Can someone please explain? Does the US only have two political parties? That sounds horrendously undemocratic. I know next to nothing about US politics so I may be wrong.
Edit: Also, why is one party called “Democratic” and the other “Republican”? Does this make the Republican party non-democratic? Is this a non-official naming scheme that people created or does seriously only one of them support democracy? Thank you for the answers :)
For all practical purposes yes. It sucks, but as you can see, speaking about third parties gets most people pissed off as it’s considered voter suicide / throwing away your vote to vote for an extremely minor third party candidate. The financial support within these two power house parties makes it unlikely this system will ever change. As someone pointed out here, a systematic change like ranked choice voting where third parties could aggregate credit without forcing voters to abandon the two parties they are comfortable with would be the only hope of moving away from the bullshit 2 party system. However, that’s not in the interest of the two parties that already run the government, so never going to happen at scale at least.
I fo think that people should vote this way to show the disagreement. Increase in votes to third parties can make more people a bit more confident in voting for them the next time right?
Can someone please explain? Does the US only have two political parties? That sounds horrendously undemocratic. I know next to nothing about US politics so I may be wrong.
Edit: Also, why is one party called “Democratic” and the other “Republican”? Does this make the Republican party non-democratic? Is this a non-official naming scheme that people created or does seriously only one of them support democracy? Thank you for the answers :)
For all practical purposes yes. It sucks, but as you can see, speaking about third parties gets most people pissed off as it’s considered voter suicide / throwing away your vote to vote for an extremely minor third party candidate. The financial support within these two power house parties makes it unlikely this system will ever change. As someone pointed out here, a systematic change like ranked choice voting where third parties could aggregate credit without forcing voters to abandon the two parties they are comfortable with would be the only hope of moving away from the bullshit 2 party system. However, that’s not in the interest of the two parties that already run the government, so never going to happen at scale at least.
I fo think that people should vote this way to show the disagreement. Increase in votes to third parties can make more people a bit more confident in voting for them the next time right?