America’s system of electing presidents is responsible for there being two major political parties, and increasing polarization of Republicans and Democrats — who virtually hate each other now — has brought that system to the verge of collapse, writes Lee Drutman, a political scientist, in a Foreign Policy article here. (Read his C.V. here.) Drutman also has written a book on the topic, referenced at the end of his article.
Drutman’s FP article traces the coming and going of political parties since the founding of the Republic, and it’s worth reading just for that succinct history.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact or NPVIC (read about it here) would alter the electoral system by, in effect, replacing the Electoral College (which would still exist on paper) with a national popular vote. It does this without amending the Constitution, an impossible hurdle, by means of states with a majority of electoral votes agreeing to cast their electoral votes for the popular vote winner. This would make our presidential elections more majoritarian, but wouldn’t change the two-party system. (Or would it? More below.)
(Because the Constitution lets states decide how to choose their presidential electors, and interstate compacts are fairly common, there’s no obvious reason why the scheme would be unconstitutional, but Supreme Court conservatives might find a way to strike it down in order to preserve the advantage that smaller states enjoy in electing presidents.)
Drutman’s reforms go much farther than the NPVIC. He advocates “ranked-choice voting with multimember districts,” a system that “would support more parties, breaking the binary partisan dynamics driving gridlock, extremism, and breakdown,” and “allow new, more flexible coalitions” than the existing two-party system.
That may be so, but I haven’t read his book or studied the idea, so I don’t have a well-formed opinion about how well it would work in practice. My gut reaction is that splitting up the two major parties — each a coalition of voting blocs and interest groups — into multiple parties would balkanize American politics and increase, rather than decrease, the impact of special interests and lobbying on our politics.
His reforms are unlikely to be adopted. But here’s an interesting question. If he’s right that the Electoral College system created the two-party system, then if NPVIC were to be adopted, and effectively neutralized the Electoral College system, wouldn’t that also end the two-party system? This depends on whether there’s actually a cause-and-effect relationship as he describes, and I’m not sure there is.
In any case, when looking at the big picture, keep in mind what the purpose of politics is. I believe it was Sam Rayburn who said, “Politics determines who gets how much of what,” or words to that effect. In other words, politics is a mediating mechanism in society. Von Clausewitz, in his classic book “On War,” argued that “war is politics by other means,” but that bromide has been criticized by scholars, and likely is too simplistic. Politics, however, does function as an alternative to violence as a mechanism for resolving competition and conflict within a society, and American democracy has a history of being quite rowdy at times.
With that purpose in mind, we probably can’t reduce the divisiveness of today’s politics as long as the issues themselves are contentious, so I question whether breaking up the two major parties into multiple parties would do much to resolve our current political conflicts. Regardless of how many parties we have, our political system has to work through those issues, and there are no shortcuts or easy solutions. We can, however, try to restore civility to the process.
The Supreme Court ruling in Chiafalo vs Washington contains a warning on the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. There are multiple references to electors casting their vote according to the candidate whom the states voters have voted for. The compact would not survive a court challenge. This most current decision was a 9 to 0 decision so there is an obvious reason the scheme is unconstitutional from judges of the right and left. Such a scheme requires ammending the constitution.
There is no reason but one that we have a two party system, and that is both major parties are big tent parties and both welcome anyone. They are two tiered, and there are shaker and movers at both levels (state and federal) state parties of which there are 102 each have considerable power in each state. And both parties do what is in their best interest which largely shuts down any significant third party. Parties do die here and are replaced. Sometimes a third party arrives on the scene and hams it up for an election or two, but then is merged into one of the parties. The KKK in the 1920s was a major party for a decade, but its primary issue was adopted with laws vastly restricting immigration, and internal corruption and the stealing from the parties coffers ended the movement, with true believers becoming silver shirts.
The real reason we don’t have more parties may simply be geography. There are states with strong independents and a fair number serving at state and local, but to have strong coalitions in Congress may well drive the strong two party system, not allowing independents or third party much of a platform. Even in times of strong regional parties and politicians the tendency is for the big tents to gloss over these factions.
And Americans really like being winners and jumping onto the winners victory float.
One time when regional differences brought about four regional parties was the election of 1860, and it begat the civil war.
Your personal opinion isn’t the law, it’s the wishful thinking of a layman colored by partisanship. Chiafalo isn’t about NPVIC’s constitutionality, and no lawyer would interpret dicta as a “warning”; the Supreme Court doesn’t issue warnings. It scrupulously avoids commenting on issues that might come before the Court in the future. Fwiw, Chiafalo says each state can appoint its electors “in whatever way it likes,” but if NPVIC is adopted and the Court decides its constitutionality, it could go either way. The main issues are summarized in Wikipedia’s article about NPVIC.