I know that I'm supposed to invoke Italy as a cautionary tale any time that someone lambastes the two party system.
But if there were a Conservative party that had about 25% support among the populous and got 25% of the seats in congress, then we could form real coalitions with the RINOs, but ONLY if they gave us some of the things we wanted.
This is the way that the religious parties get anything at all in Israel. If there were a two party system in Israel, there might not be an Israel. The RINO or DINO equivalents would have ceded over most of the country to the Palestinians by now.
“if there were a Conservative party that had about 25% support among the populous and got 25% of the seats in congress, then we could form real coalitions with the RINOs, but ONLY if they gave us some of the things we wanted.”
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There are far more than two parties - Libertarian, Constitutional and Green quickly come to mind. You don’t think of them because they have little power; they have little power due to the dynamics of politics where people want their votes to count.
For example, if the election were to be between a Democrat, a Republican and a ‘Conservative’, and the polls showed 40% for both Democrat and Republican and only 20% for ‘Conservative’, when it came time to vote, many ‘Conservative’ voters will vote for the candidate that has the best chance of defeating the candidate they want the least. The third party thereby keeps getting weaker and weaker.
There are intrinsic reasons we have only two ‘major’ political parties. Review what happened to the Whig party.
That can't happen in our system. To get into Congress, you have to win whole congressional districts. That makes it very difficult for any third party to get any seats at all. The only way a 25% party could get 25% of the seats would be for its support to be concentrated in several congressional districts so that it can be a majority party in certain parts of the country.
3rd parties don't have this problem in parliamentary systems like Israel's where seats are awarded proportionally, and hence a party with even 15% can get parliamentary representation.