Yes even Bernie
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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The two-party system is not fake, it's a very real inevitability of FPtP voting.
For example:
Ignoring that also turns everything to the right (if not through actual voting, through lower turnout).
The two party system is inevitable under FPTP, true. But that does not mean change is impossible. The Tea Party managed to take over the Republican Party from the inside out.
We need a Guillotine Party to do the same thing to the Democratic Party.
I'm not seeking to defend FPTP, butf the two party system is inevitable, how come the UK has 393 political parties? It's true that one of two parties usually wins, but against that backdrop, the SNP was able to flourish in Scotland. In America you literally have Republican, Democratic parties and Independents. It is not inevitable but it certainly isn't a good system for the modern age.
I don't know much about UK elections, but from what I see on Wikipedia it deploys different voting systems and even fptp is really a fptp system + party list so not exactly the same.
In US there truly is just a single election where you give a single vote for the candidate and whomever gets more votes wins.
Yes, there are primary elections too, but those aren't real elections, they are elections run by the parties to pick up their candidate. They actually could not hold election and just pick up the candidate themselves and that's what they often do for a second term.
The way it works with FPTP in US is that it naturally forces two parties, as you generally are forced to vote against someone and not for someone. This is because of there are two good candidates and one bad, the vote splits and the bad candidate wins due to spoiler effect. So people try to predict which candidates will likely win and vote for the lesser evil.
So no one in 3rd party has any chance, and generally most of the times the people who are running 3rd party are just pathetic.
Sometimes when a serious candidate runs in 3rd party it generally spoils for the candidate with similar views. That's how Bill Clinton won against HW Bush
For UK general elections (what we call elections to Parliament, our national legislature), the UK is divided into 650 constituencies, each of which elect one MP by FPTP. There is no party-list component.
The situation is different for other elections:
AMS is what we call MMP. Assemblies elected by AMS are composed of some single-member seats elected by FPTP which are then grouped into larger regions, each of which are allocated a certain number of seats to be used for the proportional component. These also use closed party lists, and is probably where the idea that our FPTP system is FPTP + party lists. It's not: FPTP is exactly the same in the UK as it is in the US. If there's any component on top of that, we call it AMS.