Why two major parties? Why not a third party?

This talk was delivered to our members 23 May 2010 -


The Origins of America’s Two-Party System

Why do we have two major parties? Why do third parties seldom get anywhere in major elections? Why can’t the Tea Party run candidates of its own?

The beginnings of the national two-party system are due to the structure for electing the President and Vice President as set forth in the Constitution, Article II section 1. States get one elector, and hence one electoral vote, for each Senator and Representative the state has in Congress. How the electors are chosen was left up to the State; the founders were shy of putting power in the hands of the general populace. In all states now it is by popular vote. In 48 states the winner of the popular vote gets all the electoral votes; in Maine and Nebraska the winner gets the 2 (senatorial) electors, and the other electors are selected according to the party winners in the congressional districts.

The electors (now referred to as the Electoral College) transmit their votes to the President of the Senate, who opens the votes in a joint session of Congress. If there is a tie vote for two persons, the House of Representatives votes to resolve the tie, each state having one vote. If there is no tie but no person has a majority, the house votes upon the top three candidates.

The result of this procedure is that unless a third party (such as the TEA party) can carry enough states to win a majority of electoral votes, which is extremely difficult in the face of entrenched parties, it is better off to join an existing party which is close to its belief system and to try to affect that party platform.

That is the structural reason trending toward a two-party system. The ideological reason for a two party system is that ever since the founding, one group has wanted to exercise government power over people and their lives, and another group has wanted the people to be left alone to live as they wish.

George Washington was such a respected General, President of the Constitutional Convention, and so loved by the people that there really was no other choice for the first President of the United States. He was elected in 1789. For major appointments he naturally depended on men who served with him whose character he knew and who had earned his trust. In particular he asked Thomas Jefferson to be his first Secretary of State. Jefferson had written the Declaration of Independence, had helped General Washington while Jefferson was in Congress and as wartime Governor of Virginia, and in 1789 was returning from his post as Envoy to France. Washington asked Alexander Hamilton to be his Secretary of the Treasury. Hamilton had been an artillery Captain in the war’s early battles, had served on Washington’s staff and then in other positions, leading a storming party to seize a British redoubt in the final major battle at Yorktown. These two men were constantly at odds in cabinet meetings, and opposed in their view of the role of governments. Hamilton led the Federalist Party, formulating a doctrine of “implied powers” (the Constitution means what we want it to mean), and Jefferson led the Republican Party with strict construction of constitutional powers (the Constitution means what it says and no more). Newspapers of the time picked up these debates and hotly and widely discussed them. Jefferson resigned at the end of Washington’s first term. Washington served a second term, then his Vice President John Adams won against Jefferson in 1796. Since at the time the person receiving the second highest number of electoral votes became Vice President, Jefferson took that office during Adams’ Presidency. In 1800 he ran for President hoping to end what he referred to as the “Federalist Reign of Terror”. Here’s Jefferson:

“I am for preserving to the states the powers not yielded by them to the Union, and to the Union its constitutional share in the division of powers; and I am not for transferring all the powers of the states to the general government, and all those of that government to the executive branch.

“ I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple, applying all possible savings of the public revenue to the discharge of the national debt; and not for a multiplication of officers and salaries merely to make partisans, and for increasing by every device the public debt on the principle of it being a public blessing…”

Sound familiar? Clearly these are conservative TEA party sentiments, while the current Democratic Party has taken on the ideology of the early Federalists. Jefferson’s Republican Party later suffered name changes to the Republican-Democratic party and then the Democratic party

The current Republican party was founded in 1852 as an anti-slavery party, and only was able to come onto the national stage because the Democratic party split in the election of 1860 over the slavery issue, allowing the election of Abraham Lincoln.

Jefferson’s election in 1800 exposed a flaw in the constitution – it said electors were to vote for two persons, expecting that the first person would be a presidential vote and the second a vice-presidential vote, but not saying so. Jefferson had more electoral votes than Adams, but the vice presidential candidate Aaron Burr had the same number as Jefferson. The election thus was thrown into the lame-duck Federalist House of Representatives to break the tie, and the bitter Federalists sided with Burr. The states were evenly divided. After a week of balloting, Congressman Bayard of Delaware “announced to his Federalist colleagues that he was ‘no longer willing to exclude Jefferson at the expense of the Constitution’”, and on the thirty-sixth ballot Jefferson was elected. This problem was corrected by the 12th amendment ratified in 1804.