2026 is a big election year. The November midterms will determine who controls the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, and the results could make or break President Donald Trump’s (R) ability to roll out his agenda.
Discontent among Republican and Democratic voters with their own parties has sparked a broader conversation about the two-party system.
The Democratic and Republican parties have dominated American politics since the Civil War.
Before them, there were the Whigs, the Democratic Republicans, the Federalists, and a laundry list of others. But even then, the two-party system was the standard.
Why?
Mara Suttman-Lea, an associate professor of Government at Connecticut College, said it’s because we decide elections in a winner-takes-all system, called plurality voting, or “first past the post.” The person with the most support wins the election.
“In any race where only one person wins, voters are going to gravitate towards the candidates most likely to win, and it's going to squeeze out third parties over time,” Suttmann-Lea said.
This differs from the system used by most democracies, such as Spain. That system is proportional representation. Under proportional representation, people vote for a party. If a party receives, say, 25% of the votes, they get 25% of the seats.
Under the American system, if a person votes for a candidate who loses, they’re represented by one person — and it's a person they did not support.
“Without something like proportional representation, third parties don't necessarily have an incentive to form and to organize and to run as candidates that are going to win elections,” Suttmann-Lea said. “Eventually, they get kind of subsumed into the Democratic or the Republican Party.”
Third parties exist in the U.S., and they have pull. But they often endorse candidates who are already running as Democrats or Republicans.
One example is the Working Families Party, which is further left than the Democratic label but typically endorses Dems.
“There's not as much incentive for third parties to form, and when they do, they kind of form as, like, pressure valves,” Suttmann-Lea said. “They can, you know, put the heat on major party organizations.”
And, it’s important to remember that political parties are private organizations. State and federal law, and the Supreme Court have power over them, but not a ton of it.
“It's a really strange hybrid,” Suttmann-Lea said. “They're private organizations that have immense power. They set their own rules for nomination. Those rules vary from state to state, and so we have to sort of understand constitutionally, the position that they are in. You know, they are not public entities. They are private organizations. They get to set the rules.”
For now, the two-party system is likely to continue dominating. But with discontent among voters in both the Republican and Democratic bases, a mainstream push to get away from the system could be in the near future.
