently many Democrats, believe that a third-party candidate is “perilous” to democracy, what really worries them is that a third-party is perilous to their candidates, especially President Biden. They equate democracy with the two-party system.
Most Americans disagree.
“Dissatisfaction with two-party politics is at an all-time high,” wrote Washinton Post columnist Christopher Ingraham back in 2021. And according to a recent Gallup poll "Sixty-three percent of U.S. adults currently agree with the statement that the Republican and Democratic parties do 'such a poor job' of representing the American people that 'a third major party is needed…a seven-percentage-point increase from a year ago and is the highest since Gallup first asked the question in 2003."
Disaffection with the major parties is particularly acute among Independents, with Gallup reporting that more than 70% of voters who don't identify as either a Republican or a Democrat believe a new party is needed. Nearly half of Democrats and almost 60% of those identifying as Republicans feel the same.
Four pounds of #### in a two pound bag.
As the Washington Post’s Perry Bacon, Jr. wrote more than a year ago, the “United States right now has four political parties stuffed into a two-party system — and that’s increasingly a big problem for the country.”
the “United States right now has four political parties stuffed into a two-party system — and that’s increasingly a big problem for the country.”
For both Republicans and Democrats, the tail is wagging the dog, as the far-right and far-left are dictating an agenda that belies their numbers.
Many see this as evidence of the waning power of the two major political parties, unable to corral the disparate, and increasingly extreme, factions within. But what explains the rise of the far-right and far-left?
How have the far-left and the far-right come so far?
According to Yale political scientist Ian Shapiro, “It’s due to the role of primaries at the presidential level and the interaction of primaries and safe seats in Congress. Primaries are not new; we’ve had them since the Progressive era. The basic problem with them today is they are usually marked by very low turnout and the people on the fringes of the parties vote disproportionately in them.”
In a 2021 study of the how US voters sort themselves politically, the Pew Research Center found that “U.S. adults who fall on either end of the ideological spectrum are more active than other Americans across several measures of political engagement, from voting to posting about politics on social media to donating to campaigns.”
And as media has been transformed, so have the parties. The party apparatus used to control essential campaign functions -- like fundraising and publicity. With the rise of local television and now the internet and social media, candidates can appeal directly to donors and voters, circumventing the party. In many respects the candidates control the party, not the other way around.
Since more conservative or progressive voters turn out in primaries electing more progressive or more conservative candidates – a small number of voters are increasingly becoming the party. More liberal or more conservative voters are also more likely to post about social or political issues reports the Pew Research Center – creating a feedback loop that amplifies more progressive, or more conservative, messages.
“The consequences of party decline, in short,” according to a Heritage Foundation Report, “have been candidate-centered elections in all of their ugliness, the rise of marketing in political campaigns rather than a focus on serious issues, and gridlock as individual candidates and officeholders have fewer incentives than ever to work with members of a coalition.”
Burning down the House.
What happened to the Republican Party back in October is a perfect example of candidate-centered politics and the decline of party power. It only took eight hard-right Republicans to depose their own party’s Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, and throw the House into chaos for three weeks.
When one of the far-right’s own, Mike Johnson, replaced McCarthy as Speaker, they turned on him too — forcing him to rely on Democratic votes to pass a stopgap funding bill to prevent a federal government shutdown. Just last week Johnson again had to turn to Democrats to pass international aid bills, including funding for Ukraine — funding that many on the far-right oppose. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, the rightest of the right, has threatened to force a vote to dump Johnson, though she hasn’t followed through on her threat just yet.
While he was speaker, McCarthy accused the hard-right Republican faction in the House of wanting to "burn the place down."
All this drama reminded me of something my first boss in politics, a Republican state legislator, muttered one day. “Republicans are like tigers,” he said, “they eat their young.” Except now, it’s the other way around.
A third party as a first option?
Fewer and fewer Americans are identifying as Republican or Democrat, preferring to think of themselves as Independents. “Since 2009, independent identification has grown and reached levels not seen before. Now, political independents (41%) greatly outnumber Republican (28%) and Democratic (28%) identifiers,” reports the survey firm Gallup.
Even within the parties, there is often little agreement on how party acolytes see themselves. In a major 2021 study, the Pew Research Center found that Americans sorted into nine political typology groups, based on their political attitudes and values. “The gulf that separates Republicans and Democrats,” reports Pew, “sometimes obscures the divisions and diversity of views that exist within both partisan coalitions – and the fact that many Americans do not fit easily into either one.”
Let’s disagree to disagree.
“These intraparty disagreements,” continues the Pew report, “present multiple challenges for both parties: They complicate the already difficult task of governing in a divided nation.” To succeed politically, “the parties must maintain the loyalty of highly politically engaged, more ideological voters, while also attracting support among less engaged voters – many of them younger – with weaker partisan ties.”
So, is a third party the answer? Actually, third parties are nothing new.
One of the major criticisms of a third-party Presidential candidacy is that it will likely result in a President who gets less than a majority of the popular vote. There’s certainly nothing new about that – as two Presidential elections since 2000 have been won by the candidate with fewer popular votes. Several Presidents, including Bill Clinton’s first-term, received only a plurality. In a crowded four candidate field, Abraham Lincoln was elected President with only 39% of the popular vote. And yet, democracy lived – thrived even, because of the competition.
Perry Bacon was right – we already have, if not a de-jure, then a de-facto, multi-party system. With the weakening of the national parties and the strengthening of individual politicians and ideologically like-minded caucuses, the national parties are often no longer able to do what they were intended to do, coalesce like-minded voters and bring stability to the political system. Factions within the parties are beginning to look, and work, more like parties themselves.
“Like it or not,” Lee Drutman, author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America, wrote in the Washington Post, “there is simply no way around organized parties in modern mass democracy. Something needs to organize power and arrange policy choices. And political parties are the most effective, transparent, inclusive vehicles for doing this.” But that doesn't mean only two parties – especially when those parties are not “effective, transparent, inclusive vehicles.”
Too crazy for most Democrats and not crazy enough for some Republicans.
Kennedy is polling as high as 20% in when polled against Biden-Trump II. But Kennedy faces two significant obstacles – ballot access and the perception that he’s too crazy for most Democrats, and not crazy enough for some Republicans. On second thought, that doesn’t sound so bad.
While No Labels had high hopes that Manchin, especially after announcing he would not run for re-election to the US Senate, would agree to lead a No Labels ticket, he did tell NBC News back in November that he believed the Democratic Party has “gone too far to the left,” and the Republican Party has gone “too far to the right.”
Seems that many Americans agree.
Maybe the two-party system is already spoiled.
Approval ratings for both Biden and Trump have slumped towards, and below, forty percent. So I'm not sure that forcing voters to choose one, or the other, is any more democratic than a third-party. One of the criticisms of the Kennedy candidacy, particularly among Democrats, is that he will be a “spoiler” — that his candidacy will take away votes from Joe Biden and create a path for the election of Donald Trump.
"If I were a Democrat, I'd vote for RFK Jr. every single time over Biden because he's frankly more in line with Democrats," Trump said in a video recently released by his campaign.
But if talking heads and party leaders want to complain about "spoilers," they might take a moment to reflect on the choice that voters will be faced with if they have to choose between Biden or Trump — a choice many voters are ruing.
These same talking heads and party leaders talk about the legacies their candidates, Trump and Biden, will leave. But their lasting legacy might be the end of the two-party system as we know it. Maybe that’s a good beginning?