this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2025
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I have to wonder, why DOESN'T the US have any other significant parties? Like you clearly have them but they're practically irrelevant.
Here in Canada we also have a winner takes all voting system (which is unfortunate. But we hope to change in the future) but smaller parties like the NDPs and greens still manage to hold some relevance even if at least at a regional or provincial level.
Hell, in 2011 the NDP was the opposition against Harper's CPC with the Liberals doing worse than they ever had.
During the Ontario Provincial election while the Liberals lost seats to the Tories the greens held both their seats and NEARLY got a 3rd.
It's no accident. Both parties collude to make sure a 3rd does not arise. The saying "voting 3rd party is throwing your vote away" is very, very common. Your classification of these parties as practically irrelevant is very accurate, because I don't believe any other party has cracked double digit % at the federal level.
I was wondering about that though. I'm not from the US so I don't understand the depths of the system. But wouldn't a third party only have to get a super tiny amount of votes, to become part of the government? Let's say Democrats and Republicans have 48% of the vote. And there is a third party that got 4% (in actual Electors) .
They would either have to include the small party and make some concessions to them, or agree with the other big party on a president.
Like that it should at least be possible to push a single topic through, like free Medicare. And then just work with whichever party is less against it.
US voting system is pretty much all-or-nothing at every level.
There are 100 senators, but each one of them has to win a majority of votes in their state to get elected into office. There's no representative pool where you vote for a party and X% of the seats go to that party based on their performance in the overall election.
No preferential voting system, first past the post only. Minority parties are worse than useless, they actively harm the outcome in such a system.
It has to do with how political parties in the US are regulated through the election commissions. Voters register with political parties through the commission not the party itself. The commission is bipartisan to prevent a party from cheating its own voters. For example, the democratic party couldn't just kick Bernie off the primary ballot despite him being independent his whole life.
At the same time this bipartisan election commission determines what other parties are allowed to have ballot line access and have little interest in breaking the doupoly.
The flip side to this is any Leninist pushing for a workers party has to come to terms with the fact that their workers party legally can't practice Democratic Centralism if they want to have a ballot line party.