Opinion | Breaking the Two-Party System

We are not a two-party system in America by accident. We are a two-party system in America by structure. And proportional representation, at least at the House level, might break that structure. So why is proportional representation friendlier to a multi-party system. Why would it break the two-party system compared to what we have now. Well, the reason we have the two-party system is not because Americans want just two parties. And you see, in poll after poll, Americans say, I’d like to have more choices, but the structure of single-winner elections is such that third parties become spoilers and wasted votes. So all of the energy concentrates in both of the major parties, because they essentially have a monopoly on opposition to each other, and there’s a lot of pressure to join one of the two teams. We also have a primary system, the primaries, where if you’re a dissenter, it’s better to run as a Democrat or a Republican. Like Bernie Sanders could have run as a third party. He’s not even a Democrat, but he’s going to run in the Democratic primary. Donald Trump ran as a Reform Party candidate the first time he ran for president. Then he realized, I can run as a Republican and I can control the Republican Party if I win. So under a proportional system, you don’t need to get 51 percent of the vote to represent a district. If it’s a five-member district, 20 percent. – And that allows —— – Would give you a seat. – Would give you a seat. And —— – So you could have a situation where you have the Republicans winning most votes, Democrats coming in second and a third party coming in third, and the third party has a seat in Congress as opposed to just made the Democrats lose. Right, exactly. You could, in theory, have five different parties winning a seat in a five-member district. So Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination in 2016. There is at that time, a fairly large faction of Republican voters who are dissatisfied with that choice. But, really, they are then offered a choice between, particularly at the House level, voting for Republicans, which is their party, or voting for the Democrats, on whom they disagree with on everything. Now, you could have imagined a Conservative Party emerging saying, “We’re the real conservatives. And we hold traditional Republican Party views on a bunch of different issues. And vote for us at the House level. And we’ll represent you in Congress and work with Republicans and Democrats as needed.” The issue right now is to vote for that party would be – to throw your vote away —— – Exactly. Even if it did really well, if it got 10 percent or 15 percent in, say, Utah, it wouldn’t get any representation. And it might have just made Democrats you really disagree with win the election. But the theory now is that new parties could emerge because getting 20 percent of the vote somewhere is actually enough to begin building a party and have power and maybe get 30 percent next time. And it creates this different dimension of possibility. Yeah. That’s exactly right. But it’s even worse than that. It’s not that you’re throwing away your vote. It’s that that party, you don’t even have the choice of voting for that party, because that party doesn’t exist. Because nobody’s organizing that party, because they know that it is a fool’s errand under our current system.