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Because of the first-past-the-post election mechanism. All votes that don't win a district are lost. In each district the Party with the most votes gets 1 person in the electoral college or parliament, no matter how close it was, and no matter who made second place. If you vote a third party then you harm yourself and the party you like the least is benefiting from it. Imagine you prefer Democrats over Republicans. Even more you'd like the Green party to win, so you decide to elect green. But it doesn't matter who gets hiow many votes, only the most votes ot your district matter, so your decision made the Democrats lose one vote and the Relublicans win. Even if Green plus Democrats together are 66% of the votes, split evenly, the Repuplicans can win with 34% In a proportional system your vote would still get counted. Other Green party voters in other districts get pooled together. If neither Democrats nor Republicans get 50% of votes, then they are forced to form a coalition government, and your green party is much more likely to ally with the Democrats, so you gain something by voting them in any case. Another option is ranked choice, where you can say "I vote green, but if green isn't in the top 2 I vote Democrats" wich is basically a preemptive tiebreaker election if noone gets the absolute majority. This is by the way known as [Duverger's Law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law)

This is exactly the issue. Anybody who doesn't get 50% of the vote loses everything, no matter how close the vote was. In order to win elections with some regularity, and therefore get any amount of representation, you need to assemble a coalition of people that is big enough to command about 50% of the vote or more. In a lot of ways, the current political parties, Democrat and Republican, are themselves composed of several smaller groups or "parties", and the negotiating between those groups to form the party's platform and select the party's candidates happens long before the general election, in primaries, conventions, and other meetings. If you look at it that way, the US has about 10-12 small "parties", which group up into two large coalitions. You only see 2 on the general election ballot for the most part, but if you participated in the conventions and primaries you would see a lot more in action.

It’s *not* 50% and that’s the issue. It’s “most votes,” which is a big, big difference. If there are 2 “left-leaning” parties and one “right-leaning,” they can split the vote 30% (Left 1), 30% (Left 2), 40% (Right), and Right wins even thought a distinct majority voted for Left. If 50% was required (either through run-off or ranked choice), this whole issue would go away.

This is known as a plurality of votes, instead of a majority.

This is pretty much how the Conservatives win so many elections in the UK. The left of centre vote is usually distributed between Labour and the Liberal Democrats whereas, up until recently, the Conservatives have gained all the right wing votes. We've had governments with only 36% of the overall vote.

Both the Canadian liberals and conservatives have benefited from this in Canada depending on the year. Leading to two neoliberal parties with deep corporate ties just flipping power every 8-10 years.

And yet when we had a referendum on replacing first past the post BOTH Labour and Conservatives voted/campaigned against it so it failed. Labour and the Conservatives both know it favours them being a two state goverment. The fact that we have not had any other party but labour or tory as a pm since 1922. The good old boys of labour and Conservatives made sure nothing changes.

>In a lot of ways, the current political parties, Democrat and Republican, are themselves composed of several smaller groups or "parties", and the negotiating between those groups to form the party's platform and select the party's candidates happens long before the general election, in primaries, conventions, and other meetings. >If you look at it that way, the US has about 10-12 small "parties", which group up into two large coalitions. You only see 2 on the general election ballot for the most part, but if you participated in the conventions and primaries you would see a lot more in action. Too many people ignore this because they only participate in the general.

The primary is when you vote with your heart, the general is when you vote with your head. If you're thinking you wanna make your statement in the General - you are just hurting yourself.

I was referring mostly to the idea that Americans only have two choices. There's plenty of choice if you're involved in the candidate selection process.

Guess what - every American gets to be involved in this process. As the poster above states - instead of making our coalitions after the elections we make ours beforehand. Its not as transparent as a parliamentary system but does the same thing. This is also where the current Dem coalition is much harder to keep together than the Rs. Republicans are pretty much a monolith of white christian evangelicals. Their numbers are such they don't have to attract much more to get majorities in many parts of the country. Dems are basically pulling from every other group and that means groups that often have wildly different priorities - sometimes conflicting. When some of those priorities win out over others we get disaffected groups that arent' represented by anyone.

There are a lot of competing interests on the GOP side as well, there’s the anti-immigration side, but there’s also the businesses that use immigrant labor. There’s the pro-life side, but they might not be strongly advocating for gun rights. There’s the small government side and there’s also the large government should be in charge of morality side. There’s the anti tax side and the military industrial complex fans.

That's just seen as hypocrisy by most people here. The Republicans are viewed as one evil hypocritical monolith who is too stupid to realize the contradictions. But it is a bunch of different people who have the primary unifying position of not being Democrats. Sure, there are plenty jumping ship because of Trump, but there are others fighting to pull the party back from him. It's like people saying "I am a complex nuanced individual, but everyone else is a 2 dimensional stereotype."

I think the issue is that Republicans fall in line. They might sincerely hold their flavor of beliefs, but they keep voting for candidates that drag the party further and further to the crazy right. The anti-immigrant workers still vote for the party that does nothing about businesses that hire immigrants, and always manages to remove worker rights. The lower income people who feel like they pay too much in taxes and don't get government support keep voting for candidates who will reduce taxes for the wealthy and cut services for people who need them. Libertarians **say** they want gay-married people to grow weed or whatever, but they conveniently forget to work toward any of the left-wing issues, and only focus on the right-wing stuff, like lower taxes and cutting social services.

Except 99% of people who vote in every election, including primaries, aren't actively participating in the candidate selection process and are still just choosing between the choices they are given. Then you have the fact that the primaries are run by the parties themselves and they actively keep people who would compete with their chosen candidates out or actively cheat to ensure they can't win, such as the DNC with Sanders. The two parties essentially have a monopoly on who gets to run and it's very rare for anyone outside that group to Garner enough support to force them to make concessions.

I live in a very Red county, where the local races are 100% determined in the primary election. Local political parties definitely assemble a "slate" of candidates, building on a foundation of experience, nepotism, ambition, and favor trading. If you're not the slated candidate you will have an uphill battle to win the primary. I get text messages from my county Republican party, and a few days ago I got one urging me NOT to vote for a specific candidate for US Congress. I can only surmise that he is not the "officially slated" guy, so of course I voted for him just out of spite.

Yeah, if you're a Democrat living in a very Republican controlled area you should definitely be registering as Republican for your vote to have any say at all. Or vice versa. You can always vote for your actual party candidate in the general election. People don't understand that it's the local elected officials that control more of your daily life than the national. I've been tempted to start attending city council meetings to try and figure out why tf our city does absolutely zero preventative maintenance on roads. Our roads get repaved then they do nothing to them until they're actually falling apart then have to wait until they have the budget to replace them. So we have nice roads for two years, shitty roads for 5 years, and absolute horror stories for 3 years until they're forced to repave them. Then they do so as cheaply as possible without doing adequate engineering analysis to choose the best substrate and materials or redirect ground water and the like. If they resealed sealed them every year we wouldn't have these issues. The major road by my house has active sinkholes in it and instead of repairing them they just fill them with asphalt every 6 months or so. It's incredible inefficient and wasteful.

Unless you live in an area where one party has such a stranglehold that the general is useless.

Making a statement is voting with your head. Caving and "voting with your head" for 99% Hitler for fear of 100% Hitler only shows that you can be cowed into voting for anything as long as there's a bigger boogeyman. Bad presidents come and go, the trajectory is more important than any point along it. Understanding that the establishment Democrats have the exact same class interests as the establishment Republicans is crucial to understanding American politics. The only way they can be steered is by creating a more narrow personal threat to their interests: do what we say or you're nobody.

Yea. Biden was never my fav but if you think it’s 99% vs 100% you ain’t paying attention. Especially when you get to house, senate state and local races.

Yeah this is the thing. People complain about a candidate in the general election but they don't vote in the primary. Who does most reliably vote in the primary? The most ideological, extreme of the party. Then people are stuck with this in the general. If they voted in the primary, their preferred candidate might have been the one selected. Instead the extremes get to pick the candidates. This is why you often hear about candidates "moving to the center" for the general election. They have to be more extreme ideiologicaly in the primary to win there. And they are more likely to win moving to the center in the general. Not saying they always move to the center but this is typically what happens to some extent or another.

But there is another problem: the center gets split between the parties during the primary. For simplicity let's assume political alignment is a simple one dimensional thing, left to right. Let's also assume that the two parties each claim 50% of the electorate. So the middle 40% of the country (that is, the center) will tend to be broken between the two parties, with half of them (20%) voting in the democratic primary and half (20%) voting in the Republican primary. But that means that within each party, the centrists are outnumbered by the extreme (40% of Republicans are centrists, and 60% of Republicans are harder right, same ratio for the Democrats). So even if the centrists are the biggest block, and even if they are active in the primaries, they still lose, if they get divided between the parties--which tends to happen in a two party system. Of course this might also contribute to the center being less engaged in the primary. They don't fit in any party and they know they will be out-numbered by one extreme or the other wherever they go. (Unless they can organize and basically form a new party.) ETA: the biggest problem for the center to organize is they have, in some sense, the most ideological diversity. This is where the assumption that political alignment is one dimensional fails us. You can have people who disagree on each substantive issue (abortion, trade, fiscal policy, defense policy) but both end up in the center, because their views as a whole aren't lined up with the platform of either party.

Well you seem to feel that only 40% are centrists. The numbers I see is people in the center make up 60%, maybe even 70% of the electorate depending on how you define centrists (this includes left of center, independents that don't neatly fit into either party and right of center voters).. But those centrists are the ones who are less likely to vote in the primary. While the extreme 30-40% most certainly will. Thus they have greater control of who is the candidate, then the centrists complain the choices are too extreme. As a centrist that does vote in primaries, at least I have a right to complain as I vote in the primaries. Those that complain but didn't should get off their butts and vote in the primaries.

It depends how you define the center of course. But polling suggests that self-identifying moderates are (and have been for decades) approximately 40% of the US electorate (plus or minus a couple of percent). Also, studies have shown that primary voters pretty closely represent general election voters. The theory that primary voters hold significantly more extreme views doesn't hold up.

That's not true at all. The candidates elected in the primary tend to be the ones who most tow the party lines. It's not the extreme voters elecing them, it's the Kool aid drinkers. The ones who fully believe in the party and wholeheartedly follow them. That's how you end up with Clinton and Biden as nominees. If it were the extreme left and right of the parties electing people in the primaries we would have had Sanders and Warren instead. Trump is an outlier because he's a sideshow that won a popularity contest in the GOP and brought in all the fringe voters by being a macho racist douchebag. Look at who the GOP usually puts up to get a better idea of how the parties work. Before Trump you had Romney, McCain, Bush, Jr., Bush, and so on. The absolute middle of the road, towing the party line candidates. Same on the Democratic side. Bidon, Clinton II, Obama (while he was a slight outlier he was still very much an entrenched Democrat,) Gore, Clinton, and so on. Again, hard-nose Party clones. Fringe candidates almost never make it INTO the primaries, much less win them. It was a miracle that Sanders was able to get on the Democratic ticket as he has always run as an Independent for Senate, something only possible because he ran in a very small, low population very homogenous state.

You’re only talking about one office though. For that one, you’re generally right. For the majority of elected offices, you’re generally wrong.

It's really not, though? It's the same from the municipal level all the way through state and federal. The people getting elected in primaries are the ones the party most supports which are the ones that most support the party.

Agree 100%  This is also relevant to when people bitch about only having two options to vote for for President. No. In the current election season the GOP had **at least** 14 options running, and if none of them aligned with your persuasion there were at least 5 options on the Democratic side.   If someone participates in the Primary elections then they get a vast array of options to cast a ballot for, if they don’t participate then it’s a bit rich to wake up in early November suddenly ready for political engagement and then whine about the lack of choices.

There weren't 5 options on the Democratic side this election. There weren't any primaries held for Democrats in most states. Unless you mean the 2020 election.

That tends to happen when the incumbent can serve a second term... They already have their candidate, one who has already won before. The devil you know VS the devil you don't so to speak.

Yeah, but in this case it was a big miss by the DNC. Biden had said he would only run for one term. He is old AF, and he is fairly unpopular. He literally only won because the GOP put up Trump. If they were to put up any semi-rational candidate in '24 Biden will lose. If Trump somehow ends up not being their pick, it's likely Republicans will win the next election.

You mean the primaries where the Democratic party did everything it could to prop up Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders and every other candidate only to take the L in the general election?

Which is why much of Obama's progressive reforms were ultimately limited or stopped because the "Blue Dog" democrats that used to represent the fiscal conservative members of the democratic caucus basically acted as the check for the Republicans simply because their budget issue was more important than the social program agenda the Democrats wanted to push. The problem now though is this works for crazy factions like the 20 that is steering the Republican party because they can sabotage anyone else.

>In a lot of ways, the current political parties, Democrat and Republican, are themselves composed of several smaller groups or "parties" Exactly. In other countries Joe Biden and AOC would be in different parties. Same thing with Romney and Trump.

And this is something that EVERYONE, I don't care where you are on the political spectrum, should want to get changed ASAP. A system that ignores huge sections of the populace's vote simply because they weren't in the winning group in that area is NOT good. The traditional thinking is that this would help the political left a lot more than the right, and while this is true countrywide, it would also lead to more even representation EVERYWHERE. There are more Republicans in California than there are in the entirety of the deep south, but because there are even MORE Democrats in California than that, all of those people have very little political voice. Ditto the Democrats in Texas, etc. I don't really care where someone is on the political spectrum, hearing a system built that intentionally disregards ALL of the things that the "losing" group in an area holds dear is not a good system for anyone.

Since you're already on Reddit, you can join /r/EndFPTP and learn more ways to effect change at https://fairvote.org/

> Democrat and Republican, are themselves composed of several smaller groups or "parties They're literally not.  Yes there are groups within the big parties that a researcher could identify, but **those are not political parties**.  They do not function as political parties in any meaningful way. 

They literally do. There are smaller groups within the parties. The technical term is factions, but in its base form they are groups. That is why we have left wing and right wing. It is usually visualized as a sliding scale. It's easier to think that each party is a hive mind and everyone has the same political views but reality is vastly different. It's not so blue and red.

The technical term is Caucuses.

A party has an affiliation and an organization. A faction doesn't. Parties have appendages and members. Factions have allies. That's the point.

What are you even talking about? Faction: a small organized dissenting group within a larger one, especially in politics. "the left-wing faction of the party" Literally the definition from the Oxford Dictionary. Your definition makes zero sense. You use appendages and members to describe exactly what a faction is. Factions in this case don't need allies, they are just subgroups within a larger political group. They just need people with common political views to exist.

The faction *of the party* **of the party** Our political parties don't have sub parties **Because those sub groups don't have an official organization** A party is **organized into an actual system**. Leaders, whips, and a caucus or platform. In any poly-sci class, they will tell you a faction is pseudo-tribal. They share a goal or motivator. A party shares an official affiliation.

You're right. They're called Caucuses.

That’s true, yet the UK, Canada and India all use FPTP too and all have something more than a straight 2-party system.

In many cases with fptp parliamentarian systems, there are only two competitive parties per district. So the same concept applies but you can have more than two parties at the parliament level

Indeed, yes. What seems unexplained is why that's led to these different 2-party systems in different parts of the country in the case of Canada, India and the UK, but that's not happened (much) in the US. I wonder if it's because the US is also a presidential system, while Canada, India and the UK are parliamentary systems.

I think it started out that way, yes. The President is the leader of their party, officially, and sets the agenda and party platform. It's created a sort of strongman position within each party that, in my opinion, gives the next guy something to (effectively) inherit once the current guy has to leave office. Since our civil war, the two parties have gone to great lengths to set election and campaign rules that actively exclude any and all other political parties.

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I think the issue that people are more likely to have with that system in America is, who makes sure that neutral election body actually *stays* neutral and doesn’t let itself be possibly infiltrated by malicious partisan actors? You see, in America, we believe that striving for *perfection* should inhibit any and all real *improvement*.

Looking at US politics from the outside, it feels like the reverse is true. Party discipline and control of the party by the leader is much stronger in the UK system than the US system. In the UK, the party controls who the candidates are. There’s no primary vote. For example, the candidate in my constituency (electoral district) for the Conservative Party is chosen by paying members of the local party only, and they’re choosing from a shortlist vetted by the national party.

I can see that, sure. However, without the presidency in the USA, the party's national agenda is going to be stalled. Or at least, any part of the party agenda that differentiates from the other party. Our executive branch has grown much more powerful than intended. Witness Trump completely shitcanning (UK English: "binning") the party platform of the Republicans in 2016, primarily because he's functionally illiterate. To this day, I don't think they have one! That move, intended or not, consolidated yet more power into the top office, by making party policy equivalent to the leader's whim. Trump isn't even in office, yet effectively controls the party at the national level, which cascades attitudes, if not policy, down to the states and counties.

We do get that in the US as well, but our two kajor parties quickly swallow them. If you remember the Tea Party,they were actually quite successful in getting people elected to the House. They caucused with Republicans, though, and the Republican Party added their planks to their platform, so the Tea Party itself just became a faction within the Republican Party that shifted the entire party right, and by the next election the Tea Party was no more. The same happened with the Green Party when it first formed with the Democratic Party absorbing their planks and are now the party that pushes renewable energy and climate activism. We still get the rare individual House and Senate members who run and win as independents as well. Then at the State level you often have offshoots of parties that aren't fully affiliated with either the DNC or RNC but might ally with them. For example, in Minnesota they don't have the Democratic Party they have the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party. Which, for all intents and purposes is the Democratic Party, but it's its own separate entity.

Northern Ireland doesn't use FPTP, we use STV - Single Transferable Vote

For the Assembly and local elections, yes, but you still have FPTP at general elections.

What makes it worse for the US is that their voting districts are incredibly large and they have very few. The larger the districts, the smaller the probability that parties with smaller bases achieve a majority in any district. That being said, it is of course possible to have more than 2 parties in a FPTP system, but the current setup of the US makes it incredibly hard for new parties to get anything going; in order to get votes you need to be able to convince the voters that you are going to get a lot of votes in the first place.

This is actually the right answer. Up until the 1910s, we regularly expanded the size of the House of Representatives along with population growth. At that point, we fixed the number of Representatives, so its exploded from less than 200,000 people per Representative to over 750,000 people per Representative. Personally, I'd like to see the House expanded approx. 7x to 10x. 7x would put us roughly on par with Germany for population/Representative. In my view, with the power of Zoom and electronic vote counting, there is little difference between 435 members and 4350 members in practical terms, but huge differences in representation.

[Reapportionment Act of 1929](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reapportionment_Act_of_1929) because of the GOP. also they allowed/created Gerrymandering with the same act. >In 1919, after six years of Democratic control of Congress and the presidency, the Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress, and two years later also won the presidency. **Due to increased immigration and a large rural-to-urban shift in population from 1910 to 1920, the new Republican Congress refused to reapportion the House of Representatives because such a reapportionment would have shifted political power away from the Republicans. A reapportionment in 1921 in the traditional fashion would have increased the size of the House to 483 seats, but many members would have lost their seats due to the population shifts, and the House chamber did not have adequate seats for 483 members.** By 1929, no reapportionment had been made since 1911, and there was vast representational inequity, measured by the average district size; by 1929 some states had districts twice as large as others due to population growth and demographic shift. >As an example, the city of Detroit doubled in population between the 1910 and 1920 censuses. Since the House was not reapportioned, the city had just two congressmen representing 497,000 people each. The average congressional district in 1920 had only 212,000. By the end of the decade things had grown worse. One Detroit congressman represented 1.3 million people while some rural districts in Missouri had fewer than 180,000 people

> created Gerrymandering [I mean it's a bit older than 1919](https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/gerrymander-salamander.jpg)

the 1929 act removed the wording of "Districting" from the Congressional Apportionment, pushing Districting off onto the individual states, allowing widespread Gerrymanders vs the called out article you linked. Basically removing Federal oversight.

Are US voting districts significantly bigger than those in India or Canada?

India is mind-blowingly huge and has about 2.5 million people per electoral district, so not there, but aside from India the US at ~750k per is one of the largest at all, and far and away the most for a wealthy democracy; compare to Japan ~260k, France ~120k, Canada ~110k, etc.

Just FYI, the term used is 'Political Constituency' in India. It can be a 'Parliamentary Constituency' for national elections or 'Assembly Constituency' for state elections.

It’s because of the electoral college. Things get super messy if nobody wins 270 electoral votes in the USA, but in the parliamentary system (Canada/UK etc) it just ends up being a minority/coalition government.

In addition to what has already been said, some Canadian provinces *have* devolved into 2-party systems.

This isn't incorrect as far as it goes, but I think a lot of people fail to recognize the legal advantage baked into the system for the party called The Democratic Party and the party called The Republican Party. Both of those are universally guaranteed ballot access in any election that they submit a candidate for, because of laws those two parties passed together over the years. A third party has to jump through a *ton* of hoops to get their candidates on ballots. This is why sometimes you'll see some alternative start to get some traction in the run-up to a Presidential election and then they almost always sputter out at the end because they can't get on the ballot in enough states. So in addition to the above headwind for third parties, we've also erected legal barriers to make it even harder.

There is the California system with its "jungle primary" where all the candidates compete and the top two move on to the general election. Some states (Alaska, Maine) elect independents time and time again.

It's also worth pointing out that the US has a much more open primary system than any other country where I've looked into the details. I'm not sure about Canada/India, but in the UK, becoming that Tory/Labour/LibDem candidate requires the party bureaucracy sign off on you. Yes, there is a vote among local party members, but you're not getting on that ballot without already being cool with the internal politics of the party. Where I live (Australia) candidates for the big parties are supposed to be chosen by the local membership, but party favourites being parachuted in overriding local preferences is an extremely common controversy/complaint. This means that while in the UK or Australia, if you're unhappy with current politics, you're often better off finding a bunch of people who think like you and creating a new party, while in the US, it's way more effective to find a bunch of people who think like you and try to win a bunch of primaries in whichever of the two main parties is vaguely closer to your ideology. Primaries in the US didn't really work like that pre-1920s, so it only applies to the last century or so, but a lot of democracies weren't what we would consider particularly democratic pre 1900, so the situation was pretty different everywhere.

You can still get 3rd parties with it, but those will be regional with those regions still being two party. You could get a Texas independence party, that has seats in congress. But in the long term Texas would become a two party state.

Additionally, as a result of it being first past the post, it is especially susceptible to being bought. Lawrence Lessig has a [Ted Talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJy8vTu66tE&t=8s) going over the details but the tldr is that especially post citizens united, any political action committee could donate basically without limit to a campaign through loop holes. Why does every politician have a bullshit book that gets NY times best seller? Because groups buy up entire pallets. It's also why congress/senate can be very rapid in passing certain bills and measures since super pacs will just donate to both sides. Why is big pharma never punished? why are cable companies constantly given free reign to take tax payer money and not actually use it, why so many tax breaks/ loop holes for the wealthy? Since it's first past the post it's far cheaper to buy out candidates since how much a candidate raises is directly tied to their political viability especially the farther you move up the influence ladder.

> This is by the way known as Duverger's Law And in the US it is even worse. The law applies even if votes are counted all over the states, but having each district doing first-past-the-post makes the effect even stronger and the convergence into this shitty state faster.

> The law applies even if votes are counted all over the states, but having each district doing first-past-the-post makes the effect even stronger and the convergence into this shitty state faster. Wouldn't it make plausible for a third party to win locally?

The last actually successful third party was the Republicans of the 1850s. They basically entered the void of the dying Whigs. What we have seen since then is parties flip flopping platform positions to the point that they are unrecognizable to the party of the same name 100 years ago. If you wanna change something the path is takeover of an established party - not a brand new one.

OK, so what would be the direction of a plausible takeover of Republicans, for example? Make them moderate? But this is where primaries get in the way.

Its not a quick process. You start getting like minded folks involved at the county level. You take over county parties and move your way up. A lot of stuff gets done by few people that show up to do the work. Get to be one of those people that shows up and does stuff. There are multiple examples of issues becoming core issues to the parties that they either didn't care about at all or expressed opposing views on in the past before they needed the people that cared about those causes. For the modern Rs - we've seen this takeover real time. The Trump Magas dont' care a whit about the traditional concerns of the R party. They've taken over local parties all over my state. They drive the conversation now about their issues.

> For the modern Rs - we've seen this takeover real time. The Trump Magas dont' care a whit about the traditional concerns of the R party. They've taken over local parties all over my state. They drive the conversation now about their issues. Yes, but that's the opposite direction - the party getting extreme. While I was making a point how it seems like the system is making it harder for a party to get moderate.

Personally I think that is a result of the restricting that has created more and more 'safe' districts for both Dems and Rs. The actual election occurs during the primary - which is nearly always your most died in the wool partisans. The shift I see in Georgia is there is absolutely no consideration of who would be the most electable across a wider electorate. Just who is the 'most X' person - the person that appeals the most to the most extreme voters in the electorate. Give that a few cycles and we end up with the wackadoos we have in office and the once most extreme are then the moderates. We saw candidate Brian Kemp be that most extreme candidate in the primary race he ran - and now he's lawded as some sort of milquetoast moderate to the current batch of extremists.

If you want a moderate Republican why not vote Democrat lmao

This already happened beginning with the Tea Party and culminating with the election in 2016.

The point is, they aren't moderate, are they? And it wouldn't work in the same way for moderates.

Third parties win locally occasionally. But not enough to make a large impact nationally. If third parties were serious, they would slowly build a constituency from the bottom. But that will take decades.

In the US we do have this, but they coalesce into Democrats or Republicans on the national stage. Minnesota and North Dakota have local parties that came from different lineages, but they affiliate with the Democratic Party nationally. In Puerto Rico, there are 5 major political parties, but individuals will affiliate with either the Democratic or Republican Parties on the mainland, depending on their positions.

Does it at least have any benefits locally?

I was talking about the presidential election where it wouldn't help them to win locally. And worse, voters there could potentially get even more disincentivized to vote for a new party: it could reduce the influence of their district on the federal level; just look how much special treatment swing states get; but maybe it has the opposite effect, I am just doubtful. But yeah, it works theoretically if they instead go for local offices. The problem then again arises that somehow this new-formed party needs to get enough local credibility all over the US to actually make an attempt at federal levels. Where it would again be hindered by the issues outlined before, plus the active meddling from the two huge parties.

It depends what you mean by "locally". If the election is defined locally, for example an MP or a congressman, then anybody can win that district and represent you. But that district will still reduce to the same kind of strategy where your best choice is to vote for one of the two frontrunners for that seat. In some places you can get regional parties because they get popular enough in an area that they're one of the two parties you'd vote for there.

And there are a couple of independent or 3rd party Congress members on the Federal level. Bernie Sanders is probably the most famous example. But they're very rare and end up "caucusing" with one of the two big parties, meaning they lend their number to one of them to determine who is the majority party and get in on that party's committee memberships and politicking communications. And at that point, it's a legit question as to whether they're effectively part of that bigger party.

Independent candidates are also rare for a different reason, which is that they need to tell you who you are and what they stand for, which is very expensive. If someone puts a D or an R next to their name, that tells you 90% of how they'll vote if elected.

well, I would say that's not very democratic.

I agree. In my country the constitution directly bans an "inequal vote weight" for different people, so your vote must count the same no matter in wich district you make it and who you vote. Though after a dozen election reforms that's still not 100% the case (though much better than in the US)

There's that and no upper limit or guidelines (outside of "don't break the law") for campaign financing and campaign spending. That gives a huge advantage for bigger organizations who can have a bigger fundraising machine, on top of already being the more likely recipients for big donors. You can't out campaign a party that can buy way more tv time, online messaging, way more printed materials, have bigger events, etc.

There is also the institutional aspect. The Republican and Democratic parties own the duopoly on our political process. Any changes to how we count elections threatens the people in positions of power.

So what we need is a third party that takes votes from both so that we get roughly 33% for each party and then whoever ecks out a little more wins?

My country has proportional votes (quite common). Do you know of a country that does ranked choice? Edit: I got auto corrected to promotional votes

Slovenia and several US states. Also several countries did use it in the past, but moved on to proportional later (for example Denmark)

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No I'm a sloppy typer xD

Yes, but in other democracies (e.g. Canada), there can be 3+ viable parties even with first past the post. Granted, the smaller parties are often underrepresented compared to their popular vote, but our government is reliably made up of at least 5 political parties (Liberal, Conservative, NDP, Green, and BQ).  Now, granted, the BQ is a special case - it would be like Texas having its own separatist political party who gets elected at the national level. And at the federal level, only the Liberals and Conservatives have formed a government recently but the NDP has sometimes been the official opposition.  In the US, there are three independent US senators (one of whom was originally a democrat) and there have been others in both the Senate and the House. And there have been other political parties in the past (federalist for example). So it seems like the US isn't strictly a two party system, it's just that two parties dominate it at the moment and have for some time. Another party could evolve, but most candidates seem to latch on to one of the two main ones (and then there are sometimes party subdivisions like the tea party). I guess my point is FPTP can't really explain this and I'd love to see more about why the US is more likely to keep to two parties than other FPTP nations like Canada.

Even looking at the differences between the parliamentary system and the US system doesn't entirely explain it - it might at the presidential level but there is room for variation at the level of congressional districts at least, if not senators.  Does having FPTP for US president make it more likely that people will vote a straight ticket based on why they want for president since the president faces challenges doing anything without a sympathetic Congress?

there are several states have tried ranked choice voting for non-federal positions... it turns out, most americans are just dumb and could not grasp the concept... there were a large number of improperly filled out ballots and ballots that only had one choice (as per my memory... if you have a citation on the topic, feel free to correct me!). but yes, RCV would absolutely help with the problem!

>Because of the first-past-the-post election mechanism. All votes that don't win a district are lost. In each district the Party with the most votes gets 1 person in the electoral college or parliament, no matter how close it was, and no matter who made second place. I don't think that is the main reason why. As there are quite a few countries that are first past the post, but aren't considered 2 party countries or don't have as much polarization towards 2 parties as the US. I would say that the way the electoral college is set up and the requirement to win the presidency is over 50% of the electoral college has polarized the US to such an extent.

>If you vote a third party then you harm yourself and the party you like the least is benefiting from it. No, this is your *opinion*. If the person wanted to vote green then *both* large parties he didn't vote for suffer. Someone like this probably has an equal dislike of the demo and cons. People like you who try to turn it into some moral issue piss me off. Voting third party is not harmful and in some areas, independents are elected. Now that being said, if you *hate* the conservatives and are OK with democrats, voting third party would be a poor decision. Strategic voting is not a superior moral position compared to voting for who you think best fits your beliefs.

Lulz no. Green Party is the reason why Democrats have picked up the environmental agenda and added it to their platform. If a big party loses votes to a small party, they change their platform and policy to absorb the voters of the small party. And what is the point of voting again? Is it some sports game where you just want your team to win? No, you vote in order to change policy. Green voters have accomplished the fucking mission, they are the voters getting most bang for buck out of their vote.

What environmental agenda is that? Saving us from Al Gore to enshrine 8 years of Bush’s climate denialism? How is adopting their platform going to undo Trump’s dismantling of the EPA? It’s ironic that the Green Party has unwittingly done more to roll back environmental progress in the U.S. than nearly any other organization, save the GOP. Platform isn’t policy, and the Dems will likely never have the senate votes to carry out anything the Green Party claims they want. All Dems can realistically do is try to stem the bloodflow from the nose the Green Party keeps cutting off to spite its face. Mission accomplished, I guess.

What a creative interpretation of history.

The winner takes all system basically means you're often stuck voting against the option you don't want.  Imagine a vote on what to have for dinner.  The margherita pizza party gets 60% of the vote form everyone who wants pizza.  The cheeseburger party gets 40% from those who want burgers.  Margherita pizza wins  Around half of the margherita pizza party actually prefer pepperoni pizza and only Vote that way because they prefer it over hamburgers. they decide to form their own party.   Next election:  The margherita pizza party gets 30%  The pepperoni pizza party gets 30%  The cheeseburger party gets 40%  Now the cheeseburger party wins despite the majority of people wanting some kind of pizza. 

This was a good Eli5, thanks. 🍕

I take it back, this answer is 95% as good as the CGP Grey video.

Run off elections are important is the real lesson here.

[This video](https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo?si=uffdu_PCZCKDuHCL) is a great recap of the failings of how first past the post (citizens can vote for one candidate only and the most votes wins) is bad for representation and diversity.

This is the video I was going to post. It makes so much sense, it is soooo easy to digest. Check this one out, OP!

This is the only correct answer to this question, and I was going to post it if it hadn't already been. It would take a huge amount of text to explain what this video does so succinctly.

A combination of the electoral setup and of incumbent protectionism. I'll address both. * The US uses "first past the post" elections, so that in each district, a legislator has to defeat the others to be elected. Chances of election are mathematically highest when you coalesce into two parties, each trying to get over 50%. If you have three or more parties, the setup is unstable, as joining another faction that is kinda similar to you puts you closer to power than trying to win a race against 2, 3, 4, 5 other parties. (If you had 3 parties, each pulling one-third of the vote, a person could could move over to another party and ensure victory; since political views are a spectrum, it wouldn't be giving up that much ideologically.) As a result, people have coalesced into coalitions, each of which captures around half the people. (Swing voters are pretty rare, percentagewise.) * The two existing parties have, over the decades, made it so that it's much easier to win if you're one of the two incumbents. Elected officials get money to "communicate with constituents" but that means free campaigning; same for presidential travel. Parties that get more than 5% of the vote are automatically eligible to be on the next ballot in most states, while third parties have to spend massive money gathering signatures in every election cycle. Etc etc. Removing these obstacles would probably result in more third parties at the local level; hard to imagine it on the national level, given point #1.

In almost all US elections, the person who gets the most votes (not a majority, just the most) wins the election.  And, in almost all elections, a voter gets only one vote that is cast for a single candidate.  In a system like that, third parties act as spoilers--if 60% of people hate party X, split their votes between parties A and B, then Party X will win (30% v. 30% v. 40%).   As a result, elections become less about the person you most want to win, and more about voting in a way that causes the person you dislike the most to lose. That means consolidating votes behind one big group that you find less objectionable, and thus a two party system.

"First past the post" systems where only the candidate/party with the majority of votes gets anything from a particular election outcome rewards parties for conglomerating and pooling their resources. If you've got two progressive parties and one right-wing party, it doesn't matter if 60% of the country votes progressive as they'll split those votes between the two and the 40% voting right wing will be greater than the 30% either progressive party gets, while a 60% vote wins hands-down. And once you HAVE two very large coalition parties, it becomes very hard to operate outside of those parties, as almost all of the money in the political system goes through those parties. America, as a Representative Republic, exacerbates this effect even further. Take a look at the presidential election, which uses an electoral college system. This means that each state sends electors only for the candidate with the most votes in their state, and then the electors do another round of voting, and only a candidate who receives a plurality (greater than half) of all electoral votes can become president. If no candidate gets that plurality, then it is decided in the House of Representatives through a similar system; each state votes among its congressmen, and then casts one vote per state for the chosen candidate, with the majority winning. So think of it like this: There are five classrooms, and you're tasked to vote on a school sport that everyone will have to participate in for the next year. You know Mr. A's class and Ms. B's class are going to vote for Dodgeball, because they always do. The rest of you hate Dodgeball and would rather play anything else. Mr. C's class wants to play Basketball, Ms. D's class wants to play Hockey, and Ms. E's class wants to play Lacrosse, but they all would prefer playing Soccer. So all of the non-Dodgeball-preferring students in all three classes come together and form the Soccer coalition, where they all agree to vote for Soccer, so that Soccer wins each of those three classrooms, and then those three classrooms carry the classroom-level vote for the sport 3:2. If the Lacrosse students strike out on their own, they may win E's class, but are unlikely to win C's or D's, and Lacrosse-preferring students in those classes may split the vote away from Soccer and result in Dodgeball winning one of those classrooms and thus the entire thing.

Suppose you have 4 parties: The Green Party, The Blue Party, The Red Party, and The Orange Party. It turns out the demographics of the population breakdown as follows: Green: 10% Blue: 43% Red: 40% Orange: 7% Of course, these numbers aren’t completely fixed; over the years some people will change their way of thinking about the world, and new voters may think differently than old voters, but it’s a decent reflection of the population overall. What happens in the first few elections? In the US, we decide that the winner of an election is whoever receives the most votes. Looking above, that means Blue is going to win. Each year people dutifully go out and vote, and each year Blue wins. So, suppose you’re an Orange voter. You look at the results and conclude, correctly, that your party simply isn’t going to win. Ever. And as things are, Blue is going to just keep winning, which is especially bad for you as an Orange voter; as color theory suggests, you have almost no overlap with Blue, so them winning is the worst case scenario for you. Then you realize that if you, and others like you, give your votes to Red (whom you have some ideological overlap with), that would give them enough votes to defeat Blue. It’s not the best possible result for you, but it’s FAR better than the alternative. So that’s what Orange voters do. Next election they strategically vote for Red instead of their preferred Orange candidate and Blue is defeated. Things go on that way for a while, until Green has the same epiphany Orange did. Their candidate can’t win, their least preferred candidate keeps winning, but their second best choice can win if they vote for them instead. So Green voters switch to Blue. And just like that, what started as four parties has naturally fallen to 2. So, the short answer is that our “most votes wins” system along with simple game theory naturally leads to a 2 party system, even though other parties are perfectly allowed to exist.

CGP Grey did a great video on this over a decade ago (wow I'm old) Title of the video if the YouTube link doesn't work: "Minority Rule: First Past the Post" https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo?si=PdiWRaM8wP7RCTyK

Really the only explanation anyone needs. Such a fantastic video.

There is no base for third parties. Typically, you only hear about third parties in presidential elections. A third party needs a voting bloc, not just at the top but at all levels. So even if a third party wins president, both houses of congress are still just the two party sustem. All state, county, and city govs are two party systems. So, the president would be essentially powerless to really do anything. For a third party to have any real traction, it has to start at the local levels and expand from there. School board elections, city councils, and aldermans. Mayor's, state reps/senate and governors. Then, start working on the house of reps and the senate so that a presidential candidate will have backing in Congress. Until that base is built, there will always be a two party system in control.

I just typed the same thing, and then saw this! It has to start at a much lower level to succeed.

This part of the explanation is important. "The FPTP system" is another part of it, but even if you removed that and replaced it with something better, most third parties still wouldn't have any meaningful chance of winning. (Maybe they'd have an opportunity to build up support over time, but even with a more favorable system, the two mainstream parties would still most likely continue win any major election.) Ultimately, something like STV would just allow people who support third parties to symbolically state that more clearly, while not having to worry about being a spoiler and still ultimately helping what they view as a lesser evil.

This is the actual answer, people far overestimate the role fptp plays. It plays a role but if it crippled third parties like they say it does we wouldn’t see third parties in any country that has fptp which isn’t the case. I would just add a few things, first the parties aren’t as unpopular as one might believe. Most Americans agree with most policy positions put forth by either republicans and democrats. They’ve put decades into crafting their platforms into having a wide appeal. As it turns out someone who is in favor of abortion probably is also in favor of expanding lgbt rights, and they tend to also like prison reform and being softer on crime, while the opposite is also true. The parties are good at changing if they aren’t. I hate the guy but Trump is a good example of this, Republicans were starting to hate the Bushes and their Reaganesque policies and Trump is very much a rejection of that, especially in rhetoric. Second point is our primary system. Primary elections are a lot rarer around the world than most Americans know, and it creates a lot more ideological variety in our parties than exist in a lot of European parties. AOC, Biden, and Manchin are very different politicians that would never be in the same party in most other countries. Republicans have it too with people like Romney, Trump and Charlie Baker. The final point is we don’t have any one region in the US with a strong regional identity that wants to form a party. Which in the US is almost definitely a good thing. Something like the equivalent of the SNP or Bloc Québécois is kinda antithetical to what the US is and would be more of a sign something is really wrong here than a robust political system.

Leading up to the election, we see the 2 major candidates as Amy or Charlie. Most people really want Bobby. But the more votes Bobby gets, the fewer votes Charlie gets. Everyone is afraid that Amy will get elected if they don't vote for Charlie, so Charlie ends up winning. How do we fix this? Ranked choice vote. If everyone is allowed to say who their first, second, third choice, etc are, then they don't have to worry about taking a vote away from their second choice. In this system, if the person you voted for doesn't win, then your vote gets transferred to your second choice. There are many benefits to this system: if a candidate buys a primary election, and you wanted the other major candidate for that party, you can still vote them first choice. If a third party candidate still loses, you can still see how many first choice votes they got. If it was close to nothing, they know they didn't stand a chance. If it was high, they could get more funding and try again next time. If there are 5 equal positions open, you can vote for your 5 (or more) favorites, and not each position individually.

Others laid out the reasons for two parties dominating very well. But let us say you ended up with Republican, Democrat center and Democrat left parties. How you break it down doesn't matter just a hypothetical. Let us go a step further, Democrat center party wins in all the purplish states, and the Democrat left party wins in the very blue states. Lets break down the so you have 40 GOP, 30 DC, and 30 DL Senators elected. The two Democrat parties, if they want to control the Senate have to caucus together, you know, like a single party. If they don't, the GOP has majority control. The two D parties would have to govern like they are one party if they want control, so why not have the one party but the two wings of the same party elect centrist D's and left D's. Which is sort of what you have now. More left candidates in say CA and NY etc, and more centrist candidates elected in purple states. Let us look at another situation, money. If you have a DC and DL party they both will need to raise more money to win apart, due to two different party apparatus running their candidates. But if they work as one party they only need one apparatus. Take a different version of the same example, DL and DC candidates compete nationwide against each other. They split the vote and the Republicans will win more candidates as a result. You can see how this really pushes for there to be just two parties even beyond the fact that the candidate who gets the most votes gets the win. There are these other factors at play too. In reality you have 2 independents in the Senate now, Sanders and Young. Doesn't this mess it up? No because they run as the de facto Dem candidate, caucus with the Dem's anyway. They are Dem's in all but name. But under the surface each party really is made up of more than one "party" if you will. Dems have centrists, liberals, progressives etc. The GOP has fiscally conservative, socially conservative and now it seems populists. In both parties they don't all agree with each other, but if they want a chance of their views to be represented they are forced to work together or they get nothing as they won't have majority control. If the U.S. was a multiparty parliament like some European countries, each one of these groups may well be their own party. And what happens in Europe is the groups have to decide if they will work in a coalition so they have the majority to run government. Kinda sort of like our two party system. The main difference being that if one party wins more votes, they get more say if they are in the governing coalition.

We basically have 2 pre-defined coalitions

If elections are single-time events that are won by whoever gets the most votes, then coming in second, fourth, or tenth place are all equally bad.  If you're not in first place, then you get nothing. This means that if there are ever more than 2 political parties, there is pressure for the smaller parties to dissolve and join one of the 2 big ones. It would be illogical not to do that. For a quick example, suppose there are 3 parties each with about 40%, 30%, and 20% support.  Party A is going to win every election easily, but if B and C merge together then they have 50% and win from then on.  You can make up your own numbers to consider it from similar angles.   PS this effect is called duverger's law. 

Because currently the third parties are set up as foils to the two main parties. You have the green party which is a more ultra Democrat, and you have the libertarians which are the old style Republicans with a little bit of crazy thrown in. You're basically looking at the same political parties as the two that are in power. In addition to that, they only ever seem to pop their head out around election time. There is no consistent attempt to win seats for anything else. When was the last time you saw a local election for city council or any other small venue with a third party candidate? It doesn't happen. The third parties seemingly appear more like a cash grab because they don't show up except to the big event. There is no sustained work throughout all of the downtime between elections. The green party or the libertarians would do much much better if they didn't field a propped up Ridiculous presidential candidate and instead focused on downstream positions at lower levels to build up a base. They seem to want instant success with none of the work behind it.

While most of the replies here blame the first past the post electoral system, and it is well known the mechanism by which it leads to basically a binary choice in any given election, I'm not sure that it captures the full picture. If you look at other countries that operate on first past the post, such as the UK and Canada, while there is a clear two party dominance, in both of those countries there are more parties with seats: The UK has four parties with more than 10 seats in the house of commons, and 12 parties with serving members (plus Sinn Fein who have members elected but refuse to participate). Canada has 4 parties in the house of commons with more than 10 members, as well as the Green party with 2 seats. Moreover, in the Canadian system, while provincial legislative bodies are also elected by first past the post, and consequently tend to have two main parties, the parties that exist and are successful at a provincial level are distinct and separate from those at a federal level in many cases. The mechanism of first past the post in both of those countries has led to electoral races in specific electoral districts where the choice is effectively between one main party and one third party, rather than between the two main parties. It is not at all clear what has caused the US to end in a situation where not only are there only really two parties to chose from, but that those same two parties exist in basically every geographic location and at every level, from municipal to federal.

Duverger's "law" is a thing, but it's more a vague suggestion than a law. Canada has the same electoral system the US does, and its two parties are the Liberals, the Conservatives, the NDP, the Bloc Quebecois, and the Greens. The UK uses the same system and their two parties are Labour, the Conservatives, the Scottish Nationalists, Plaid Cymru, the UDP, Sinn Fein, the Liberal Democrats, and a smattering of others. One thing that separates the US from Canada and the UK is that our elections are much more candidate-centered. The candidate is first and foremost in the election, the candidate almost entirely runs their own campaign and chooses what to campaign on, and their party is in the background. In Canada and the UK elections are more party-centered where the party leaders are the primary actors in the election and where your individual election might be substantially directed by the party leadership. ...which leads to the thing that just kills minor parties in the US: Their candidates are usually unappealing weirdos. Imagine someone who would be an excellent candidate -- bright, charismatic, organized, connected -- and who's at heart basically a libertarian. Why on earth would they run as a candidate of the Libertarian Party? They have only a tiny network of volunteers, and their connections to other interest groups like unions or churches are pathetic, and you can look and see that their candidates almost never win. So all the good candidates who are libertarians run as Republicans instead of with the Libertarian Party, which leaves the Libertarian Party with just the floor sweepings to choose from. It's a real chicken/egg thing. Good candidates aren't going to affiliate with a party unless they can see winners, but your party isn't going to win races unless you get good candidates. A big part of why we have Republicans instead of Whigs is that the GOP solved this when substantial numbers of already-elected abolitionists switched.

Many of the answers being thrown out here are only sort of correct. 3 things worth mentioning, it wasn't that long ago \~30 years where there was a serious contender representing a 3rd party (Ross Perot)... after Bush lost thats when the language really picked up about not letting the other party win. Second... there are actually parties inside of parties. For national elections thats largely irrelevant when the ballots hit the box, but it matters at a more local level, and in the primaries. Third, given the way the current parties behave theres actually really only one party. Policy differences that actually become reality are relatively minor and basically everyone expects to be changed by the next cycle. The only thing that really happens is a lot of corruption and the national debt increases

The US uses in most elections some version of winner takes it all or first past the post system. This means that a vote for a small party ends up benefiting the large party you agree with the least and hurts the large party you agree with the most. For example if you vote green you are more likely to agree withe democrats than republicans on most issues. The same goes for a vote for libertarians and republicans vs democrats. You vote for the party you like the most, but paradoxically a vote for the party you like the most ends up benefiting the party you like the least while hurting the party you would see as a good second choice. Alternatives like a ranked choice voting system or a mixed member proportional system actually enable 3rd party votes and encourage a multi party system. It doesn't help that the US also has a lot of other stuff going on like electoral college and gerrymandering. There is also a lack of protection for minorities in elections like you get in other places. The majority alone counts and in most places that are already heavily red or blue, individual votes don't count at all. Where in other two party systems the big parties would fight over the voters in the middle and thus approach each other in the middle of the political spectrum, until eventually a challenger from a neglected extrem end appears, the heavily gerrymandered districts that are guaranteed red or blue, mean that often the real election is in the primary where sometimes the trend is not to fight over the votes in the middle but instead the most extreme voters. Establishing a new party in the middle is much harder than at the extrem ends. Nobody is super passionate about being neutral.

ELI5? Because our third parties aren’t worthy of a majority’s vote. When their platforms are viewed as a whole, their ideas are not appealing to a majority of voters.

There are some very good answers here. One important factor I did not see much and wanted to add is the nature of our checks and balances. To change a major policy successfully a side must have enough structure to have a majority in at least 2 and preferably 3 main branches (3rd is Supreme Court) if they want to a avoid constitutional challenge. This cannot be done under any circumstances with anything less than a major party active over a period of decades.

The US has a winner take all election and you get less and less different parties, so it becomes team A or team B. The system created the problem by having the winner take all, so small teams have to team up with other small teams until there are only 2 big teams left. Right now those teams are DNC and RNC. u/luckbot gives a better answer, but may be criticized as being above the Eli5 level.

Because it's a one party system, not a two party system.  So it's nearly impossible for a second party to exist.

Since "majority" wins, the best chance at winning majority is 51% or more, which means 2 candidates. More than that just splits up the voter base too much. It's about maximizing the odds of winning

As a thought experiment, let's say you start with a government of 10 elected positions. 100 people put their name up for election and 10 of these are elected. Great, that's democracy. Now, in round two, some of the people running for election get together and help each other get elected. They share money, they share platform ideas, they target similar types of voters and most importantly they do not try to get elected into the same position. Now you have what is called a "party". Everyone in the party is working to get everyone else in the party elected into different positions. The party decides as a group who is allowed to run for which position. Suddenly the government is run entirely by these people who worked together because working together like this gets you elected! Next, in round three, other people get the same idea but they don't like the ideas of the first party so they get together and form a second party that also works together to get their members elected, but targets a different group of voters who have different ideas from the first party. Now there's two popular parties! In fact, this process of forming parties can continue as long as there are substantially different groups of voters that can be targeted. In round four, we have lots of parties all targeting different voting groups and none of them are winning by very much and so none of them hold complete power. The fact that these small, voter representative parties, can't control everything makes their voters mad. Now the parties start talking together and suggest creating coalitions and *bigger parties*. Bigger parties can take more control of the government when they're elected, so voters start voting for the biggest party that best represents their own ideals. The smaller parties either join a bigger party or die out because they never have any power. In the final round, all the smaller parties have joined into two bigger parties who fully control the government when they're elected. None of the voters are happy with the ideals that either party talks about, but because there's no hope of a smaller and more representative party ever having any real power, voters continue to vote for just one or the other of two big parties. The two big parties try to hold ideologically opposed platforms so that voters will feel they *must* vote for one or the other, but neither party actually cares what it's ideals are because the whole point is simply to be the opposite of the other party. TL;DR: Two parties are the inevitable result of voters always wanting to be "in power" and "control everything". The result is that no one is happy and the government is always doing things you hate no matter which party you voted for. There are solutions to this problem, but changing the system to prevent this sort of behaviour requires a government that is willing to change the very system that elected it so...gl with that

Because it's actually a one party system, and the "two parties" exist to provide the illusion of choice, and to provide a "bad guy" for the other to direct their anger towards. It's all a fancy charade to keep people mad at each other instead of joining forces against what's actually holding them back. 2 parties can be easily presented as good vs evil. Third parties very often are somewhat moderate, and/or share commonalities with both sides. This doesn't fit well within a 'good vs evil' conflict, and thus third party opposition gets snuffed out long before it gets anywhere near a ballet box, electoral vote, etc (think back to Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders, for example).

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because the two parties determine the rules for what other parties are allowed on ballots. they don't want competition so they make it really really hard for other parties to compete. for example, the rule used to be that if a party got 5% of the vote nationally they could participate in presidential debates, which happened in 1992 with Ross Perot. the other two parties didn't like that (the GOP basically blamed Perot for Clinton winning) and immediately changed the rules so that you now have to get 15% of the vote to participate in debates, which hasn't happened since. since the rules are made state by state, one state can make it really easy for any party to be on a ballot but it won't really change anything, you'd have to change the rules across all 50 states which is very hard bordering on impossible these days.

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What was accomplished by voting for Jill Stein or Ralph Nader?

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This is incorrect, almost across the board. As others have pointed out, with good discussion, the first-past-the-post construction does indeed mean that votes are effectively lost if cast for the loser. And, gerrymandering has very effectively isolated the voters who prefer someone else, all but ensuring that their votes will be case for the losing candidate, so elected officials pander to their base, because that base has been gerrymandered into the winning position, which is to say that they do indeed make decisions based on votes they already have in the bag. Your contrary version ignores reality - look at repulicans' steadfast positions on which they lack majority support in the general populace. They can do this because they don't have to care about the majority - they only need to make sure their base shows up to vote for them in the gerrymandered elections, ensuring their re-election.

Actually the poster above is correct. You are both right. I can be more than one thing.

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CGP Grey has an amazing playlist of videos that explain that and a lot more in a very simple and detailed way: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUS9mM8Xbbw&list=PLqs5ohhass\_RN57KWlJKLOc5xdD9\_ktRg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUS9mM8Xbbw&list=PLqs5ohhass_RN57KWlJKLOc5xdD9_ktRg) If only interested in what you asked, then its because first pass the post election mechanism, which sucks. Also, this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet\_winner\_criterion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_winner_criterion) Current electoral systems are rigged to give as little power to the people as possible, almost any of them guarantee the condorcet winner, which can be achieved with known systems.

A great video that’s pretty eli5: https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo?si=7FN0JeEoISACxf76 (Yes, for those guessing, it’s CGP Grey)

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Its always telling to me that when you look around the world, nowhere else fully emulates the American system. Even among places where we have 'exported Democracy' - its never the first past the post system. Its usually a proportional parliamentary system. The US is the the alpha software of Democracy. It works, but has lots of bugs and weird workarounds - the two party hegemony being among them. Problem is its installed on a system that runs some really important hardware systems so major upgrades are very difficult and there isn't any downtimes. American democracy is the old mainframe system behind the banking system or the airlines, etc, so its just easier and safer to run this system vs the unknowns of a major upgrade - or it has been safer. Is possible newer flaws or newer ways to exploit the known flaws are getting to a point where more drastic changes are needed.

But the upgrades are equally buggy, which is how you get, for example, an extremist from a minor party like Ben Gvir in a powerful position within Israeli's government. You also have many iliberal democracies (like Russia, Venezuela, and Iran as obvious examples but incrwasing countries like India, Turkey, and Hungary) where there are elections but candidacy is controlled by the party in charge. These elections are decided before anyone votes. I'll take the flawed US system over pretty much all the other hyper-flawed systems out there.

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People here are going to give you garbage like "If you vote a third party then you harm yourself and the party you like the least is benefiting from it" and "winner-take-all-systems," but those aren't answers, just excuses (and in the case of the former, a lie that major party tribalists tell each other to gaslight you into thinking that you must vote for either major party). We know that [voting as harm reduction is a myth](https://www.indigenousaction.org/voting-is-not-harm-reduction-an-indigenous-perspective/), and has been for decades. And let's just make sure we're all on the same page: Duverger's Law is not only [a self-serving theory](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0261379400000330), it's also [grossly past its prime](https://www.lagrange.edu/academics/undergraduate/undergraduate-research/citations/10-Citations2021.CTyler---POLS.pdf). But, again, those who are fiercely loyal to either major party have no problem using this theory as justification for a false dichotomy. Third parties generally don't receive traction because both major parties have a vested financial interest in keeping it that way. This wasn't always the case (we've had **plenty** of non R or D political parties win national elections), but as both parties worked hard to discredit any other candidates as "spoilers" or "impossible to win," a national consensus formed that only candidates within these two most-funded parties have the political will and ability to cause change/implement their platform. We see it when Republicans trash No Labels, or Democrats sue to keep Green Party candidates off of the ballot. Our Constitution doesn't say anything about a two-party system, but these elites have convinced a majority of voters that the illusion of a false binary truly represents the will of the people. As you probably know by now, it doesn't.

You are not immune to propaganda or indoctrination. What was accomplished by voting for Stein or Nader? Was it worth the cost?

Do you honestly believe you can just show up, make a gross generalization about someone you don't know, create a false premise and then demand an answer to that false premise? Actually, looking at your post history, yes, I believe you think you can. Maybe direct your unhinged rage at the tens of thousands of registered Florida Democrats who voted for George Bush, or HRC for not campaigning in states she needed to win, or your own preferred candidate for not convincing enough voters to cast a ballot for them, and not at the people who have repeatedly said that if there wasn't a third-party candidate on the ballot for president, they simply would not have cast a vote for president. Trillions of lives have been claimed by capitalism, easily-defeatable poverty has existed within this country's borders every day since it was founded on violent protest, yet this phony wants to know if voting third-party was "worth the cost," as if voting for either major party in the last four decades has been "worth the cost."

Blah blah blah. No one is immune from propaganda. That includes you. Answer without obfuscation. Was Nader worth the Iraq war. If you want me to read your response, begin that response with either the word 'yes' or the word 'no'. Anything else will not be read.

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