But with three major parties in a system like ours, a winner could seize the entire office with only 34 percent of the vote; with 4 parties the winner could carry only 26 percent of the vote. With such weak popular support, a minority-run non-coalition government like that would be in constant crisis.
When James Madison and Alexander Hamilton took on the job of trying to sell our new democracy in October 1787 with a yearlong series of newspaper articles we now call "The Federalist Papers," they knew they had to confront this terrible problem.
They were haunted by what's called "first-past-the-post winner-take-all" elections - majority rule - meaning that, in practical terms, there could only be two political parties.
They were so horrified by this realization that Madison devoted the entirety of Federalist 10 to begging Americans not to empower factions or embrace political parties, as I quoted at length in my March 21, 2022 rant Is America Facing the "Doom Loop" of Democracy?and Dan Sisson and I devote several chapters to in The American Revolution of 1800.
In the first of their series, Federalist 1, Hamilton writes:
"Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives not more laudable than these" are typical of the "intolerant spirit which has, at all times, characterized political parties."
Thomas Paine, writing from Paris in 1795, laid it out clearly six years after our Constitution was adopted and modern America was birthed:
"[F]or it is the nature and intention of a constitution to prevent governing by party, by establishing a common principle that shall limit " the power and impulse of party, and that says to all parties, thus far shalt thou go and no further." [emphasis Paine's]
They all saw this as a fatal flaw in the republic they'd birthed: there could only be two political parties of any consequence because of the way the election system worked.
Any third party might have an influence for a cycle or two, but ultimately would always pull votes away from one of those two primary parties and increase the chances that the one closest-aligned to the third party would lose.
This is why the Republican Party and partisans aligned with them have repeatedly been busted for funding the Green Party, and Democrats sometimes have tried to boost the fortunes of the Libertarian Party.
Similarly, Republicans have overtly used third-party participation on the left to their advantage in the past. In a Washington Post story titled GOP Figure Behind Greens Offer, N.M. Official Says, Post writer Thomas B. Edsall noted that: "The chairman of the Republican Party of New Mexico said yesterday he was approached by a GOP figure who asked him to offer the state Green Party at least $100,000 to run candidates in two contested congressional districts in an effort to divide the Democratic vote."
It's how Ralph Nader's winning 90,000 votes in Florida in 2000 - even if most of those people wouldn't have voted at all if he hadn't been on the ballot that year, as he asserts to this day (and is, I believe, right) - helped George W. Bush "win" that state, and thus the presidency, by 537 votes. (And why David Cobb, the Green's presidential candidate who followed Nader, didn't campaign in swing states.)
David Koch figured this out when he ran for Vice President on the Libertarian ticket in 1980, pulling about a million votes away from Republicans (Reagan won anyway). His Libertarian efforts helped push Reagan to the right, but he quickly abandoned both the effort and the Party.
It's presumably why he and his brother, after that electoral failure, committed themselves to help build a 50-state infrastructure to build their influence within the Republican Party.
It's what progressives need to do, too, only within the Democratic Party.
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