Institutions, incentives and inertia

By Fester:

I'm a Democrat and a lifelong Red Sox fan, so I am used to seeing situations of great advantage being squandered, although this expectation has been tempered with recent successes.  Cernig's post on the Democrats being able to screw up this year is one I sympathize with, but I believe his conclusions and hopes will be wrong and unfulfilled:

Well, the Dems might just have done it again - snatched defeat from the jaws of victory....

for the positive side - a Mccain victory handed to him by the Clintonistas might just mean the end of the two party monopoly in America. An Obama victory gained despite this primary season's bloodletting and erosion of trust might well mean the same thing. There's a lot of dynamic just now that says the natural tendency to stick with what you know and not rock the boat to the point of capsizing might be itself overturned. [my emphasis]

I think Cernig is wrong here as there are strong incentives and institutional reasons for two party systems to be a relatively stable equilibrium with the occassional burst of an ascending third party displacing and thereby making irrelevant a stagnant and failing major party.  The Republicans did this to the Whigs in the 1850s and that is the last time a wholesale replacement of parties has occurred.  And the Whigs did not stick around; instead they fragmented and migrated to one of the two remaining large parties.

The peculiar particularities of the American electoral system with a strong president drawn from outside of the Legislature, single member districts and first past the post voting.  The goal in all situations is to assemble a plurality.  These contests are individually winner take all contests so that a candidate with support of 25% of the population wins nothing besides abuse, and a candidate with support of 3 more votes than anyone else takes the entire prize even if there were seventeen candidates running.  This incentive set quickly produces two blocs that seek to gain a slim majority.

The only prominent national example where this incentive set breaks down is the Democratic nominating process with state by state and district by district proportional delegate allocation and voting.  The old Louisiana open primary system of pitting an unlimited number of candidates together and then advancing the top two vote getters if no one receives an initial primary majority also produces different incentives.  However the institutional organizing, branding and fundraising advantages of aligning with the dominant political organizations in the country swamp the local effects.   

I think Mark at Publius Endures catches the dynamic much better than Cernig as he looks at how libeterians and liberals could integrate into a different coalition:

The fact is that the �Left� in this country, just like the �Right� is just a mish-mosh coalition of various ideological groups. Those interest groups can and do change sides over the course of time, as different issues come to predominate within the group.

Much of what the �Left� generally claims to believe in is not as universally held as they like to think. Instead, many in the modern Left coalition, just like many in the modern Right coalition, conform their political views over time on lower priority issues to match the views of coalition members to whom those issues are of higher
importance.

So I think it depends which element of the �Left� you�re talking about....

The coalitions that are assembled under the labels and institutions of Republicans and Democrats will change after this election. But that is normal and healthy.  And this is the far more likely outcome than a complete rejiggering of American voting rules, political norms and constitutional governance structure that would be needed to break a two party hold on power.