America wasn't founded by mathematicians or engineers, but by lawyers who waxed lyrically about freedom and invidividual rights while they owned slaves and planned to steal the land from the indigenous population.
At some point in the future perhaps. But not, I suggest, less than three weeks before the election, when votes are already being cast.
Because copying the Westminster Parliamentary System in any way was politically poison, and so they came up with a horrible bodge that was so obviously locked into a hyper-partisan outcome that Washington was bitching about it within a decade.
It's simple game mechanics, the result of our first-past-the-post, winner-take-all elections. As long as we have FPTP, we will have two, and only two, relevant parties. Bronxelf had a link to a wonderful video that showed exactly why this always games out to two parties, but I haven't been able to find it.
No, we can't.
This is exactly why it's not happening. We'd need a large majority of Americans to agree to a major change in how our system works which is hopeless in the current political climate. We'd need to switch to something like ranked choice voting and or a parliamentary system. Most Americans are too proud of the current system and don't want to copy ANYTHING from other countries because the founding fathers are viewed as magical beings who surely knew the best system!!!
Exactly. Changing the current system to better reflect the desires of the country's population would significantly strengthen the Democratic party, which routinely wins the popular vote. This is why Republicans have been fighting voter rights tooth-and-claw. They are just barely hanging on to power as it is.
The thing is, we've had 3rd parties in the past. They just never broke through enough to gain any permanence.
The problem of course is that the current course of action is self-defeating. It's inevitably radicalizing even more Palestinians -- hell, it's radicalized me -- and has made Israel, and to some degree the US itself, into an international pariah. The two-state solution, which is almost certainly the only real path to peace, is even deader now than it was a year ago, in part because Israel has been emboldened by its apparent impunity to work openly against it, and in part because of that radicalization in the Arab world. And in the process, the status of international law and order has been perhaps fatally weakened, and not in a way that even benefits the US.
"We will agree to use Ranked choice, but by default the Republican candidate gets at least one vote per ballot already selected."
The problem is, though, that you can't separate US policy towards Israel from US policy towards Iran and the Middle East in general. So unless and until the US can settle on a Middle East policy that doesn't depend on having Israel as a dependable and well-armed ally in a coalition to contain Iran and its allies and satellites, the amount of pressure the US can credibly bring to bear upon the government of Israel is very limited, and Benjamin Netanyahu knows that very well.
