MILWAUKEE — As Republicans assemble to nominate former President Donald Trump for the third consecutive time and Democrats implode over the otherwise straightforward renomination of President Joe Biden, America is increasingly detached from the two major parties.
The news media will cover the Republican National Convention here on the western shore of Lake Michigan and next month’s Democratic National Convention some 100 miles away in downtown Chicago as if most people are rank-and-file members of the two major parties.
Similar to the declining number of members in fraternal organizations, civic clubs, and churches, the affinity for the Democratic and Republican parties isn’t what it once was.
In many states, whether they’re called unaffiliated, unenrolled, independent, no-party, or something else, these voters are a plurality and, in some cases, a majority of the electorate.
The best example may be Colorado. The Centennial State was once a Republican bastion before becoming competitive in the aughts, when the two parties each had a third of voters. Now a record 48% of voters are unaffiliated. And yet, elected Democrats enjoy unchecked political power, even though they outnumber Republicans by just 3 percentage points — 27% to 24%.
The same is true in America writ large: The politically homeless are now a plurality, with 43% identifying as neither Democrat nor Republican, according to polling earlier this year from Gallup.
Democrats and Republicans maintain their duopoly through a combination of the first-past-the-post electoral system (that is to say, the candidate with the most votes wins) and state-level laws that give their standard-bearers automatic access to the general election ballot.
While a handful of states have enacted modest reforms, ranging from “jungle primaries” to alternative voting systems such as ranked choice voting, most races at the federal, state, and local levels are contested by a head-to-head contest between a Democrat and a Republican under first-past-the-post.
Yes, third parties and well-funded no-party candidates, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., do poll well, at least when they’re included as options. But the entire structure and system is stacked against anyone who isn’t a donkey or an elephant.
A good example is what played out earlier this month across the pond.
Reform U.K., a new party that fuses national conservatism and populism, finished the general election in the United Kingdom at 14.3%. While that was good enough for third place, it only produced five seats in Parliament’s House of Commons. Compare that to the fourth-place Liberal Democrats, which took 72 seats with 12.2%, or the Green Party’s 6.4% share, which was good enough for four seats.
The disparity is a result of first-past-the-post in single-member districts — the same system as America.
It’s why a party can win the aggregate congressional or state legislative vote without winning a majority of seats. Winning requires a party to be efficiently organized across every state, district, county or local jurisdiction.
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Only Democrats and Republicans come close to that level of organizational strength. And even then, there are at least a half-dozen states with a major party that is a superminority rump.
Of course, the irony this year is that the national conventions may be the most important and politically meaningful conventions since the 1970s, when the quadrennial party confabs transitioned from being true conventions where the party decided its nominee to being tightly scripted infomercials.
Dennis Lennox is a political commentator and public affairs consultant. Follow @dennislennox on X.