Our dysfunctional two-party system may be a relic of the past

Editor’s note: This story was updated to correct the goals associated with a political organization. We regret the error.

Next year could feature a six-way race for the presidency. 

Democrat Joe Biden is certain to be renominated for a second term, while Republican Donald Trump is poised to lock up his party’s nomination. Jill Stein has once again announced her intention to seek the nomination of the Green Party. Cornel West is running as an independent. So, too, is Robert Kennedy, Jr. And No Labels has signaled its intention of getting on the ballot fueled by millions of dollars in dark money. 

Not since 1860 have we had such a splintered contest. Back then, Abraham Lincoln won, but with only around 40 percent support.

Today’s polarized politics is reminiscent of the extreme polarization that dominated U.S. politics in the decade leading up to that historically significant 1860 election. Racked by the issue of slavery, the two-party competition between Democrats and Whigs broke apart, and in 1854 the Republican Party was formed. Six years later, the Whig Party was no more, and the familiar Democrat-versus-Republican contests became the norm.

In subsequent decades, the two major parties cemented their hegemony. Single-member electoral districts, the Electoral College, ballot access restrictions, direct primaries, campaign finance laws, the exclusion of third parties from most presidential debates gave them a monopoly on acquiring political power. Also a help was the propensity of voters not to “waste their vote” on “spoiler” candidates.

Nonetheless, Americans have fallen in love with the idea of third-party candidates. 

A 2023 Gallup poll found that 63 percent believe a third party is needed because “the two major parties do a poor job of representing the American people.” And a September Fox News poll found 50 percent of voters “dreading” a Biden-Trump rematch. In 2024, Joe Biden would be 82 years old and, if reelected, would leave office at age 86. Donald Trump is not far behind, turning 78 in 2024. Given such a scenario, could the two major parties disintegrate, and would that disintegration be permanent?

Perhaps the Democratic Party could cleave in two, with its progressive and centrist wings battling for control. But the reality is that Joe Biden has accomplished more than progressives could have imagined. The American Rescue Plan, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the CHIPS and Science Act, the PACT Act and the Inflation Reduction Act have been signed into law, and each achieved long-sought goals advocated by progressives.

The likelihood is that, come 2028, Democrats will have a spirited contest. But this competition is likely to be shaped by competing ambitions emanating from a deep bench that includes Vice President Kamala Harris, Govs. Gavin Newsom (Calif.), Gretchen Witmer (Mich.), Josh Shapiro (Pa.) and J.B. Pritzker (D-Ill.), Secretaries Pete Buttigieg and Gina Raimondo, and others.

If Democrats do not splinter in two, perhaps the Republican Party will. House Republicans are riven by ideological divisions that have made it nearly impossible for them to govern.

Last January, Republicans took 15 ballots before Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) became Speaker of the House. But McCarthy’s tenure was the third shortest in history. After he was ousted for compromising with Democrats on the debt ceiling and budget, House Republicans were deadlocked for three weeks before the little-known Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) was chosen. Even now, it is impossible to see how Johnson can heal the breach among the various House Republican factions.

The reality is that the Republican Party has been cut adrift from the conservative moorings established by Ronald Reagan, leaving many Reaganites politically homeless. Former Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wy.), Joe Scarborough (R-Fla.) and Adam Kinsinger (R-Ill.), and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), among others, are now estranged from the GOP.

Ronald Reagan long espoused free trade principles and a strong national defense. But Donald Trump transformed the Republican Party into a populist movement that imposed high tariffs, placed restrictions on immigrants and advocated an “America First” foreign policy that resembled the isolationism of the 1930s. 

A poll from earlier this month found that just 35 percent of Republicans back additional aid to Ukraine. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a conservative in the Reagan mold, believes that Ronald Reagan would “turn over in his grave” at the intransigence of GOP voters when it comes to aiding Ukraine in its fight to repel Russian aggression.

While disenchanted Reagan Republicans may vote for Joe Biden in 2024, as some did in 2020, it is unlikely that a modern-day one-party era of good feelings, with center-right Republicans temporarily using the Democratic Party to express their displeasure with Trump, is a sustainable arrangement.

In an 1860 editorial in The Atlantic endorsing Abraham Lincoln for president, James Russell Lowell wrote that the government “seems an organized scramble,” and the political process had become “personal and narrow to a degree never paralleled, unless in ancient Athens or medieval Florence.”

Lowell’s words have particular relevance as 2024 begins. The stresses on our democracy, and the two-party system that shaped it, have intensified to a potential breaking point.

John Kenneth White is a professor of politics at The Catholic University of America. His forthcoming book is titled “Grand Old Unraveling: The Republican Party, Donald Trump, and the Rise of Authoritarianism.”