Editor’s Note: This has been a crazy week for me. Earlier this week, I had some elective heart surgery to correct an irregular heartbeat. While the surgery was a complete success, it did require me to spend part of two days and one full night in the hospital this week. I just got home today.
Due to my hospital stay, I was not able to write Between The Lines for today. Instead, I have reprinted an excellent article written by former presidential candidate in 2020, Andrew Yang, who is a political Independent.
Mr. Yang, like yours truly and lots of others in the conservative movement, believes we need to substantially overhaul America’s political system to include more than just two parties and thus only two serious contenders in most presidential elections. This really needs to change, soon!
I encourage you to read how Mr. Yang proposes to change our political system and know that I agree with just about everything he wrote below.
America Is Hungry for New and Better Political Options
by Andrew Yang, earlier this month in Newsweek magazine
“Americans are fed up with our current political system. President Biden’s approval rating has been sitting in the low 40s for most of his presidency. Congress is sitting at 20 percent. Even the Supreme Court, long seen as the branch with the best reputation, is currently sitting underwater, at 40 percent approval vs. 58 percent disapproval.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Congress has gotten into debt ceiling fights almost like clockwork for the past decade. The Supreme Court has been overturning decades of precedent, even on issues that were widely viewed as settled like Roe v. Wade.
If anything, it’s fair to say that our current leaders are creating new problems rather than solving long-standing ones like our broken infrastructure, overwhelmed immigration system, and failing public education.
This reality has led Americans to grow hungry for new and better options. Seventy-five percent of the country is effectively under single-party rule, and both the Republicans and Democrats have given up on even trying to contest in vast areas of America. Nearly three out of five Americans believe a new political party is needed, and younger generations are showing even less of a desire to continue to operate in our two-party system.
Only 40 percent of Americans think that the two parties are doing an adequate job of representing them. Independents and unaffiliated voters are the largest voting bloc by far, and, with the two parties seeing their membership decline precipitously, there are almost more independent voters than Democrats and Republicans combined.
What’s driving this? A belief that the two parties are increasingly catering to their bases and the extremes. That’s a [main] feature of our current system, not a bug.
In our current system, most states have closed party primaries to determine candidates for the general election. Since these primaries freeze out independents, and only the most partisan members of each party vote in them, the candidates that are selected are the ones that most appeal to the fringes of each party. The incentives of our system promote the continued polarization of our elected officials. In the current system, good policy doesn’t matter—because neither side has an incentive to fix problems that they can instead use to bash the other side while fundraising to fuel the machine. We’re behind the curve on addressing past issues, let alone things like AI policy.
We need reforms such as open, nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice voting to give everyone a voice in selecting our candidates. Ranked-choice voting, and similar alternative voting methods, reduce the incentives for attacking opponents, as each candidate will need to get the second-choice vote from many people to win the election. We’ve already seen these reforms lead to better outcomes in Alaska. There, Senator Lisa Murkowski built a coalition of people across the political spectrum to retain her seat against an election-denying opponent. Those same rules helped elect Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola over former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who had much more extreme views and a much higher initial profile.
But, on top of these reforms, Americans need more choices. By setting up a system where there are only two options, each party needs only convince voters that they’re better than the other team to win an election.
Coupled with our skewed partisan primary system, this creates a race to the bottom—one that we’re all suffering the consequences of now, as we head into a likely presidential rematch between two candidates that Americans don’t want. [Emphasis added, GDH]
We need more choices. But we also need better choices. AMEN!!
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.