I used to think this but seeing how the French elections turned out vs the recent primaries I’m having doubts that having more parties will give us better elected officials.

26 comments

  1. I guess it’s just my opinion but i think it would only bc I don’t like voting between 2 things. It’s so little to choose from. I vote democrat because I’m not gonna vote republican and yeah theoretically I could vote green party or something else more left but I know it won’t win and in this day and age it feels like i need to vote democrat just so my basic rights are still in place u know what i mean and sure u can argue voting is frivolous and activism does the real change but im still not going to just NOT vote you know what I mean idk

    I would like more viable extra parties. I think a lot of Americans are not 100% democrat or 100% republican and we would see a lot of benefits if that was represented in my OPINION

  3. Sure, if those parties had values that enough people would support. We have multiple other parties, but they don’t have the same exposure and most people don’t agree with most of their viewpoints.

  4. It isn’t really a conversation worth having at this point? What would these parties even be? Say we tomorrow had 7 parties, what would they consist of?

    It is also worth noting that a lot of the time in European countries, these 8 parties or whatever are all largely the same. They still break it down to liberal and conservative. They are just basically wings of those parties. The two parties we have already have wings. You have Liberals, leftists, socialists, far right, conservative, centrists.

  5. If we subdivided American politics into 50-odd parties, they would in a few months coalesce into two broad coalitions that looked more or less like Republicans and Democrats.

  6. More parties would be fine if we had ranked choice (or similar) voting instead of first past the post. Right now voting for a 3rd party is effectively throwing your vote away.

  7. It would probably make the house a bigger mess than it already is (they’d never be able to decide on a speaker) the senate would probably be more of the same.

    It wouldn’t really work on the presidential level either considering the electoral college.

    We need an alternative to our current two party system but we’d have to pass other reforms first to make it work. Ranked choice voting and national popular vote being the two biggest I think.

  10. Odds are it would just end up as two coalitions that broadly mirror the current political landscape.

  12. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again:

    Our parties are more like other countries’ coalitions. Our parties are much bigger tents with a ton more infighting and differences in opinion.

    Joe Manchin and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are in the same party. Mitt Romney and Marjorie Taylor-Greene are in the same party. That would be unthinkable in many other countries. In different parties in coalition with one another, though? That they’d believe.

  13. I’ll ask a better question, OP. What views do you want represented in American politics that are not currently represented?

    Before you talk about adding parties or changing electoral systems, ask yourself that question. Adding parties for their own sake will just have them coalesce back into 2 major ones over time, like we have now.

    So what would new parties do that the current ones don’t?

  15. Improve how? What’s wrong with elections that needs to be improved?

  16. The US is only two parties. On both sides crazy people. Don’t be a joiner. Think for yourself

  17. No. Either you have big tent parties within which members have to cooperate and compromise, or you have multiple smaller parties which have to form coalitions to get anything done.

  18. Things will improve before we have more parties in power, because we’ve set up a situation where it’s basically impossible for a third party to gain any meaningful amount of power.

  20. No not really. As long as there are seats, and only one person can win them, we will rabidly give up even democracy to achieve our immediate goals. Because loosing means no power and winning means everything.

  22. Elections for our various legislatures, possibly. Not entirely sure about the various executives.

    Thing is, the solution isn’t as simple as “so start more parties.” We got lots of parties, we’ve got the Green party and the Rent Is 2 Damn High party. There’s only two that really matter though, and to have any hope of election (or getting anything done once elected) an independent or 3rd party candidate pretty much has to choose one of the two actual parties to stand next to. Trying to replace one of the two established parties with another one is a bit like trying to tip a freight train over lengthwise, it’s the hardest of hard ways to get the job done.

    The problem is written right on the ballot: “You may vote for ONE.” In most states, the algorithm for tallying a vote is voters mark the candidate they want to win the race, and then they count how many votes each candidate got, and the candidate with the most votes wins. So simple it’ll never work. The more candidates there are, the more likely it is that the majority of the people will want someone other than who wins the race. If it’s 30%, 30% and 40%, only 40% of the people want the guy who won.

    Say you’ve got a district with a slight R majority, maybe 52% to 48%. Then a libertarian candidate runs. Ls are closer to Rs than Ds, so the majority of the voters the L candidate draws would have voted for R. So instead of 52%R, 48%D, now it’s 48%D, 47%R, 5%L. By voting for the candidate they actually prefer, the small party voters hand the election to the candidate they least want. This is called the spoiler effect, and it’s the main force that keeps small parties out of the running. To get at least some of what they want, voters have to vote for who they think can win, rather than who they really want.

    Alternative voting systems like ranked choice can mitigate or eliminate this problem, but it’s not likely because the politicians currently in office probably need the current voting system as-is to remain in office, and there’s a huge mass of inertia in the form of sports team voters who vote for the party they “belong” to even when that party directly runs against their personal values. “I’m in favor of gun control and women’s right to choose, but I vote R because my daddy voted R so that’s that, can’t be helped.”

  24. My problem is that I like some of the ideals of the smaller parties, like the Libertarians, but they just take everything too far and have deal-breakers. So, I feel like it would be nice to get some of their ideas into the discussion, but I fear that what I’d actually get is all of their horrible policies and none of the ones I like.

  25. It might do. I’m kind of impressed with the voting systems in some countries where you can rank your parties of preference in order and they sometimes have to team up with other minority parties in order to form a majority in order to govern.

    Like, I don’t like the ‘green’ parties generally, but I do think they have the occasional good idea, so if there’s 10 parties listed and I can rank them #5 or something, that’s not too bad.

    Perhaps they get a seat on the government and can interject some of their ideas, that’s what I’d like to see.

  26. What’s so wrong with the French system and how it turned out? It narrows down to 2 parties in a second round of the election anyway.

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