RENDEZ-VOUS WITH AMERICA

An Explanation of the US Political System, Chapter 4

Patrick Siegler-Lathrop

CHAPTER 4

I have lived in Europe for decades, and have witnessed many US Presidential elec-tions. At every election, non-Americans ask me about the process, and I see that they do not understand it well. I propose in a series of short chapters to explain the complex and cumbersome US Presidential election and political system[1].

As was explained in Chapter 2, the US Presidential election is not a national election, it is the sum of fifty, simultaneous, independent, winner take all plurality elections, one per state, for the Electoral College votes of each state. In Chapter 3, we explored the Electoral College. This Chapter 4 addresses America's two-Party system.

EXPLANATION - Two Political Parties

A: Historical Explanation: There is no mention of Political Parties in the US Constitution, and George Washing-ton, who was twice unanimously elected the first president of the country as an independent, was highly suspicious of them. However, from his first election in 1788-89, there appeared two competing political factions: Federalists and Anti-Federalists, setting the tone for America's attachment virtually throughout its history to a dual-party political landscape.

During Washington's first term, his Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton, from New York, and John Adams from Massachusetts and other proponents of a strong central government and a national banking system, created the Federalist Party, with an anti-slavery platform that was pro-business, promoting industrial economic growth. They were elitist, highly suspicious of democracy, believing that the wealthy (identi-fied as the most intelligent) should govern, and in foreign relations, they were political-ly sympathetic to the United Kingdom. The Party was geographically concentrated in New England, with backing in some Middle Atlantic States.

Opposing the Federalist vision of government was a group led by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration of Independence and ideolo-gical leader of the group, and James Madison, often referred to as the "Father of the Constitution", who proposed a more populist vision, defending slavery, states' rights, and a decentralized, limited federal government. They created in 1792 the Republican Party (it quickly changed its name to the Democratic-Republican Party, not to be confused with the current Republican Party), which represented rural, agricultural interests (95% of the US population was rural in 1780), including most slave-owning Southern planters. In foreign relations, influenced by the ideals of the French Revolution, they were politically sympathetic to France.

The Federalists Party won only one presidential election, of John Adams in 1797, then lost to the Democratic-Republican Party during the two-term presidencies of Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809) and James Madison (1809-1817). The Federalist Party disappeared in 1816, in part because of its lukewarm support of the War of 1812 against the UK, introducing the only eight years in American history without two dominant factions (1816-1824), referred to as the "Era of Good Feelings", an experi-ment, led by Presi-dent James Monroe, to see if America could live without political parties, which he viewed as harmful to the country. In fact, the absence of an opposi-tion party led to the multiplication of regional factions and personal conflict within the government, to the detriment of any national agenda.

The experiment fell apart in the 1824 presidential election, which exposed polarization over the issue of the extension of slavery to new territories, and led to the break-up of the Democratic-Republican Party into two major factions, one continuing under the same name, later dropping "Republican" to become the Democratic Party in 1844, the precursor to today's Democratic Party. The other group became subsequently the Whig Party, winning presidential elections until 1854, when it in turn split between pro- and anti-slavery groups. The anti-slavery faction became the National Union Party, formed in opposition to the extension of slavery in the new territories and defending a strong central authority against states' rights, with Abraham Lincoln elected president in 1860 as the first leader of the National Union Party, which was to become the modern-day Republican Party.

Since 1852, either a Democrat or a Republican has won every US presidential election and only once was the loser from another Party. The exception was Theodore Roosevelt who had won the 1908 election as a Republican but failed in 1912 to obtain the Republican nomination, so he created his own Bull Moose Party and ran unsuccessfully for the presidency, splitting the Republican vote and allowing the Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win the election.

In conclusion, a summary review of the history of the US clearly shows a virtual permanent attachment to a two-Party system.

B. Winner take all elections, Duverger's Law: It might, however, be premature to conclude that American politicians by their nature fall into only two opposing groups, in contrast to politicians in countries with multiple political parties. As noted in Chapters 1 and 2, in presidential elections it is the states that determine how they select their Electors, and today, virtually all the states[2] use single round, "winner take all" (referred to as "plurality voting") popular elections to choose their Electors. 

Maurice Duverger, a French sociologist in the 1950s, identified the strong tendency that single round plurality voting per district tends to evolve towards two-party systems, whereas a double vote majority (where the top two contenders compete in a second round if there is no initial majority) or proportional representation (where winners are allocated by proportion of the votes) tend to favor multi-party systems. 

Duverger points out that plurality voting will often lead to what he called Polarization: concentration to two dominant parties because there is little incentive for new parties to form, since they know that even if they obtain a substantial minority in votes, they have to overcome the virtually impossible hurdle of being first to obtain an electoral result. A particularly flagrant example of the consequences of "winner take all" state elections was the US presidential election of 1992, when Ross Perot, a wealthy Texas businessman, received 19% of the popular vote but was unable to win a single Electoral College vote from any state (see Chapter 3 for an explanation of the Electoral College system). 

The two-party tendency is reinforced by the fact that voters will often be hesitant to cast a "useless" vote for a party that has no chance to win. Duverger presents the example of an election with 100,000 conservative voters and 80,000 liberal voters where normally the conservative candidate will win. Should a person within the conservative faction decide to create a new party, that would split the conservative vote, and unless that new party receives more that 80,000 conservative votes (which would appear unlikely) or less than 20,000 (then why launch it), the launch of the new party will insure victory of the opposing liberal party. To avoid such a situation the majority party will do everything it can - and will have a strong argument - to prevent the creation of a new party and to persuade its voters to avoid "wasting" their vote by voting for it. 

There have been several cases in US history when a majority party split into two factions, leading to the election of the presidential candidate from the less dominant party, but in each case, the majority quickly regrouped and returned to the two-faction system. The above-mentioned unsuccessful bid by Theodore Roosevelt to win with a new party, leading to Woodrow Wilson's victory, is a case in point.

Even though there are counter examples in various other countries to Duverger’s Law, in the US “winner take all” political systems, third parties have been completely shut out of national office since 1856; it appears highly unlikely that anyone will break through the domination of the Republican and Democratic Parties. 

C. Why did states choose winner take all elections? As we saw in Chapter 2, the Constitution gives the states the right to choose the specific method for selecting Electors. In the earliest elections from 1789, the most widely used method was for the state legislatures to choose Electors, with the second most popular method to organize elections per electoral district, with a single winner per district, both of these methods making it possible to spread the Electoral votes among several candidates. Only a few states initially used a statewide popular vote, limited of course to white males, but as states frequently wanted to favor a presidential candidate from their own state, the advantage of concentrating their votes on a native candidate became apparent and naturally encouraged adopting a "winner take all" approach. The origin of the US, a federation of autono-mous states and the natural rivalry between them meant that as soon as a few states used "winner take all" statewide elections, there was a strong incentive for the others to follow. As shown in the chart below, by 1824, more than half of the states used that system, and nearly all of them had adopted it by 1836.

From "How the Electoral College Became Winner-Take-All", Devin McCarthy, FairVote, August 21, 2012.

The same phenomenon favoring the two dominant Parties has governed elections to the US Senate and House of Representatives. Since the Second World War, only two of the 535 members of Congress have been something other than Republicans or Democrats (and one of the two is Bernie Sanders, who identifies as an Independent but virtually always sides with the Democrats). 

Nevertheless, the US has had and has today many splinter parties, including the Libertarian, Green and Populist Parties. Although they have never won a national election, they have occasionally won local elections and have siphoned off votes from the two dominant parties, to sometimes influence national election results.

D. Role of US Political Parties: Although there is no reference to political parties in the US Constitution, for nearly 170 years they have served the critical role of mediation that has made the American Constitution work so well. The Democratic and Republican Parties exist and function at three levels: the public that identifies with each Party, the candidates and officials who govern under the Party banner, and the Party organization. 

In contrast to people in most other countries, the majority of Americans register as voters by party, either Republican or Democratic. It is difficult to obtain precise figures as many states do not record party affiliation, but a Gallup poll in March, 2020 noted that 30% or about 75 million of American adults consider themselves Democrats, 30% or about 75 million Republicans, and a rapidly increasing 36% or over 90 million identify as Independent (the vast majority of "Independents" nevertheless vote consistently with one of the two Parties). 

The Democratic and Republican Parties fulfill the standard functions of all political parties, but as they have singularly dominated the political landscape of a large, powerful and diverse country for so long, they do so with considerably more power than political parties in most other democracies. The Parties: i) Choose the process and select candidates for elected positions, ii) Assist officials in power in carrying out their mandate, iii) Choose what and how to inform the public on political issues, and iv) Limit the control of the opposing Party in power, be it at federal, state or local level.

Under the US system of "checks and balances" purposefully structured by the Founding Fathers of the US Republic, there are three separate branches of power in government: executive, legislative and judicial, in part to limit the powers of the others. This same tri-partite structure exists at the states' level. The Democratic and Republican Parties vie for control of the executive and legislative branches at the federal level and in each state, and even though judges are in principle expected to be non-partisan, experience strongly suggests many are not. As a result, the control and direction of the US government operates through the agency of the Democratic and Republican Parties at all levels of government.

Although some consider the American two-party system is too narrow to fully reflect democratic governance, it has worked well over most of the past 170 years, in part because of the following:

            - Knowing that they have to retain the allegiance of a broad electorate, each of the political parties simplified the choices presented to the voters, limited the presentation and impact of radical ideas and typically presented middle-of-the-road platforms appealing to a large section of the electorate (the latest example of this is the recent Democratic Party choice of Joe Biden rather than Bernie Sanders as its presidential candidate for the 2020 election);

            - Both the Democratic and Republican Parties have historically focused on policies rather than personalities;

            - The Parties have produced and reinforced over time a unifying consensus in the country on fundamental freedoms and values, espoused by both political parties, reducing excessive polarization of the public and insuring smooth government transitions from one party to the other; and

            - The Democratic and Republican Parties have in the past maintained a dynamic equilibrium fed by a level of trust and dialogue between the two parties and their elected officials, encouraging them to reach the essential compromises required to govern and to promulgate new programs and laws in the public interest.

E. Shifting Ideologies, Regional Affiliation: Political parties are by their nature identified with specific ideologies. It is interesting to note that the current broad ideologies of the Democratic and Republican Parties are in many ways the opposite of the ones espoused at their origin. In my first draft of this Chapter, I tried to avoid the politically delicate (or politically incorrect) subject of the racial divide in America, but it is impossible to understand the institutional evolution of the US party system without addressing the fundamental impact, since the creation of the US and still today, of the politics of race.

Although Thomas Jefferson, the ideological founder of the party that in due course became the Democratic Party, was the principle author of the Declaration of Independence who coined the phrase "all men are created equal" and he is idealized as one of the leading founders of US democracy, he was also a slave-owning Southern planter who strongly defended the institution of slavery, as well as states' rights and a small Federal Government. 

The Democratic Party remained pro-slavery, and as the US expanded Westward during the first half of the 19th Century, political tensions rose dramatically over the acceptance or not of slavery in the new territories, leading to the Civil War in 1861-1865, a chapter in American history the importance of which cannot be overstated and the echoes of which are still very much present today. 

The Republican Party has its origins in the Northern anti-slavery movement in the middle of the 19th Century, and began a period of nearly 80 years of relative national dominance with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 on a strongly anti-slavery platform, defending the vision of a Union with a big government agenda. 

"Recon-struction", as is named the turbulent decade after the Civil War when the country reintegra-ted the defeated Southern States and dealt with 4 million newly-freed slaves, might have evolved differently had Lincoln not been assassinated at the end of the Civil War, but the country's leader-ship fell into the hands of his successor, Andrew Johnson. He believed strongly in states' rights and decided to leave to Southern States how they were to rebuild rather than imposing federal rule. Nevertheless, during more than a decade, Reconstruction in the South became a large-scale experiment in truly interracial democracy. More than 1,500 Southern African-Ameri-cans under the Republican banner won election to local, state and federal office, including 16 to the US Congress. But white supremacy gradually reasserted its hold on the South, and Reconstruction officially ended in 1876 when the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes acknowledged Democratic Party control of the entire South in exchange for their certifying his election. The Democratic Party remained the dominant Party in the South for nearly a century.

During the first half of the 20th Century, the issue of race remained an underlying divisive issue, but more within parties than between them, so it did not change the regional balance of relative strength of the Republican Party in the North and Democrats in the South. The system worked partially because, on certain issues, Southern Democrats aligned in Congress with conservative Republicans, whereas moderate Republicans voted with progressive Democrats.

The other dominant theme in the ideological realignment of the two parties is the economic role of government, exemplified by Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal promoting, to combat the 1930s Depression, an active role of the Federal Government in putting into place liberal economic policies and supporting labor in economic and social matters - Roosevelt created Social Security, the 40-hour work week, a minimum wage and benefits for the unemployed - policies which remain at the core of the current Democratic Party agenda and which have been strongly opposed by the Republican Party.

The regional dominance of the Democratic Party in the Southern US ended when Democratic president Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s forcefully promulgated the Great Society and the civil rights agenda already promised by Kennedy, including Affirm-ative Action (policies forcibly increasing opportunities to the African-American community), a courageous act as he knew full well it would lead to losing the support of the Southern states for his party. The very night after signing the landmark Civil Rights Act in 1964, Johnson correctly predicted: “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” The South is today firmly in the Republican camp.

In contrast the Democrats, the Republican Party has consistently been more market-oriented party, and in recent history is known for its support of free market capitalism, of small government, lower taxes and minimal government welfare programs as well as conservative social policies. Republican President Ronald Reagan formulated this stance in response to an economic recession with his famous “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” 

The Republican Party today is strongest in the South, Great Plains and Western states, among older, white voters, with particular strength in the rural electorate as well as with evangelical Christians. In contrast to its Southern initial base, the Democra-tic Party is today strong in the Northeast and Pacific Coast of the US. It tends to be favored by African-Americans and Latinos and is heavily concentrated in urban centers, among younger, better educated, more diverse and more liberal on social issues voters than the overall electorate.

F. A Summary View of the Current Situation: The American two-Party system has worked remarkably well since the middle of the 19th Century, in part because there has been sufficient trust between leaders in the two Parties for them to bargain, compro-mise and find mutually acceptable solutions, instead of engaging in endless conflict. 

However, this may no longer be the case. In the last decades, much has changed in US electoral politics as we have witnessed two closely interrelated developments:  

- The growth of "Negative Partisanship"; and

- A major racial realignment in the two US Parties.

Negative Partisanship, the term used to describe voters' motivation to vote against the other party rather than for their own party, helps explain two apparen-tly contradic-tory trends: voters increasingly view both the Democratic and Republican Parties negatively, and yet Party loyalty in voting has never been higher, with Party identity appearing increasingly as a virtual tribal attachment, sometimes referred to as "Identity Politics".

The American National Election Study introduced in 1968 the feeling‐thermometer measuring the attitude of Democratic and Republican voters towards their own and the opposing party's presidential election nominee. As shown in the graph below, the attitude towards their own nominee declined significantly only in 2016, but the attitude towards the opposing party's nominee has declined since 1968, with a precipitous drop in the 2016 election. Large majorities of Democrats and Republicans truly despised the opposing party's nominee. 

Graph: Average feeling–thermometer ratings of own–party and opposing–party presidential candidates,  1968–2016. ?Source: American National Election Studies.

There are a multitude of causes for the spectacular growth in negative partisanship:

1.             A huge increase in the amount of money spent on negative political advertising, due on the one hand to the landmark United Citizens Supreme Court decision (2010) opening the floodgates for US corporations and labor unions to make political contributions, and on the other hand to the political reality that negative political advertising focused on personal attacks has proven remarkably effective in influencing US voters: it works.

2.             The growing influence of highly partisan and ideological media outlets. In the 1970s, voters received their news from broadcast television, which were obliged to present controversial news in a "fair and balanced" manner and were generally non-partisan, but the advent of new technologies and Republican President Reagan's repeal of the "fair and balanced" rule in 1987 changed the media landscape dramatically, with the advent of cable television networks such as Fox News Channel, CNN and MSNBC, plus a multitude of news sources from the internet offering a more partisan type of news coverage, as well as more targeted additional news sources. Numerous studies have shown that voters are attracted to these partisan new sources and that they have a strong impact on voter attitude. 

3.             A growing divide of the electorate between the two Parties over social and cultural issues - these have always existed, but they become more radicalized and partisan, with both Parties rallying their troupes over the issues and frequently finding fertile ground to encourage intense animosity towards the opposing view, on:

a.    Abortion, where attitudes for and against are a virtual Party label identity;

b.    Repeal of the health insurance program ObamaCare repeal, another strong, emotional dividing line between the Parties; 

c.     Assault weapon bans and unwavering defense of the right to own any weapon;

d.    Immigration and especially the treatment of the estimated 14 million illegal immigrants currently in the US.

4.             Demographic and economic factors have also played an important role in the increase of negative partisanship, contributing to the racial realignment of the country. As a result of immigration from Latin American and Asia and higher fertility rates among sections of the non-White population, the non-White share of the US population grew dramatically from the 1980s to the 2000s, from 13% to 28% of the share of voters in presidential elections. Simultaneously, the largely White middle class grew increa-s-ingly frustrated as they witnessed a decline in their relative economic position, with almost no growth in incomes over the 30 years since 1980 (the benefits of globaliza-tion have seemed to go only to the upper class). The Republican Party was able to take advantage of this White middle-class frustration by successfully blaming the other side.

            In fact, one school of thought led by influential political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster, affirms that the growing racial divide between supporters of the two Parties is the single most important factor in the rise of negative partisanship. They point to racially tinged messages by Republican elected officials and candidates over the past 30 years about the dangers posed to Whites by African-American crime, immigration, affirmative action and other social welfare programs benefitting non-Whites, fomenting a racial divide, resulting in a sharp increase in racial resentment among Republican voters, as shown in the following graph prepared by the American National Election Studies:

Graph: Trends in racial resentment among White Democrats and Republicans from Reagan to Obama. Leaning independents included with party identifiers. Source: American National Election Studies

Irrespective of the weight given to various causes, what is clear is that in parallel with the growth in negative partisanship, there has been a major racial realignment in the US in the last thirty years, with an overwhel-m-ing preference for the Democratic Party of the growing non-White electorate along with educated, liberal Whites and the opposing but equally strong movement, particu-larly in the South, of White voters, especially those with a lower level of education and those living in rural communities, overwhelmingly in favor of the Republican Party. 

Although negative partisanship had already become the most important development in the evolution of the American body politic before he came onto the scene (and is certain to continue after him), Donald J. Trump understood better than any other politician this trend as well as the unhappiness and frustration of the white middle class, and took advantage of these phenomenon by using more explicitly than anyone had dared before him a full array of tools to accelerate negative partisanship. He has built a following of fiercely loyal voters by fomenting their negative feelings, even their hatred, of his opponents, flaunting the rules of political decorum and political correct-ness and making explicit and acceptable the expression of open animosity towards all those who disagree with him. He has mastered as a highly effective political tool the ability to energize anger and fear towards his opponents in the Democratic Party, and also towards immigrants, his own government bureaucracy, the national press, multinational institutions, China, etc. This strategy clearly has been politically effective, bringing him to the White House in 2016, creating unprecedented fidelity towards Trump among Republicans voters and making it virtually impossible for any Republican politician who wants to stay in office to disagree with him. It has rendered almost credible Trump's joke that he could "stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot someone and I wouldn't lose any voters." 

Although most observers agree that negative partisanship explains current American politics, many view it as extremely dangerous for the country. It has clearly made it increasingly difficult for Party leaders to work in cooperation with the other Party: for the past 20 years, the American political system has basically been in gridlock. Has the US reach a point where the notion of an effective political system has become impossible? How can Democrats and Republi-cans work together if, as shown in a recent survey, about 42% of people think members of the other party are “downright evil".[3]

Can the advent of a national crisis brought on by the Coronavirus break the gridlock and open the door to the hope that Americans can reunite Americans and once again reinstate a functioning two-Party system? Given the current level of animosity and the personalities of the current leaders, it is difficult to be optimistic on this score, but let us not prejudice the outcome,

In the next Chapter 5, I will talk about Red States, Blue States, Swing States, Split Voting and other related subjects.

[1] DISCLAIMER: I have sought in this series to explain the US political scene in a non-partisan manner. Any opinions expressed herein are solely my own and do not in any manner reflect the position of the American Club of Lisbon or any other organization with which I may be associated.

[2] With the exception of two states, Maine and Nebraska, who allocate their Electoral Votes in part by Congressional district, rather than as a single state, but this has never had a notable impact on the presidential election.

[3] From "History of political parties in America" by Keri Wiginton, March 14, 2019, in thestacker.com