Why We Shouldn't Try For Third-Party (Yet)

There is a very good reason that we essentially have a 2-party system: because our voting system sucks. When we must choose one or another without stating a list of our preferences, we end up spreading out our votes. Let's make an extreme and ludicrous example to understand. Let's say we have parties A, B, and C. Party A wants to enslave children and parties B and C do not. Those two parties differ in that they prefer orange or blue carpet in the town hall. If 60% of the people don't want to enslave children but half of them want orange and half want blue carpet, then the children-enslaving party A will get 40% of the votes while parties B and C get 30% a piece. Now the stupid non-majority party wins because those who cared about children were quibbling over something less useful.

In short, we cannot simply vote for "the one person" who "best" fits our desires. We must instead vote for the one person who is most likely to be voted for by most other people who share the most important opinions. I would certainly have given up the orange carpet just to save the children, but because I voted for the "best" candidate, we now have child slaves. And so, the two-party system is born. We have to band together to prevent the worst outcome from winning on the big issues. So even though the third-parties might very well encompass the best of our individual desires, it runs a huge risk if they are more or less similar while those you really disagree with don't have much to choose from. More options is bad in our current system of voting.

Now, yes, sometimes third parties win the small positions in local government. It still comes with the risk though and it still weakens the position for the 2-party system in the bigger and more important things like our president. Instead of entertaining third-parties, we first need to fix our voting system. We need "Instant Runoff" or "Single Transferable" voting in order for third-parties to be useful. We could always vote for the people who best fit our desires in this case. For now, however, we must band together to get the most important things done first. We should not be weakening our positions on our big topics by splitting on the small topics.

https://www.fairvote.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote