3 main political partys in the us?

mr noob

Banned
is it possible for the libertarians party (or any 3rd party) to gain enough supports for them to be a viable opponents to the republicans and democrats in congress?
I know that the libertaions got really big in the 80s but lost their momentum to gain more supporters after the 1980 presidential election
 
Yes, prevent the destruction of the Socialist party in the 1910s and again in the 1930's and you would likely see them becoming the major third party. (provided they dont outright replace one of them) They where growing in popularity very quickly before avoidable circumstances caused them to be disbanded (in 1910's their opposition to the draft meant most of them where arrested due to the sedition acts, in the 1930's they had their momentum stolen by FDR who managed to make most of the socialists into Democrats.) If this happens voila, America has a new three party system.

The Libertarians just dont have the time to really become a major party, as is what happens much of the time they ended up big enough to be absorbed by the larger party for the most part.
 
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I hate to let reality get in the way of a good story but it is highly unlikely that the House of reps. can sustain more than two parties due to Duverger's Law. The US senate on the other hand is more likely to be able to have a diverse party system. The problem is providing a viable third option rather than libertarians which are essentially a particular breed of republicans or socialists which as said above were sucked into the democrats. With the left right spectrum as exists with most western democracies it's difficult to have a third party on enough of an issue platform to remain afloat.

Nice idea though.
 
I think a third party could work, but it would need to have a strong regional basis. Your best shot for this would probably be FDR getting into trouble in the mid-1930s (or dying prematurely), giving the Farmer-Labor Party (MN), Progressive Party (WI), and the Nonpartisan League (ND) an opening. Though not a national presence, those three states would give enough of a geographic rump to keep a party going, and quite possibly build from.

Other than this, a catastrophic split within the Democratic Party would be your best bet...if the Dixiecrats walk out (I've toyed with a variation on this in a timeline), it's not likely that the GOP of the 1930s and 1940s would work with them directly (doing so would have been toxic in many regards) while the GOP had a bad name for historical reasons in most of the South, so I can see a situation emerging where the GOP and the National Democrats fight in most of the country, while the National Democrats and Dixiecrats fight in the South. Your only "real" three-way fights would be in the border/mountain states and in Texas. Basically, Duverger's Law still applies in most cases...you just have it applying on a sub-national level. Witness Canada (where you've ended up with various regions where one of the "big three" parties simply wound up being uncompetitive...the NDP, for example, never had much of a foothold in Quebec until recently, while the Liberals often had a hell of a time out on the Prairies) or Britain (where the Tories are basically locked out of Scotland, in particular, while Labour is more or less locked out south of the Thames) for ways this can work.

Structurally, I think that both the House and Senate could support a third party (so long as that party had a solid geographic base of some sort)...it's the Presidency that the party would likely be locked out of and which would make things difficult in the long run.
 
Structurally, I think that both the House and Senate could support a third party (so long as that party had a solid geographic base of some sort)...it's the Presidency that the party would likely be locked out of and which would make things difficult in the long run.

And that's the crux of the problem... the Electoral College. The two party system in the USA is a pair of 'big tent' parties that work rather like a coalition of parties in Europe, although less volatile. For a long time, Presidential electioneering here has carried over into Congressional politicking too, mainly for support and money; the Presidential candidates want a compliant Congress to get stuff done, so the candidate's party has every incentive to support like-minded candidates for Congress. For this reason, a third party is going to have a very hard time forming and amounting to anything in the USA... I think you'd about have to do away with the EC to get it done...
 
And that's the crux of the problem... the Electoral College. The two party system in the USA is a pair of 'big tent' parties that work rather like a coalition of parties in Europe, although less volatile. For a long time, Presidential electioneering here has carried over into Congressional politicking too, mainly for support and money; the Presidential candidates want a compliant Congress to get stuff done, so the candidate's party has every incentive to support like-minded candidates for Congress. For this reason, a third party is going to have a very hard time forming and amounting to anything in the USA... I think you'd about have to do away with the EC to get it done...
Actually, I think there's another way, thinking about this: If you got rid of primaries (or never had them really catch on), it's possible that you could induce a break below the Presidential level. Even at that level, having two parties negotiate sets of electors seems plausible as well (and there is precedent in the form of 1896).

Likewise, if multiple states were to adopt NY-style fusion voting (at least at the Presidential level), you could sustain some sort of division.
 
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