Hey beautiful people of AH!
Specifically looking for opinions of Americans or those who know America well.
PoD doesnt matter much to me; although I'm going to assume post-Watergate. Maybe even after 2000 and the hanging chads?
Anywho, what political parties do you think would be successful/come to exist and what would be the impact on American politics?
I'm imagining something like = STV-PR (like Ireland) from state-wide lists from each state; eliminates gerrymandering.
Senators are elected by STV
President is elected by popular vote? (Electoral college is abolished).
As stated, any PoD post 1900 is fine; all and any ideas welcome.
An old post of mine:
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Although all sorts of arguments have been given about why proportional representation is unsuitable for the US, it has in fact been tried here--in municipal elections. That it was ultimately repealed in city after city may be due in large part not to its "failures" but for doing what it was supposed to do: assuring representation for political and other minorities:
"Another factor working against defenders of proportional representation in many cities was the controversial nature of minority representation. Many Americans in the early twentieth century were hostile to political and racial minorities--the very groups aided by PR. Opponents of PR were not above fanning the flames of prejudice in their efforts to get rid of this reform. In particular, critics often played upon two of the most basic fears of white, middle class Americans: communists and African-Americans.
"In Cincinnati, race was the dominant theme in the successful 1957 repeal effort. The single transferable vote had allowed African Americans to be elected for the first time, with two blacks being elected to the city council in the 1950s. The nation was also seeing the first stirrings of the Civil Rights movement and racial tensions were running high. PR opponents shrewdly decided to make race an explicit factor in their repeal campaign. They warned whites that PR was helping to increase black power in the city and asked them whether they wanted a "Negro mayor." Their appeal to white anxieties succeeded, with whites supporting repeal by a two to one margin
"In New York City, fear of communism proved the undoing of proportional representation. Although one or two Communists had served on the PR-elected city council since 1941, it was not until the coming of the Cold War that Democratic party leaders were able to effectively exploit this issue. As historian Robert Kolesar discovered, the Democrats made every effort in their repeal campaign to link PR with Soviet Communism, describing the single transferable vote as "the political importation from the Kremlin," "the first beachhead of Communist infiltration in this country," and "an un-American practice which has helped the cause of communism and does not belong in the American way of life."(3) This "red scare" campaign resulted in the repeal of PR by an overwhelming margin.
"Just as the adoption of the single transferable vote in New York City prompted other cities to consider this reform, its well-publicized defeat there also encouraged repeal efforts in other PR cities. PR was abandoned in neighboring Long Beach and Yonkers in 1947 and 1948. Repeal campaigns also won in Boulder (1947), Toledo (1949), and Wheeling (1951). The PR movement never recovered from these defeats; and although supporters remained optimistic, the 1950s saw the repeal of PR in one city after another. By 1962, only Cambridge, Massachusetts retained this system.
"While the repeal of proportional representation in these American cities is taken by opponents as evidence that this voting system failed, proponents argue that it is more accurate to conclude that this system was rejected because it worked too well. They note that PR worked well in throwing party bosses out of government--bosses who never relented in their attempts to regain power--and it worked well in promoting the representation of racial, ethnic, and ideological minorities that were previously shut out by the winner-take-all system. For advocates of PR, then, it was the very political successes of this system that set the stage for a political backlash that was effectively exploited by its opponents and eventually led to the its demise in most of these cities.
http://www.fairvote.org/a_brief_history_of_proportional_representation_in_the_united_states
See also Robert J. Colesar, "Communism, Race, and the Defeat of Proportional Representation in Cold War America."
http://www.fairvote.org/communism_r...oportional_representation_in_cold_war_america This article raises an interesting what-if: Suppose PR advocates had linked themselves with the Civil Rights Revolution, and had put more emphasis on the potential of PR to elect more members of ethnic minorities? True, this would make PR more unpopular than ever with many whites, yet it would at least give it a substantial favorable constituency in minority communities. (And in any event, PR could hardly have fared *worse* than it did in OTL!) Colesar explains the failure of advocates to press this point by noting that "While PR proponents had always vigorously championed the utility of the representation of minority opinion, they were less enthusiastic about racial, ethnic, or religious group representation. They never denied the reality that voters made judgments on such grounds, and never denied their right to do so. But they were not interested in encouraging voting by racial preference, and went to some pains to demonstrate that under PR, such divisions played no greater a role that they did in districting..."
