The thing to remember about American politics is that the deck is stacked. In most races, in most places, the winner of the election is decided before the campaign begins: by the gerrymandering of election district lines, by the power of incumbency, by the influence of money, and by media outlets that prefer the manufactured drama of a two-party grudge match. According to the election reform group FairVote’s most recent “Dubious Democracy” report, the United States suffers from a “chronic lack of competition” in races for the U.S. House of Representatives, as illustrated by the fact that only thirty-five of the 435 contests in 2022 met the baseline standard for offering voters a genuine choice.
Even when there is competition, it is constrained by a political duopoly that—in races for everything from the presidency to governorships, Senate seats, House seats, state legislative seats, and local posts—consists of a Democratic Party that is heavily invested in the economic and political status quo and a Republican Party that, while more authoritarian in approach and more extreme on social issues, is frequently funded by the same corporate interests as the Democrats.
The range of debate often extends from one side of Wall Street to the other—creating a system that Vermont U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, has complained “spends more time representing the wealthy and the powerful than ordinary Americans.”
On top of all this, the system is showing signs of severe strain, as one party evolves into a cult of personality, while the other has been torn apart by a debate over whether to continue to support an aging leader whose capacity to win elections and govern is now widely questioned. A growing number of Americans tell pollsters that they are sick of both parties and desperately want alternatives.
The United States, uniquely among its most major democratic allies on the global stage, makes no pretense of being a robust multiparty democracy. The current German government is a coalition of the center-left Social Democrats, the climate-focused Greens, and the socially liberal but business-friendly Free Democrats. In the United Kingdom, where July 4 election results swept the rightwing Conservative Party from power, the new parliament will be dominated by the center-left Labour Party. But it will also include seventy-two members of the Liberal Democratic Party, which sometimes positions to the left of Labour; twenty members of Scottish, Welsh, and Irish nationalist parties, which frequently position to the left of Labour; four members of the proudly progressive Green Party; and six independents who were elected at least in part because of their advocacy for a ceasefire in Gaza. In Canada, there is considerable discussion about whether the next government will be a coalition featuring two parties that already work closely in the current parliament: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals and the left-leaning New Democrats, led by civil liberties lawyer Jagmeet Singh.
There is no such political diversity or fluidity in the United States. While multiple parties exist, the last time a new party hit the main stage was in 1856, when the Republicans replaced the Whigs. No third-party member has been elected to a seat in Congress since the 1970s, when two members of the Conservative Party of New York won races for the U.S. Senate and U.S. House. The New York Conservatives got their start as a party that protested what they saw as the leftward drift of the GOP in the 1960s, but that’s not much of a concern these days.
The United States seems to have settled into a two-party rut that, while unsatisfying to most Americans, is reinforced by a system that provides few openings for alternative candidates and parties. A number of communities and states have adopted forms of proportional representation and instant-runoff voting that give third parties a chance at the local and regional levels. But when it comes to federal politics, most Americans assume they are stuck with a binary choice that leaves voters dissatisfied and challenges unresolved. Bold proposals for ending the U.S. Senate’s electoral bias in favor of small, conservative states go unconsidered. Even reforms that were once entertained by the administration of former President Richard Nixon—such as the elimination of the Electoral College so that Presidents could be elected by the popular vote—are brushed aside by the political and media elites that tell us that we dare not look beyond the boundaries of an increasingly dysfunctional two-party system.
There is no question that today’s Democratic and Republican parties differ on many economic and social issues and that choices between them have consequences. Yet, on a striking number of issues, they find common ground. Consider the debate about Gaza. When the top lawyer with the International Criminal Court applied for an arrest warrant to charge top Israeli officials—as well as Hamas leaders—with war crimes and crimes against humanity, Democratic President Joe Biden decried the move as “outrageous.” So, too, did Republican Donald Trump’s allies in Congress, who organized a House resolution—which passed with bipartisan support—to rebuke the court.
Contrast that with the response of Cornel West, who is challenging Biden and Trump as an independent. West applauded the legal action, saying, “I think there’s no doubt that genocide is taking place.” Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein said the United States needs a President who can “act like a commander-in-chief, not a secretary for Bibi Netanyahu.” And Chase Oliver, the Libertarian Party nominee for President, decried Biden’s failure to stand up to the Israeli prime minister, while at the same time referring to Trump as a “neocon war criminal.”
The United States seems to have settled into a two-party rut that is reinforced by a system that provides few openings for alternative candidates and parties.
Those were not fringe positions. National polls have suggested that a substantial plurality of Americans, and in some surveys a majority, believe that the Israeli military—operating on Netanyahu’s orders—is committing genocide in Gaza. “A majority of women, a majority of people of color, a majority of Democrats and progressives and young people believe that this is genocide,” explained University of Massachusetts-Amherst political science professor Tatishe M. Nteta, who directed a national UMass-Amherst/WCVB survey on the issue earlier this year. “Whereas, on the other side, you see Republicans and conservatives, older Americans, men having an opposite view. This issue has become, in some ways, a flash point or at least a reflection of many of the divides that we see in our country today.”
Yet, when the first presidential debate took place on June 27, only Biden and Trump were on stage. And when the subject of Gaza came up, Foreign Policy observed, “Both candidates, as expected, issued full-throated endorsements of Israel.” There was no serious discussion of genocide, ICC warrants, or a two-state solution. In fact, there was very little debate at all. Trump lied about his record, and Biden’s, with such frequency that former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci estimated that his ex-boss produced a prevarication “every 100 seconds” during the ninety-minute standoff. Biden’s struggle to keep up with his rival’s rapid-fire fibbing was so unsuccessful that his dismal presentation inspired a vigorous debate about his capacity to continue on as the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Even before the debate, an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found that 55 percent of U.S. adults said they were not satisfied with the choice between Biden and Trump. “This is not a happy electorate,” said poll director Lee Miringoff, “but it is one that is starting to deal with the realities that these two are the choices they’re going to have to pick from.” On the surface level, that’s true. Candidates who aren’t associated with the two major parties are running. But they’ve been kept off the debate stages for the past three decades—and more generally, off the radar.
Media coverage of this year’s alternative candidates—with the exception of independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has a famous name and a penchant for posing for pictures with animal carcasses—is very nearly nonexistent. And when third-party contenders are mentioned, it is usually as part of a warning that ballots cast for anyone other than the major party contenders will be “wasted.” That creates a political “reality” that voters think is unavoidable. Thus, post-debate polls that included Biden, Trump, and the independent and third-party prospects generally had the major party contenders splitting somewhere in the range of 85 to 90 percent of the vote, while RFK Jr. was in the high single digits and Stein, West, and Oliver trailed behind.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr., running for President in 2024 as an independent.
But when we scratch the surface, another picture emerges. Americans aren’t just frustrated with this pair of contenders in this particular presidential election. A Pew Research Center survey from 2022 found that 61 percent of Americans have a negative view of the Republican Party, while 57 percent have a negative view of the Democratic Party. Even accounting for the excesses of partisanship on each side of the political divide, those numbers suggest that millions of Americans are turned off by both parties. Among voters under age thirty, disdain for the major parties has skyrocketed.
A Gallup poll, conducted about a year after the Pew survey, found that 63 percent of U.S. adults agreed with a statement that the Republican and Democratic parties do “such a poor job” of representing the American people that “a third major party is needed.” That number has steadily risen over the past two decades, according to Gallup, despite the fact that when third parties are mentioned in the media, it is usually to dismiss them as “spoilers.”
The “spoiler” question is already getting plenty of attention this year. Both major parties, and their media echo chambers, are concerned about the prospect that Kennedy, the nephew of a Democratic President and the son of a Democratic presidential contender who in recent years has become a favorite with conspiracy theorists, will harm their prospects. Polls suggest that RFK Jr. draws support from Trump and Biden, which has led both parties to seek to thwart his efforts to get on ballots around the country. But the Greens and the Libertarians, which have decades-long histories of party building, will be on most state ballots, and you can bet that there will be plenty of warnings from the Democrats and the Republicans, telling voters to stay clear of what they dismiss as “minor parties.”
Most will do just that, especially as concerns about the threat posed by the antidemocratic Project 2025 playbook have caused many voters to believe that blocking Trump and the Republicans is mission-critical.
But the tendency to see third parties and independents merely as threats or, at best, annoyances misses the reality that they have a long history of contributing ideas to the political process in the United States—from Socialist advocates for old-age pensions (Social Security) and health care programs (Medicare and Medicaid) to Libertarian champions of LGBTQ+ rights and drug-law reform and Green contenders who have demanded that the climate crisis and U.S. militarism be addressed.
It also misses the reality that third parties can play a critical role in averting the crises that are created by major parties, as illustrated by what happened in France this summer.
In the June 9 elections for seats in the European Parliament, the far-right Rassemblement National (National Rally) party and its allies finished first, with one-third of the vote. That was a dramatic improvement in the position of the National Rally, which was founded by a convicted Holocaust denier, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and Pierre Bousquet, who during World War II was a section leader in the Nazi Waffen-SS. While current party leader Marine Le Pen, daughter of Jean-Marie, has tried to soften the image of the historically racist and xenophobic party, the strong showing for the National Rally sent shockwaves through French politics. President Emmanuel Macron responded by calling snap legislative elections in order to determine whether the French people were really prepared to accept political extremism that, since World War II, had been recognized as wholly unacceptable.
Unfortunately, Macron suffered from low approval ratings, and his Ensemble political coalition was weak, unfocused, and divided. After being crushed in the European Parliament voting—falling behind the National Rally by an almost 3-1 margin and losing ten seats—there were real questions about whether it could muster the energy or the resolve to stop the march of a rightwing movement that many commentators have identified as a modern expression of fascism—and that others compared with the MAGA movement of Donald Trump, a Marine Le Pen fan. Luckily for France, and the world, it wasn’t necessary to wait for the ill-advised and unpopular Macron to sort things out.
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Jean-Luc Mélenchon, founder of the leftwing France Unbowed Party, a member party of the New Popular Front.
France is a true multi-party democracy with multiple groupings on the right, in the center, and on the left. The leading figure on the left, three-time presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, brought his popular France Unbowed party into alliance with the Socialist Party of former Presidents François Mitterrand and François Hollande, the Greens, and the historic French Communist Party to form the New Popular Front (NPF). The parties maintained their distinct identities and ideological stances, but they came together with a common goal of beating the far-right threat. And it worked.
Running on a radical platform that promised to tax the rich, raise wages, lower the retirement age, cap prices on food and other essentials, legislate for carbon neutrality, and seek a full ceasefire in Gaza, the NPF stole the populist thunder from the right and finished first in the decisive second round of voting. The NPF will form the largest grouping in the new parliament, while Macron and his allies will form the second-largest camp, and Le Pen’s vanquished National Rally will form the third bloc.
It is often said multiparty democracy creates confusion and complexity, and that can be the case. But it can also produce dynamic responses to challenges that mainstream parties fail even to grasp—let alone meet. In France, Mélenchon and the New Popular Front proved what is possible. That’s something the American left should consider as it looks to the future. The 2024 election will be run along the old rules, and the threat posed by Trump and his MAGA movement leaves no margin for error in the eyes of many progressives like Sanders and U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York.
When the current threat has passed, however, and Americans are thinking about how to avert the next one, there is a strong case to be made for bold changes to our electoral system. Proportional representation, instant-runoff voting, and the radical reform of presidential and Congressional elections, as well as open debates and more freewheeling media coverage, might break the grip of a two-party system that has produced a 2024 contest that leaves most voters frustrated, angry, and increasingly disenchanted with the American experiment.