The USA’s two-party system is broken.

Here’s why it’s so hard to fix.

ABC News Photo

Before getting into the nitty-gritty of this contentious quagmire, I must confess, upfront, that I have an opinion: I’d like to see more political parties active in U.S. elections … and a coalition style government, as in other “Western” nations.

Why can’t we have that in America?

Politics. Tradition. And scores of whirling dervishes.

What has gone so wrong with the two-party nominating process that voters again are facing yet another election in which the parties are producing candidates they don’t like? And they – especially independents – really don’t like these candidates.

Despite the divides catapulting the country into chaos, it’s presumed that Donald J. Trump will win the Republican nomination for President and that current President Joe Biden will be the presumptive candidate of the Democratic party.

“When U.S. voters go to the polls to elect a president in 2024, they may be confronted with more familiar names on the ballot than they are used to seeing,” predicts Rob Garver in a November 11, 2023 Voice of America (VOA) article, “as relatively high-profile third-party candidates seek to take advantage of a year in which the likely candidates of the two major parties are suffering from low favorability ratings.”

Adding kindling to the fire, early last October, AP News reporter Steve Peoples emphasized that, “The rise of outsider candidates is an acute reminder of the intense volatility – and uncertainty – that hangs over the 2024 presidential election. Biden and Trump are extraordinarily unpopular. They’re running as the nation grapples with dangerous political divisions, economic anxiety, and a deep desire for a new generation of leadership in Washington.

The emergence of potential third-party nominees – independent or bilateral – is, once again, creating fearmongering on the entrenched pollical landscape with the assumption that no candidate other than a Democrat of Republican can win the USA’s 2024 presidential election … and that independents do collateral damage by taking away votes from the existing two parties and their chosen disciples.

But this year is different. Because of Trump and Biden. Not only is their rematch something most Americans don’t want to go through again, but, apart from their rather limited “bases,” most electors will be voting against one or the other rather than for them. Razor thin margins in Greek chorus polls put either the former president or current one ahead … but not by much. The twice impeached, four times indicted former president is beset by legal problems that he’s turned on their heads to his advantage, while Biden’s baggage (like Trump’s) includes misplaced classified documents, along with awkward foreign dis/entanglements, discontent about his avid support for Israel, and family connections with indicted felons. And, of course, there’s the matter of their ages—they’re both old and allow little elbow room for emerging voices.

Where’s the outcry? The public outrage?

The climate is far different heading into this year’s elections, with many voters from both parties exhausted by years of turmoil and chaos in Washington.

Historically, our electorate has featured 40% voting for Democrats, 40% voting for Republicans, and 20% identifying as issues-based voters. Today, the situation has significantly worsened for the two major parties, as both have shed support from center-oriented voters who perceive both the right and the left as increasingly pandering to activists and the extremes of each party.

Recent polling data indicate a new split: 35% leaning Democrat, 35% leaning Republican, and a full 30% who are unaffiliated, issues-based voters. Close to a third of voters today are issue-driven voters looking for solutions to the nation’s problems. These voters may well determine the winner in 2024.

“These are unprecedented times,” says Benjamin Chavis, a former head of the NAACP who is now working with third party group No Labels. “Never before has such a large number of Americans expressed their concerns and expressed their views and their aspirations for more choices.”

Nonetheless, we’ve been numbed into complacency, believing that – somehow – this, too, will pass … and life will go on, Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da. It’s the venerable Alfred E. Neuman shrug-off, “What, me worry?”

But that’s no longer the case—not this time around.

The New Yorker

There’s no denying that voters want other choices in 2024. But neither party is delivering, and voter dissatisfaction is becoming increasingly obvious as people migrate to “independent” status. Exit polls in 2020 reaffirmed the trend toward nonpartisan self-identification, with 26% of the electorate calling themselves conservative Republican, 17% liberal Democrat, and 57% … something else.

These percentages signify that the majority of the electorate no longer considers themselves part of either party’s base. Frustrated, they’re dominated by unhappy voters. They see the country’s two parties ignoring their concerns and continuing to nominate presidential candidates they neither like nor want as their leaders.

Call it a Catch 22, if you will … or “check” between the competing mates.

“What’s first going on at this point is that about 60% of the American public does not want to see a Trump-Biden rerun,” said CBS News (Minnesota) reporter Esme Murphy, “and therefore are looking for other candidates.”

Facing a likely choice between Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Joe Biden, many Americans are desperate for younger, less divisive options.

The electoral system in the U.S. is a two-party one. Two parties dominate the political field in all three branches of government: legislative, executive, and judicial. These are the Republicans and the Democrats.

Political factions or parties began to form during the struggle over ratification of the federal Constitution of 1787. Friction increased as attention shifted from the creation of a new federal government to how powerful that federal government would be.

Followers of the two first political parties, the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans, were organized in loose alliances led by members of the social elite who served in Congress or the executive branch.

Party labels were very fluid at this time, but for the most part, supporters of Washington and Adams adopted the label Federalists, while the opposition, led by Thomas Jefferson, became known as Democratic Republicans.

While many third-party and independent candidates ran for office in the past, few received enough public recognition and even fewer received states’ electoral votes. Ross Perot, who ran as an independent, received 19 percent of the overall vote in 1992 but did not win a single electoral vote. Democrats blame Green Party nominee Jill Stein for spoiling Hillary Clinton’s would-be victory in 2016, when Stein got more votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin than Trump’s margin of victory. “In 2020, a shift of just 45,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin would have been enough to tilt the election from Biden to Trump,” claims AP News writer Jonathan J. Cooper.

When such candidates get electoral votes, racial tensions are often involved. George Wallace (who won 46 electoral votes in 1968) and Strom Thurmond (39 electoral votes in 1948) were Southerners who ran as staunch opponents of integrating black and white Americans and are the last two non-Republicans and non-Democrats to win electoral votes.

The only candidate not running under the banner of one of the two major parties to have a legitimate chance at winning a general election was Theodore Roosevelt.

With the assassination of William McKinley on September 14, 1901, Roosevelt became the 26th president of the United States. Elected to a full term in 1904, he declared that he considered it his second term and would not run again. Almost immediately, he regretted making this statement. Roosevelt would only be 51 years old when he left office, more than able to seek another term.

Nevertheless, determined not to go back on his word, Roosevelt hand-picked his Secretary of War and close friend, William Howard Taft, to succeed him as the Republican candidate in 1908. Taft was not the progressive candidate Roosevelt had hoped he would be. Taft’s first term performance would eventually convince Roosevelt to go back on his word and run for a third term as president in 1912.

On the evening of June 22, 1912, former President Theodore Roosevelt asked his supporters to leave the floor of the Republican National Convention in Chicago. Republican progressives reconvened in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall and endorsed the formation of a national progressive party.

According to Reuters, citing a Gallup poll, some 63% of U.S. adults today agree with the 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 is up seven (7) percentage points from a year ago and the highest since Gallup first asked the question in 2003.

“Putting up a third-party candidate for president will be a much bigger challenge and, if history is any indication, probably a quixotic endeavor,” writes Michael Collins in USA Today. “No third-party candidate has ever come close to winning the presidency, but some sense that dissatisfaction with Biden and Trump could provide a viable path to victory in 2024.”

“Voters may be surprised at how many choices they actually have,” Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the University of Virginia told NBC News. “It’s going to make polls even harder to figure out. It’s an added haze over the whole battlefield.”

Bernard Tamas, a political scientist at Valdosta State University who studies third party movements in the United States and the author of The Demise and Rebirth of American Third Parties told Politico, “There is a huge opening for third parties.”

No Labels claims to be born from the horrible divisiveness of our current politics. “In reality, it is the fully begotten child of Citizens United,” says Charles P. Pierce in Esquire magazine’s January 17, 2024, issue. “Mother Jones (magazine) ran through the roster of the people funding No Labels and found that it is thickly infested with bet-hedging plutocrats:

“Among the No Labels backers are donors who contributed millions of dollars to Republican causes, such as past GOP presidential candidates and super-PACS connected to Republican congressional leadership, and several who have poured money into the Democratic presidential campaigns of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. One donor provided a big chunk of political cash to Donald Trump. Generally, these No Labels supporters, who mostly made contributions of $5,600 to its 2024 project, appear to favor conservative candidates, though many have played both sides of the aisle, financing both Republican and Democratic politicians.”

No Labels has ties to moderates from both parties: Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, former independent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, former Republican Gov. Jon Huntsman of Utah, and Republican Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, as well as Benjamin Chavis, former executive director of the NAACP.

Concludes Pierce: “What is plain from all of this is that the country’s oligarchs are seeking a safe space in our politics where their interests are protected until all this unseemly uproar among the proles settles down again. They don’t really care what the country’s like when it does.”

No Labels party members skew younger. More than half are younger than 35 and just 5% are older than 65, according to Phoenix-based Democratic data analyst Sam Almy.

More than 15,000 people in Arizona have registered to join this new political party floating a possible bipartisan “unity ticket” against Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

While that’s less than the population of each of Arizona’s 40 largest cities, “it’s still a number big enough to tip the presidential election in a critical swing state,” insists Jonathan J. Cooper, who believes that “The very existence of the No Labels group is fanning Democratic anxiety about Trump’s chances against an incumbent president facing questions about his age and record.”

In 2024’s election, however, Trump is also considered an incumbent president.

Supporters of No Labels maintain that the political climate is far different heading into this year’s election, with voters in both parties exhausted by years of turmoil and chaos in Washington.

No Labels leaders vehemently deny that they’ll be a spoiler for Trump and say they’ll only proceed if their candidate has a path to victory. Further, the group says it would withdraw its ticket if it feels it’s in danger of putting the former president back in office again. What’s more, No Labels would pursue a third-party ticket only if voters remain dissatisfied with the Democratic and Republican nominees, indicated Ryan Clancy, the group’s chief strategist.

“Donald Trump should never again be president of the United States,” wrote Lieberman and Chavis in a recent op-ed. At the same time, “a growing commonsense majority” is exhausted “by the politics of grievance and victimhood. They seek unity and cooperation. And they believe our country can do so much better than the choices of the election we seem headed for in 2024.”

Perhaps. But the major challenge for all this year’s candidates is navigating the onerous rules put in place by Republicans and Democrats to keep others off the ballot and freeze them out of the debates.

“Maybe the real threat to democracy is the unwillingness of the two parties to acknowledge a broken process that leaves too many voters without ‘good choices’ and might just open the door to independent or third-party candidates,” longtime congressional Republican adviser David Winston proposes in his Roll Call essay.

A key lesson of the 2020 election is that the process for electing the U.S. president is open to abuse. In addition to Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment, the 12^th Amendment looms as a possible threat in 2024. Through a process known as a “contingent election,” it requires Congress to select the president and vice president if no one gets a majority in the Electoral College.

“With two candidates, an Electoral College tie is always possible. But if a third-party candidate can win any electors, the likelihood of a majority winner decreases substantially,” declare Beau Tremitiere and Aisha Woodward in their October 30, 2023, article published in Lawfare. Unlike other third-party efforts, the bipartisan “unity ticket” floated by No Labels “could plausibly win a state or two in 2024 and keep anyone from reaching 270 electors.”

In U.S. presidential elections, there is no requirement that the winner receive a majority of the vote. The winner is the individual who receives 270 or more votes in the Electoral College—a complex system under which the candidate who receives the most votes in each state is awarded that state’s electors, the number of whom is determined by the state’s population.

This means that not only can someone who receives less than 50% of the popular vote become president, but, under certain circumstances, a candidate can win the presidency despite losing the popular vote. This has happened several times in U.S. history, most recently when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016.

No one can predict what would happen next, Tremitiere and Woodward shrug, because there is no federal law governing how a contingent election would be administered. The foreseeable outcomes range from destabilizing to calamitous.

“Unsettled legal and procedural questions permeate nearly every aspect of the process, and in today’s political environment, high-stakes legal disputes and constitutional hardball would be inevitable,” contend Tremitiere and Woodward. “Even if Congress could avoid a prolonged presidential vacancy, it might elevate to the White House a candidate who decisively lost at the ballot box and in the Electoral College.”

Today, a third-party ticket could trigger a contingent election simply by winning a small handful of electors, because the current electoral map “reliably delivers each major party a sizable and relatively equal number of electors, leaving only a small number of competitive races,” they say. As a result, the likelihood is reasonable that the leading candidate will barely exceed the majority threshold.

Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, a highly respected election expert, identifies four toss-up states for the 2024 election: Georgia (16 electoral votes), Arizona (11), Wisconsin (10), and Nevada (6). That’s a total of 43 electoral votes. Other analysts include North Carolina (16 votes), Pennsylvania (19), and Michigan (15).

Sabato’s calculations assume that Democrats begin with 260 blue-state electoral votes. To Republicans, he allots 235 red-state votes. If the Republican candidate were to win both Georgia and Arizona, those 27 additional electoral votes would provide 262 to the Republican candidate.

If a strong third-party candidate were to win two of the remaining states, say Wisconsin and Nevada, he or she would have 16 electoral votes … leaving no candidate with the requisite number of electoral votes.

Could this example, or a similar scenario using other swing states, happen?

Let’s just say that it’s possible.

Historically, our electorate has found 40% voting for Democrats, 40% voting for Republicans, and 20% being unaffiliated, issues-based voters. But today, the situation has significantly worsened for the two major parties as they’ve shed support from center-oriented voters who perceive both the right and the left as increasingly pandering to activists and the extremes of each party.

Recent polling data indicate a new split: 35% leaning Democrat, 35% leaning Republican, and 30% who are unaffiliated, issues-based voters. Close to a third of today’s electorate are issue-driven voters seeking solutions to the nation’s problems. These voters may well determine the winner in 2024.

“If the universe of candidates is spinning things around, Biden is entirely in his own orbit,” alleges Hanna Trudo in The Hill (November 25,2023). “That is to say, the president is not really even acknowledging that there are forces working against him beyond the Republican primary field.”

Trudo notes that Biden is polling at historically low numbers, and voters in the states he needs to win – like Pennsylvania and Michigan and Arizona – are showing, in a handful of surveys, that they prefer Trump.

Last summer, after a reporter cited poll numbers suggesting just 26 percent of Democrats wanted him to be the nominee, the president rejected the idea that a large majority of his own party’s voters didn’t want him on the ballot in 2024.

“Read the polls, Jack!” Biden argued. “You guys are all the same. That poll showed that 92 percent of Democrats, if I ran, would vote for me.” Biden’s statement, however, was somewhat misleading: Ninety-two percent of Democrats said they would vote for Biden in a general election rematch with Trump, not that they wanted him to run. In fact, 2022 exit polls showed that two-thirds of USA voters didn’t want him to run for reelection.

Nevertheless, Joe Biden launched his re-election campaign with a video in which he said the country faces a pivotal moment in the 2024 vote. The 2024 “outsiders” likely won’t make it any easier for Biden. In fact, they’re actively challenging his core message on democracy, which the president’s team says is essentially on the ballot next fall as Trump and his supporters undermine the rule of law and integrity of the vote.

The Democratic Party will need convincing that Biden’s the best candidate they have against Trump. Polls show about half of Democrats want the party to nominate someone else—although many of those have said they will still vote for him. Because of Trump … not because of Biden’s record.

Following decades of public service working both sides of the aisle, Joe Biden has realized the dream of his lifetime: to be the USA’s president. But even if he were to win the 2024 election, he’d face formidable challenges with a potential GOP-dominated Congress and Supreme Court.

Within the Democratic party, concerns have grown over the president’s age (he’ll be 82 shortly after the 2024 election), his low approval ratings (he’s mired in the low 40s in job approval), ongoing political struggles, … and a series of stories examining whether Biden should run again and, if not, who might take his place.

News of classified documents found in his Delaware home have not helped in soothing these concerns. Nor has Republican finger-pointing at his son, Hunter, decrying a double standard against their own. Biden is having a hard time convincing Congress to increase funding for Russia’s war with Ukraine, as well as public uneasiness for his staunch support of Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu. The world outside of Washington, DC, is increasingly rallying around the Palestinians.

If Biden does not run, the 2024 Democratic primaries would become a much more open contest. There are several potential candidates:

• Kamala D. Harris would be the presumptive nominee. Biden’s announcement may raise some doubts about her. According to The Washington Post, “There have been questions about how voters might feel about that, given that her ascension to the top job is a more real prospect with Biden in his 80s, and she’s generally less popular than both Biden and recent vice presidents. Polls suggest she’s the nominal front-runner in a Biden-less race, albeit without anything approaching a convincing margin.

• Gretchen Whitmer Democrats have shown they’re interested in pragmatism by nominating Biden in 2020. It’s hard to see them doing worse than the well-regarded and liked female governor of a swing state (Michigan) who has won two campaigns there by about 10 points. Whitmer has said she wouldn’t run even in a Biden-less race, but it’s not difficult to see a huge recruiting effort emerging. Plenty will believe she is the answer.

• Amy Klobuchar The Minnesota senator is among those seen as quietly doing the things one would do to remain a part of the conversation in a post-Biden race. She makes sense as a stand-in for Biden and his more pragmatic brand of politics, but she might have competition for that lane with others.

• Pete Buttigieg The transportation secretary seemingly is aiming higher — whether in 2024 or 2028 — after passing on running for an open Senate seat in his adoptive home state of Michigan. While he finished fifth in 2020’s pledged delegates, it’s worth recalling that he just about won both of the first two states, Iowa and New Hampshire. His lack of appeal to minority voters is a major obstacle that must be dealt with—especially given his open sexual orientation. But he’s also the most established and capable national messenger on this list. And perhaps more people would give him a look now that he’s no longer just a 30-something mayor of a medium-size city. If elected, Buttigieg would be the youngest ever president and the first openly gay man to become president.

• Gavin Newsom Despite his protestations, the California governor is widely viewed as being among the most likely candidates to run if Biden falters. He’s gone to great lengths to build his national profile, while pushing his party toward a more in-your-face approach to taking on Republicans. It’s easy to see how that message might play well. Newsom is less disliked than Biden and Harris, but is still polling in the single digits—which may be explained by his slightly lower name recognition among voters. If Newsom enters the race for the Democratic nomination, his campaign strategies would need to be focused on raising his public profile across the nation.

“These points may be obvious but bear repeating: a great many voters are hurting and rightfully angry: about powerful corporations controlling their democracy and profiting off disease and poverty. About endless wars draining national coffers and maiming their kids. About stagnating wages and soaring costs. This is the world – inflamed on every level – that the two-party duopoly has knowingly created,” notes UK’s The Guardian newspaper.

No sitting president in modern American history has been primaried successfully, although intraparty challenges usually end up hurting the incumbent in the general election. If something happens to change Biden’s mind or circumstances in the months before the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, however, “then it’s open season,” Tampa-area Democrat Doris Carroll told The Wall Street Journal.

The ball is in the president’s court. If he decides not to run amid increased calls for him to step aside, the Democratic party certainly has options, and the primaries could shape up to become a highly competitive contest.

As they should be.