In my country it’s common for parties to splinter if a popular leader doesn’t get what he wants. It is possible for them to overshadow their former party, and even if they don’t, they prefer to occupy their own niche rather than play second fiddle in a bigger org. I’ve been following US politics for some time, and I wonder why your politicians never do this, instead you guys keep trying every 4 years to get the party to move in a different direction. AFAIK your law does allow it (?). Is there some other significant hurdle to it? One would think that in a presidential system where votes are effectively cast in the name the guy (as opposed to the party), this should be easier.
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Because they’d lose.
No one in America wants coalition government. Our two main parties are coalitions in all but name already.
They can, but the two main parties are so powerful and financially backed that it’s virtually impossible to beat them.
It doesn’t work like that here. If anything the smaller parties are just there to give ideas to the democrats and republicans. Honestly the more you think about it Americans are divided into those two parties so anything else wouldn’t work for a politician.
Because then the oppositon party remains united while the new party and the candidate’s old party have their votes split, so their side loses to the opposition. Look up the 1912 election. Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, runs with his own new party, the Progressive Party, AKA the Bull Moose party, against William Hpward Taft’s Republicans and both lose to Woodrow Wilson’s Democrats in a landslide.
Donald Trump has.
The reason is first past the post voting, which naturally leads to two parties. Think about it: if the new party takes voters away from one of the major parties, their rivals automatically win.
Basically every time a politician splits off from the party to create there own for president elections, they end up splitting the vote that could have taken the election if they were together.
Woodrow Wilson the worst president in our history won the election because Teddy Roosevelt created Bull moose party.
Starting a party is allowed, however we have a plurality voting system, not a majority voting system. Because of that, third parties rarely win if ever.
But they have though. Google Ross Perot.
**Never** isn’t true. Andrew Yang started the Moving Forward Party.
Ross Perot started the Reform Party
I’m sure others have done the same.
Our first-past-the-pole voting system makes more than 2 parties almost mathematically impossible. Each party ends up having to be made up of coalitions living in compromise with each other. It makes for some very strange bed fellows sometimes.
Some do, but those parties usually don’t win at this point.
The two major parties are so entrenched in our system, it would be like removing an inoperable cancer. Other parties have such major obstacles to overcome that are nearly impossible. In PA, the Democrats and Republicans actually worked together to pass legislation that makes in incredibly difficult for third parties to run.
Also, Democrats and Republicans have major corporations and other politicians financially backing their campaigns. It also doesn’t help that the media likes to pretend other parties don’t exist. There’s so much fear mongering around election season with the ever popular “If you don’t vote for me, the guy that’s worse will win,” which discourages voters to support anyone that’s not a Democrat or Republican. I’m fully convinced both parties offer the worst of the worst just to keep using that strategy.
There’s also general ignorance revolving around third parties stemming from reasons I’ve mentioned above.
Have you not heard of the Libertarian Party or the Green Party? Both have fronted presidential candidates and both have won lower offices.
It’s only a *de facto* “two party system” – you can, and people do, form new parties, or run as an independent, unaffiliated with either party.
The way our election system is set up, all this would accomplish is taking votes away from the main party that is most similar to them. They’d hurt their cause by making whichever party they dislike the most more likely to win. It’s why some people support election reform. Other election systems make it easier to establish a minor party without the spoiler effect.
Hey Trump!
In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt did just that after losing the Republican nomination. He chose to run with the Progressive Party, which became nicknamed the Bull Moose Party. Here were the election results:
https://preview.redd.it/8onrxj2ztp4a1.jpeg?width=958&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5648863bbc1982132e80a90081840f306487c73b
This graph makes it look like Wilson was popular, but he honestly wasn’t really. Woodrow Wilson won the election with only 41% of the popular vote, but still won an electoral college landslide with 40/48 states and 435/531 electoral votes. To be fair, it’s entirely possible to say that the Republicans might still have lost if Teddy didn’t run 3rd party, but it’s not likely. In the popular vote and in the electoral college, Wilson swept not because he was the most popular candidate, but because the Republican ticket was split between two candidates. This would also be the best showing for any third party candidate since Abraham Lincoln (Who, funny enough, was running with the Republican Party in 1860).
Basically, American politics work as a state-by-state, winner-takes-all race. If you don’t win, you lose. With multiple parties, it isn’t like you’re just choosing a party you like, it’s like you’re choosing an alternative to another party. Thus, voting for a third party means you’re throwing your vote away. Plus, America doesn’t have ranked choice voting, so third parties basically just show up, appeal to voters from one party, and steal the votes because they can’t transfer to another when they lose.
Money. Major parties get federal funding. 3rd parties need like 18% of popular vote to get this funding for the next election. Ross Perot was the only 3rd party candidate to do that
Worth noting Bernie Sanders is an Independent and consistently elected as such. But that pretty much only works in Vermont and Maine, fir different reasons.
We do have politicians who start their own parties or join third parties. Its just they usually drift into irrelevance when they do so.
There are institutional differences between the US and most European systems given the US is a presidential republic versus a parliamentarian one. The structure of parliamentarian systems lend themselves to multiple parties. Even the smallest party can hope to one day be a part of a power sharing agreement to get some of their policies passed. The US system lends itself to two parties with multiple factions within each party given the winner-take-all nature of each individual election. There are some movements toward a ranked choice model in the US that could disrupt these factors, but the Democrat and Republican party have strangleholds on national fundraising that probably will limit the impact of ranked choice voting forming more parties.
What you’re describing has been attempted a few times and mostly resulted in failure. Theodore Roosevelt lost the Republican nomination in 1912 and decided to form his own Bull Moose party. He beat out Taft’s share of the popular vote (27% to 23%) but lost the election to Wilson. Ross Perot attempted this in the 1992 election, spent $60 million dollars of his own money, and only got 20% of the popular vote and zero electoral votes. Andrew Jackson split from the Democrat-Republican party in 1828 and won the election, but at the time, the Democrat-Republican party was the only significant party since the Federalists had collapsed, so he effectively was forming a second party.
Ultimately, our system’s institutions lend themselves to a two party system, and actors who attempt to challenge the current system tend to fail given the advantages the current parties have with pre-existing network of donors and institutional knowledge. And anyone who ran against their own party would be splitting the vote and handing the election to the opposing party. It’s a lot easier for popular politicians to remain inside their party and form a caucus to advocate for their policies and leverage their votes to get their way. This is why you hear stories about the progressive wing of the Democrats refusing to vote on a bill unless certain items are included or excluded. Or how the Freedom Caucus refuses to go along with certain Republican bills.
> One would think that in a presidential system where votes are effectively cast in the name the guy (as opposed to the party), this should be easier.
This is exactly why it DOESN’T happen. In a parliamentary system, you can have no parties with a majority, and the smaller parties can join with one of the larger parties to get over that line. In our system, whoever gets the most votes for president wins, even if it’s less than 50%. As others have pointed out, this almost always leads to vote splitting and the diametrically opposed party winning.
That doesn’t mean it never happens, there have been 3 or 4 times in history where a new party was created and was successful, but either it quickly flames out or one of the old parties fades and we’re back to two major parties. The most recent time this happened was the creation of the Republicans around the civil war (pretty sure that’s the most recent, definitely the most recent time the new party was the one that stuck).
There are third parties even today, but you never hear about them because they never have a real chance to win, and since it’s winner-take-all if you don’t win you get nothing.
The further down you go, the more likely it is that a third party can win. There are two members of the senate that have no official party (although they’re both basically democrats). I’m sure there are some people in the house too. Once you get down to local government in rural areas, the parties might barely matter at all. Also, I think I remember that there’s a state in the Midwest where Republicans have been replaced by another party at the local level (something with farmer in the name?).
Because we have first-past-the-post voting and without significant amounts of campaign funding coming from PACs and the party itself it’s virtually impossible to actually win an election on a large stage.
Look up the 1912 election.
That’s the reason.
it’s harder to gain supporters that way because so many americans use the main two parties. I say i’m independent (don’t associate with a party) and people have actually got mad at me over that, and are confused usually. it’s very frustrating lol
Because the system is set up (rigged) to be a two party system and any third party has an extremely steep mountain to climb to stand any chance of winning a national election. 3rd party candidates sometimes win local elections and maybe even the occasional statewide election, but not at the national level. There’s a pretty strong view of most of the voting population that a vote for a 3rd party candidate is a wasted vote and ultimately ends up being a vote for the guy you probably really don’t want to win.
The last somewhat successful 3rd party presidential candidate was Ross Perot back in 1992. He managed to get close to 20% of the popular vote, but didn’t win a single state. I was young enough at the time that I don’t know how much he influenced Clinton winning, but I’d hazard a guess that he pulled a lot of his support from people who would’ve otherwise voted for Bush.
I think the last 3rd party presidential candidate to get that much of the vote was Teddy Rosevelt in 1912 (which handed Wilson the win over Taft.)