III. Voters And The Two-Party System

Most voters are dissatisfied with the state of U.S. politics, and in particular, the hyper-partisan polarization, the gridlock and failures of government, and the anxieties it generates. But they lack a mechanism to express that frustration within the two-party system. The most obvious challenge is that they can only send a very crude signal: Democrat or Republican. There are rarely third-party options. Most of the third parties produced by our current system do not offer viable, moderate choices. Put simply, voters cannot clearly signal, through voting, that they want less hyper-partisanship.

Imagine a long-time Republican voter who is unhappy with their party moving towards a more extreme end of the political spectrum. This voter also sees the Democratic Party as very extreme and unrepresentative of their views. What should this voter do? A vote for an extreme Republican means that the Republican Party will only become more extreme. A vote for a Democrat helps extreme Democrats hold power. Voting for a third party is a wasted protest vote, assuming a third party even mounts a candidate in this particular district. Not voting because neither candidate is appealing is giving up this voter’s greatest power—the right to vote. In short, a voter who views both parties as too extreme is effectively powerless in this system.

In theory, political parties should select more moderate candidates capable of appealing to the broadest electorate. This is often known as the “median voter” theory, which posits that in a two-party system, both parties should converge on the political middle in order to maximize their vote share.

However, since three decades of parties pulling away from the center have contradicted this theory, a simpler explanation is that the theory is either wrong, or it depends on particular conditions that no longer hold. In reality, the political science consensus is now turning against the median voter theory. Some critics argue that it was at best an overly simplistic model that could hold under very specific assumptions; others believe it was simply wrong because the specific assumptions it stipulated about party and voter behavior were largely fantastical.¹

Whether or not the median voter was a useful construct, it is nevertheless true that many voters still prefer moderation and compromise to implacable extremism. But as parties move to the extremes and refuse to work together, it is hard for voters to tell which party is more moderate, and their judgments are likely impacted by their previous allegiances. An option to vote for a moderate party that occupies the “middle ground” would, by definition, allow and amplify their preference for more moderation in civic life.

But no such party exists, and for a reason that any sensible person will immediately understand: in America’s plurality-voting, single-member district (PV-SMD) system, a vote for a third-party candidate is either a “spoiler” vote or a “wasted” vote.² Neither is a constructive way to participate in elections, and citizens properly understand this. Because third parties are spoilers (or just irrelevant) in our elections, all political ambition and money flows through the two major parties. This keeps third parties as marginal actors in politics: they struggle to raise money and legitimacy, are unable to recruit credible, viable candidates, and they exist only on the political fringes. Thus, even when voters want to support a third party, they’d be foolish to do so.

Thus, the fact that a moderate third party has not emerged is not because nobody has had the idea. It’s because the reality of actually building such a viable party under the current election rules makes it the longest of long shots.