I fully support third/fourth/fifth, etc. party options. It forces the STALE mainline two-party system to build broader coalitions and make compromises to govern. My political compass is fairly heterodox, which is why I'm unaffiliated with either D or R. Actually, I'll even go further and say ranked choice voting should be in all 50 states. I think Maine does this for some races, no?
If you get enough seats in Congress that are not mainline D or R, it would force the aforementioned coalition building, not too dissimilar with our friends across the pond. Is this wishful thinking? Probably. Should we implement it? Absolutely!
This is wrong-headed on so many levels. Our two parties already engage in plenty of coalition building and compromise--they just do it through the primary process rather than through post-election parliamentarian maneuvering. Throwing your energies into third-party politics isn't prioritizing coalition building--it's the opposite! It's choosing identity performance over pragmatics and progress.
The two major parties in this country have locked out the competition by creating voting systems that gravitate towards a two-party system. Until this system is ended by the installation of nationwide ranked-choice voting, the Democratic and Republican parties should be considered enemies of "small-d democracy."
No. A functioning presidential system is almost by definition a two-party system. That's the nature of winner-take-all competition. It's not because Ds and Rs "locked out the competition"--it's because the men who drafted our Constitution created a chief executive chosen by popular vote (in practice, at least--let's just ignore the Electoral College for a moment). In practice, all that third parties do is dilute the majority's will and undermine democratic accountability.
To be clear, I'm not saying that the presidential system is necessarily the best form of government that's out there. But it is the system we have, and in all honesty it's performed pretty well relative to all its alternatives. Its dysfunctions are not a result of its two-party nature, but of the deeply antidemocratic rules surrounding Senate apportionment, partisan gerrymandering, and judicial appointments. Ranked Choice Voting or whatever might be worth adopting, but it's not going to address those problems and it's not going to somehow magically undo the logic of two-party competition in a presidential system.
A functioning presidential system isn't inherently a two-party winner-take-all system. That's an inherent problem with First Past The Post. It is possible to have a single chief executive without a two-party system, we just need to tweak the way they're elected.
