It would be nice if it worked that way in Texas. But to maintain GOP control, our districts are gerrymandered into tortured shapes to dilute urban votes, with particular care to split up majority BIPOC areas and cities that have majority democrat voters
I think the first step to moving to a multi-party system is getting rid of all voting restrictions and instituting politically neutral voting map committees in every state. By politically neutral, I mean a mix of GOP and Democrat. No one who takes the time to be on such a committee would be politically neutral. Then ranked-choice voting.
ETA: and some people from outside the GOP and Democratic party
Yes, the roots of US American bigotry come from the colonial era. Almost all of the European powers treated the natives like crap when they came: the Spanish in their claimed territories, the French in theirs despite the myth of France working more with the Algonquin and Micmac than conquering… but none were quite so nasty as the Protestant English, especially the Puritans who took it upon themselves to drive off the heathen savages. From there, the narrative was set, the native nations were considered “primitives” and “savages”.
But really, what makes American electoral systems different from the rest of the world is the way it ignores political parties in its constitution, and I don’t blame the framers back then for choosing to only elect people, not parties. Because then you need to hack out the red tape of what constitutes a party, can more than one party support a candidate on the ballot, and so on. All very messy, so no wonder the oligarchs and idealists decided to skirt the issue.
Maybe I’m too invested in the USA system, but I don’t like the idea of electing parties instead of individuals. That seems to give more power to the party instead of the voters. There are some super shit Democrats and I’d be afraid we’d end up with milquetoast Dems instead of true leftists.
Kinda sorta. I was looking at what could be done without changing the US Constitution, and keeping the principle of each representative having a personal mandate. And it’s not an untested system, elections to the German Bundestag are pretty similar, but also different enough that the Bundestag has both direct candidates, but also party mandates.
What I really think, though, is that a “third party” is something that has to start on the community level, then state, then eventually gain acceptance on the national level as the smaller parties choose who to caucus with. Cities and towns can experiment freely, as some towns have no mayors for example. Why try to change the entire nation at once?
The idea in that case is that the leftists would split off and form their own party, the Greens might get a foothold, the QAnon Qrazies would support the next rich demagogue, and so on.
Right now, the parties are already very strict in controlling their elected members, due to the high cost of running a campaign. It makes it hard for a bipartisan caucus to arise if your party has you by the purse strings.
In a multiple party system, it’s slightly better because although the party still decides who you will caucus with, at least the party is mostly like-minded parliamentarians, and your party is free to choose its coalition partners.
There’s nothing in the Constitution that establishes or protects gerrymandering. If you count amendments, there are several that, in contrast, justify elimination of the practice.
That could be easily dealt with by limiting campaigns to a set budget and time period. If every candidate gets the same amount of money to campaign on, that would go a long way to opening up elections to more candidates from more parties.
I think expectations regarding the role of parties are somewhat different if you are used to a multi-party system. To me, first and foremost it is the parties’ job to present a coherent and credible position and then voters choose between them. I see real value in the work parties do developing those positions and becoming something greater than the sum of their parts.
To be fair, we here in Germany do that only for local (municipal) elections.
For state and federal elections, you generally get two votes – one for a direct candidate in your Wahlkreis (constituency) (one candidate, max, per party) and one for a state-wide party list. Voting for direct candidates is FPTP but (at least in theory) the number of seats that a party actually has in the state or federal parliament is calculated based on proportions of list votes. (The actual method for figuring out the numbers of seats and exactly who gets to occupy them is very complicated, has in its current incarnation at the federal level led to a huge inflation of seats in the Bundestag, and is in urgent need of reform, but the general principle is reasonable.)
Yeah, that’s kind of my larger point - no system is perfect, and the parliamentary system favored by many other countries, aren’t any less problem to real, serious problems. There are certainly structural problems here and in other places - but it’s not the ONLY thing causing these issues, here and abroad. There are other things happening, globally, that is driving a resurgence of the far right… it’s a combination of the chickens coming home to roost on capitalism, imperialism, neo-liberalism, and all the environmental destruction we’ve created during the past 100 or 150 years. People are looking for easy answers for all the problems we face, and it’s far easier to blame some other than it is to look at the system, which is massive, opaque and seems inevitable. At least, “keeping those people out” feels like a solution (or hurting trans people, or banning gay marriage, or ending abortion, or rolling back civil rights, etc), when it’s really not. None of that fixes the underlying problem. Only dealing with the complex set of problems in front of us and working together to solve them will do that… but the people in power continue to push forward these easy narratives, because it gives them power and leverage… just look at what has happened with Musk and Twitter.
I think in America the hard part would be the spending side of things. For private money to become less important it has to become less useful. There are ways to do that, but some of them may be hard to reconcile with American attitudes towards political speech. For example, here in Germany slots for TV and radio campaign ads are alotted to parties based on past results, overrepresenting small parties. All the money in the world won’t buy you an additional campaign ad and if you aren’t a party competing in that election you won’t get any at all. That’s a lot of money that could and probably would be spent but isn’t. But would something like that ever fly in America?
If so, I think it’s a long way off. But that’s no reason not to imagine what solutions might look like. My great-grandmother grew up in a country where women couldn’t even vote. Then, blammo, she could. Because people imagined and worked towards a different way of doing things.
