Two-Party Problem

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein (Getty Images)

There are few things more tiresome than the quadrennial exercise of arguing about whether to vote for the lesser of two evils in American presidential elections. The combination of Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign, antipathy towards Hillary Clinton, and the specter of Donald Trump has made this year’s cycle particularly intense.

The whole discussion is so frustrating: needlessly hostile, marked by insufferable self-righteousness, condescension, and name-calling.  And many of the people arguing basically agree on many policy goals.

I’m not going to try and shame you. You’re not inherently “privileged” if you don’t back Clinton. No one is entitled to your vote. The Electoral College elects the president, and unless you live in Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Virginia, or a handful of others, the electoral votes of your state (or District) are already predetermined. 

But you should also understand that Jill Stein is not going to be president. Gary Johnson is not going to be president. Come January, it’s going to be Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in the White House. Even if you don’t like either candidate, one of them is going be in power for the next four years.

Trump must never be president. The guy is an absolute fucking maniac who is openly stoking racism and xenophobia to get elected. So much ink has been spilled about Trump’s awfulness, but it’s worth reiterating that his election would represent a historically calamitous event. 

Clinton, while far from perfect (particularly on foreign policy), would uphold the domestic accomplishments of the Obama years, build on them at the margins, and appoint a few Supreme Court justices. Critically, she also isn’t Trump. It would be foolish to pretend that that doesn’t matter.

All that said, it’s worth taking a step back here to look at the bigger picture.

A two-party system in a country of 320 million is kind of ridiculous. When Bernie Sanders and Michael Bloomberg, politicians with entirely different policy agendas, speak at the same party’s convention, perhaps we need to rethink how we’re doing electoral politics.

That Clinton and Trump are historically unpopular only illustrates the need for a political system in which voters can choose other options without unintentionally swinging the election to a candidate even farther from them on the issues than the “lesser of two evils” (as Nader voters in Florida and New Hampshire arguably did for George W. Bush in 2000).

Winner-take-all elections encourage two parties. Virtually all voting for public office in the United States works like this. As FairVote puts it, “Few people will support a party that never wins, especially when they are supporting that party at the possible expense of their least favorite candidate taking power.”

While people like Dan Savage dubiously criticize the Green Party for not building from the ground up in local offices and basically attribute their lack of representation to not trying hard enough, the reality is actually structural. 

A proportional unicameral parliamentary system modeled after the governments of Israel, Portugal, or Spain, among many others, would make for a better, more representative democracy. 

Without going into excessive detail about how it might work in practice, the basic idea is that the proportion of the vote a party received would be equivalent to the percentage of seats it would have in the House of Representatives. The executive branch would be drawn from or appointed by the major party or coalition in the House.

Here’s how the vote and seat makeup of a 2016 American parliamentary election might look in a House of Representatives with 553 seats (*)

Party	Leader	Seats	Percentage
Left	Sanders	71	12.9%
Democratic	Clinton	228	41.2%
Republican	Ryan	122	22.0%
Nationalist	Trump	114	20.6%
Libertarian	Johnson	18	3.3%
Total		553	276 majority

This is just a wild guess at how the parties might split if proportional representation were implemented, but you can see the basic principle that voters could support minor parties without having to worry about helping their least favorite candidates.

Dissatisfied left-leaning voters could support a more radical party without being blamed for the election of Donald Trump. A hypothetical Prime Minister Hillary Clinton could still form a Democratic government that would command a parliamentary majority on most issues.

By the same token, Republicans unwilling to back Trump could form a new organization that would have a credible hope of becoming the largest party on the right. Frankly, I don’t think Trump would’ve even attempted his hostile takeover of the GOP if American democracy operated this way. 

The incentive structure of a parliamentary system would have motivated Trump (**) to form a new alternative right-wing party. The National Front in France and the United Kingdom Independence Party are two examples of what such a party might resemble. The level of support Trump garnered in the primaries suggests that this new force would have substantially eroded the Republican vote share, but Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and company would still control the GOP.

To be sure, other supplemental changes would be needed to optimize democracy in the United States (political finance reform, making voting easier, a reimagining of federalism and devolution of powers to states and localities). 

But critically, a proportional parliamentary system would make moot the questions of tactical voting and lesser evils. Surely that’s something that both sides of this quadrennial debate should be able to agree upon.

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(*) The 1913 law capping the size of the House at 435 means that some states are overrepresented or underrepresented. Not nearly to the degree that the Senate is unrepresentative, but the House still runs afoul of the one person, one vote principle that is essential in a democracy. And besides, 435 is an arbitrary number (the United Kingdom has less than a quarter of the number of people who live in the United States yet elects 650 members of the House of Commons). 

Better to give the least populous state (currently Wyoming) one representative and determine the number of representatives that each of the other states will have by dividing the state’s population by that of Wyoming’s and rounding to the nearest whole number. 

And while we’re altering the representation formula, let’s making sure the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the other U.S. territories have voting members of Congress as well.

(**) Or someone like Trump. It’s very possible that the guy would not be up for the multi-year party building and maintenance effort that this would require.