The Two Party System is broken. The interests of the American voter are no longer served by choosing between the Democrat who received the most support from Hollywood and the Republican who raised the most money from Wall Street. The Two Party System, coupled with the Electoral College, have derailed democracy in America and replaced it with a “lesser-of-two-evils” mentality in the minds of voters.
The irony is that local governments have developed a far healthier approach to elections than our federal government has. In a recent election for a city councilman in my town, three qualified candidates were vying for a single seat. On Election Day, none were able to garner a majority of the votes, so a runoff was called between the top two vote getters to determine a winner. This simple and straightforward system ensured that a) every candidate had a fair chance and b) the winner had a majority of the popular vote.
Contrast that with the national presidential election. The two major parties all but strangle out any independent candidates. In the rare instance where an independent does sneak his way into the field, it can lead to a president being elected with a minority of the popular vote. Remember Ross Perot? He hit the scene and made a real run for the presidency in 1992. The result was that Bill Clinton was elected president with only 43% of the popular vote.
In an interesting footnote to Perot’s election bid, exit polls showed that many people were going to vote for Perot but felt that they would be “throwing their vote away”, so they voted for either George Bush or Bill Clinton. According to those polls, if everyone who said they wanted to vote for Perot but didn’t had just voted for him, he would have won the election handily.
We know the system is broken. We know how it can be fixed. We’ve seen it working in local governments for decades. Sadly, the only people who have the power to fix the system (Congress), owe their current positions to the very same system, so we cannot expect change any time soon.
Sorry for my blutness, but NOW you say the two-party system is broken? This was evident in the 1950s. There was a brief relapse during the Reagan years, when it looked like his administration was going to return the country to Federalism, but the administration, government, schools, and media were already entrenched with a globalist agenda.
This did not happen overnight, and it did not happen recently.
Good post for bringing out the issue.
I agree, there has always been a problem with the 2 party system, as well as the fact that there are no term limits for our representatives in DC. But did you know that today, if you publicly promote or endorse a third party candidate, the government will label you and place you on a watchlist ? Where the heck is our country heading ?
Why do people always assume if we had a different system that it, too, wouldn’t be “broken”? You’d see the government completely change… small states against big ones, multiple splinter parties getting elected and coalitions having to be formed, an unstable government, gridlock in Congress… it would be far worse. The Electoral College was put into place to deal with these issues.
The SYSTEM is not broken… the voters are. If people say Congress is doing such a terrible job then why do these people keep getting elected? Don’t blame the “system” blame the voters.