I certainly think you've legitimized the discussion of mechanisms that might have locked the 2 party system into the same two parties over time, and the ballot thing might be quite significant, though you've gone and offered a second quite different theory to consider, that of deep identities anchoring party labels to deep things hard to change. Certainly in the modern generation the notion of Democrats as party of elite ivory tower idealism versus Republicanism as identity of homespun down home Archie Bunker nationalist righteousness seems to be the salient divide post Nixon. It is sustained on both sides despite the self-limiting of the divide.
I remain interested in discussing stuff like the ballot control aspect, ideological anchoring, and it certainly would all bear on whether it is possible to kill the Republican Party in the 1930s.
@Raferty, you overlooked that whether or not Progressive Republicans could be found in large numbers in the Midwest, beside them there were the conservatives like Taft (shown to be a bit of a maverick with a handful of semi-progressive concessions, but still basically Mr. Conservative) who separate from progressives, had their own strong persistent base in that region--I am tempted to consider your New Englanders in places like Vermont and Maine just a branch of those. Same party, very different policies--though one can also discern consistent differences between Republican progressives and Democratic progressives in the north; just as Robert Taft made a few humane concessions to progressivism (prophylactic, it seems to me--admit a few instances of welfare state intervention so you can claim that is the absolute limit and anything beyond that is crazy short-sighted moral fabric eroding welfare statism, road to serfdom and all that--the prophylactic stuff appeases some of the more egregious and demoralizing downsides of raw competition and can have a special case made that doesn't open the door to welfarism in general) so progressive Republicans must prove they are nevertheless less leftist by having a few hardline positions. Nelson Rockefeller for instance was the despair of such semi-supporters as Thomas Dewey late in his life for his high welfare state spending in New York state--"Nelson, I love you, but I don't think I can afford you" Dewey said--but he also adopted a very Nixonesque hard line "war on drugs" position which proved he was no soft-boiled egg. Alternatively one could be consistently moderate between hard conservatism and standard issue liberalism and thus prove to be holding the line against moral rot that way--"let's be reasonable but not let it get out of hand." Anyway your 1930s conservatives would despise that sort of compromise (except judiciously--and Taft took flak from the harder right, those guys were however clean out as Presidential prospects in the Depression generation, it would take Cold War reaction to rehabilitate them and even that would not be enough for the Presidency until Nixon cleared the way--Nixon himself being a "mixed bag" moderate I suppose--hard on this, soft on that, as opportunism offered).
So actually the leftover hidebound Republicans would command a lot of territory west of New England, and indeed the mix in the Mountain west seems exactly a spectrum between extremist conservative Republicans and very progressive ones, not really a lot in between them--one western Republican would be a rock-eating Neanderthal, another just a bit toned down from Socialism but often with some pet right wing bee in his bonnet to prove he was no Commie.
So peeling all the progressives away into their own TR worshiping party would seem harder than it looks--they ballasted themselves with this or that hardline right wing position but often not the same one, is my impression. This proved they were all independent minded free thinkers but it would make it hard to make a party with just them--mix in the Neanderthals whom they could each agree with on some right wing shibboleth or other, to justify sharing the same party, and they collectively could form a progressive stratum over the rockhead base and it made sense.
Recall that part of two-party dynamics under FPTP, especially if the single person office of President helps crystalize each of the two parties into separate identities, is that each candidate must be all things to all people, or anyway enough people to comprise 51 percent of the electorate--among those 51 percent are lots of subconstituencies with contradictory interests. A bit of schizophrenia comes in handy then, particularly when each separate individual candidate claims to have their own personal philosophy that make
their odd mix of right and left interests seem reasonable. Then their peers have a different mix and different philosophy. It means they are all respectable free thinkers who come to their conclusions by rigorous thought, not a bunch of clones. The fact that they act in lockstep is the beauty of the system! If the various publics all had equal power as free individuals, you would expect a kaleidoscopic balancing act of shifting compromises over time, and sooner or later, everyone gets their back scratched, and that seems fair. Now to a more Marxist thinker like me, I perceive it as certain sectors who have more property get their needs catered to first and must be kept pretty happy all the time, and others get a juggling act that gratifies them verbally sometimes and seeks to console them to inevitable losses, and tries to convince them it raineth on just and unjust alike and every dog has his day....someday. It just ain't your night tonight. But hang in there! This is America, the greatest land, and if your deal seems raw, imagine how much worse it would be overseas!
And here we have the nature of the two party system in the mid 20th century I suppose. With a similar idiosyncratic candidate lineup among the Democrats, lefty on this, righty on that, it did largely come down to tribalism I suppose, only the Democrats were able to parley the contrasting images of Hoover versus Mr Fireside Chat lover of the common people and their Patron FDR and project it for generations to come and sell that their identity was Common People versus Moneybags. It didn't work with some audiences, and I think I would have to get drunk or something and write all night to juggle this into a fluid process that would show how the imagery shifted into the modern configuration where Reagan takes FDR's place as the Great Shaman, lubricated by Nixon's creative failure to do that (becoming the unloved prophet I suppose)..I am free associating here. Perhaps I should go think more about ballots or something.
But anyway I think the two party system has got some such complex, largely self-contradictory dynamics in it to try to capture solid majorities when in truth the publics of a complex society like ours would tend to split into more numerous, more sharply defined groups. The apologists for FPTP and other stuff I think of as reactionary argue that this is moderation and deliberation, whereas to me it looks more like a heads I win tails you lose fan dance, and I want proportional representation unchained (no damn hurdles, Hamilton assignment which is most inclusive, stuff like that) so people can make the small party that really speaks for them and the parties can sort it out as paid proxies in the legislature, no more superparty for 50 percent plus minus one.
I suspect that a true analysis would show that in the mid-20th century, this "fan dance" had to largely be played by ear and intuition, and so both superparties were haunted by a broad brush eclecticism overall; it was an art not a science what messaging would pull in the crucial 50 percent plus one and how to consistently orchestrate the message so the same voters made up that ruling majority from year to year. And gradually, starting already with people like Mark Hanna before 1900 and with Woodrow Wilson hiring Madison Avenue ad men and the advertising industry itself becoming more and more technocratic, and then WWII efforts leading to stuff like the CIA and really major scientific analysis, we got people like Karl Rove who could really refine it to a science and isolated the new Conservative ideology that would reliably resonate enough to win most of the time, and this enabled the parties to shed that alleged process of reaching out to a large consensus and settle for that sure thing 50 percent plus one, and enable the ideologies to double down on "screw the 49 percent, we hate them." If you can always get that plus one percent, you can afford to totally alienate and objectively hurt the other 49 percent you see, you are going to win everything.
Personally I believe the alleged creative moderation was always a sham and a scam of sorts, but when you get this perfected scientific voter analysis, it gets brutally blatant and the tribalism becomes a painfully divisive thing.
But historically in many times and places it was already painfully divisive so that model only works so far.
The relevance to the 1930s death of the Republican party is no, I doubt it could be done, because both parties had this protean diversity necessary for vying for the majority, and smashing the credibility of one set of party leaders left others standing to fill the vacuum. Killing either major party would have to happen through the other one achieving one party rule, but the tendency would be for voters to tire of either, because the "all things to all men" fan dance is not in fact catering to everyone equally but first of all to the ruling classes, and the neglected majority tires because their hopes are disappointed--not so much in the nature of things, but in the nature of a class society, so the Republican holdouts blown away in 1932 and 1936 were there to creep back into alliance with conservative Democrats (mostly in their Southern bastion, but you could find others all over the country) and later into the majority of the House. They retained their connection to other tribes of Republicans because whether it was consciously understood or not, conservatives and liberals in each party needed each other to maintain the balance of their overlapping fan dances for the majority vote.
But why not just form a new party as had been the norm up to the Civil War era? We probably need more discussion on that to identify why the same two parties marching on forever have been locked in apparently forever on into the future, despite each shifting drastically in perception from generation to generation.
I would want to say it is just very hard to get voters to make that jump to a third party, but actually it happens a fair amount even today and it used to happen every couple of decades. Getting rid of FPTP would make transitions easier but also enable many parties that never consolidate into two again, a bugbear feared by some, a holy grail to others.
On the ballot thing--which Britons among us can explain how one votes for Parliament MPs. Is it a state produced ballot, or do you write the candidate in, or what?