US elections are not very democratic, but they are crucial for our survival as a planet
Unlike countries that have overthrown dictators by taking to the streets or even taking up arms, our dictator has been elected by a clear majority of US-Americans. Most people will tell you that US elections are “free and fair,” but that is hardly the case. Nevertheless, that perception makes it almost impossible to remove an elected official until the next election.
Election Financing
The US election process is not free or fair, firstly because billionaires, special interest groups and large corporations can spend unlimited millions of dollars promoting or denigrating a particular candidate. They can fill the airwaves with propaganda and lies, and thus sway voters opinions and ultimately their votes. These billionaires and corporate donors use their money not only to sway elections but to buy favors from the politicians they helped elect. As Represent.US says, “corruption is legal in America.”
Gerrymandering
Both major parties have spent decades fiddling with the boundaries of congressional districts for their own benefit. Normally boundaries are changed only every ten years to adapt to population changes identified from the latest census. But Trump has made gerrymandering one of his preferred tricks to secure more seats for Republicans in Texas and other states where Republicans already have total power at the state level. Democrats have responded by trying to the same thing in states like California where they have control of the state process.
Two Party Dominance
Most democratic countries in the world today have numerous political parties vying for public support at each election. These range from far left to far right and everything in between. People thus have a genuine choice as to which party most closely aligns with their values, beliefs and interests when they go to the polls. And in most cases, no one party ends up with an overall majority, so they are forced to form coalitions, make compromises and work together to get anything done.
Currently there are just two Senators (Bernie Sanders and Angus King) and no Representatives in Congress who are Independent as opposed to Democrat or Republican. At local and state level, there are many more Independents and third party elected officials. These include 159 from the Green Party, 4 from the Vermont Progressive Party, 1 from the Libertarian Party (plus 9 Libertarian mayors) and a spattering from other parties. (There are also 207 Democratic Socialists of America in local and state government, but DSA does not claim to be a political party and most of those officials were elected as Democrats.)
But no third party candidate has come even remotely close to winning the Presidency or a seat in Congress for decades. The last third party candidates to be elected to Congress were in the 1940s, apart from James Buckley, who was elected to the Senate as a Conservative Party candidate in 1970 (but was essentially a Republican).
All of the other factors described on this page make it exceedingly difficult for third parties to break into the two-party system in the United States.
One Party States
While politics in the US as a whole is controlled by just two parties, the reality is that a majority of people in this country actually live in what is effectively a “one-party” state. Given the enormous antipathy in the US towards other countries like China, which are effectively one-party states (in this case, dominated by the Chinese Communist Party), it is surprising that there is so little attention given to the fact that most states within the US are also one-party states!
In 41 out of the 50 states right now, a single party controls every executive office of that state. And in 39 out of 50 states, a single party has what is known as a “trifecta,” controlling both Houses of the State legislature plus the governorship.
Some 9 states have voted for Republican Presidents in every election since 1968. Another four have voted for Republican Presidents since 1980. And 15 states have voted for Democratic Presidents in every election since 1992. Since 2016, only 6 states have switched from one party to the other in a Presidential election. The other 42 states are virtually fixed at the present time as either red or blue states.
First Past the Post
In most states (apart from Maine and Alaska), elections at the national level are won by whoever gets the most votes in the general election. This is a voting system known as First Past the Post, and there are only a few countries left in the world that still use this system because it is unfairly skews elections towards one or two dominant parties.
When there are two major political parties, for instance, it doesn’t matter how closely behind the third candidate is. They will never be able to make any electoral progress, even if they were to get more votes nationally than either of the two major parties.
In a hypothetical example where a third party won 32% of the vote in each of the 50 states, they would still end up without a single electoral college vote, Senator or Representative, whereas a party with just 34% of the vote could end up with the Presidency and every single seat in Congress.
The Electoral College
When it comes to electing the President, the US relies on an antiquated, 18th century process whereby it is the Electoral College, not the popular vote, that decides who becomes President. And however wins by even a single vote in a state gets all the electoral votes for that state. This skews the result heavily towards smaller, more sparsely populated states. Twice in recent years, and several times previously, the President elected by the electoral college was not the candidate with the most votes nationwide.
Roughly 15 million people voted in California in 2024. Kamala Harris therefore needed 7.5 million plus one vote to win all 54 electoral college votes from California. In fact, she got more than 9 million votes, which was 1.5 million more than she needed. Trump, meanwhile, won Texas, with its 40 EV votes, with about 1.5 million surplus votes. But if the 1.5 million “surplus” people who voted for Harris in California had instead voted in Texas, the outcome of the election might have looked very different.