The winner takes all system requires candidates to compete for a plurality of votes. This means major parties must accommodate a broad range of ideologies.
Multiparty democracies typically use a system in which representation is proportional to the number of votes received and those political parties can often get somewhere by catering to narrow interests.
It's not inconceivable for a new coalition to form around a new ideology and have that replace the GOP.
The democratic party after the Civil War was was the political wing of the KKK, in a similar relationship of Sinn Fein to the IRA.
I mean, you could argue that that's happened with Trump anyway; the way the system works, doing it internally to a party is probably easier than completely externally.
As tenuous as it may be, it’s stronger than anyone else’s!
Hasn’t that already happened? Since 2016 there has been frequent reportage that the GOP has increasingly been taken over by populists, that the platform that the party proclaimed before (small government and a libertarian touch, some military hawkishness) has little appeal or momentum today when it comes to deciding elections. When the candidate for president who wanted to run under that party had enough charisma to be elected (or at least defeat all other primary challengers), ideology went out the window. And all without creating a third party.
Well, yes, several times. Like I said "in the history of the US..." - because it's happened before.
But what you describe here is shifting platform of the party itself, perhaps due to gerrymandered House districts shifting the rhetoric to include ever more extreme ideals.
True replacement would be an entirely new party, from the ground up eventually forming government.
And then yes, in traditional proportional systems you vote for a list of candidates rather than a single candidate, the lists are the ones getting the seats based on vote totals. The seats can be distributed based on a fixed or flexible lists model
If you have a state that now has 10 reps each party would make a list of 10 people, then if party A gets 40%, party B 35%, C 15% and D 10% you'd get 4 people from the list proposed by A, 3 (or 4) from the list for B, 2 (or 1) from C and 1 from D
…apart from all others.
Many Westminster descendants are not this way, and never have been. Canada has multiple parties, new ones crop up and old ones die.
The current conservative party is a 20ish year old party, and a merger/takeover of the Reform, then Alliance, the Conservatove party absorbing the tattered remnants of the old party.
We have political alliances, coalition governements where more than one party holds power, minority governments, and typically at least 3 main parties, with a smattering of others around.
We typically have 5 or 6 parties sitting at one time.
And yes, to the youngsters in the room, even our 3rd main party has held power from time to time.
But most importantly, party names and controllers change.
That's on the federal level. On the provincial level, new party spring with abandon, and form governments too.
What I would suggest, is not pushing for something incredibly insane sounding to most US ears, like changing the entire voting system, but instead just push for that third party, something that sounds more tenable.
There are _lots_ of places in the US where one of the two major parties is a complete shambles and there are people running unopposed for races where a third party could actually come in and win elections.
Demonstrate success at the county level, work up to getting elected to the state house, demonstrate that you can govern effectively and so on.
It's a 20 or 30 year project, and it's not glamorous like running for president is, though.
It's actually much easier to do this a national level, and then drive it downwards into the states.
Also, getting elected to state houses requires a lot of non-monetary support for field work and independent candidates won't have the resources.
You really need at least ranked voting and ideally multi-seat PR to get out of that, which is hard as it's against the interests of the two big parties.
That said, looking at the UK there does seem to be a renewed interest in moving away from FPTP in their Labour Party despite it being nominally against the parties interests, so maybe there's a way to get movement on that?
Parties have no standing at all within the United States Constitution. The fact that we are talking this way is reflective of the simple fact that the representative democracy (aka Republic) that the United States is has been corrupted by parties that work to their own interest, not the interest of the people.
IF you need any evidence of that, you can see it this week when Democrats voted party line with a few Republicans to remove a speaker for no other reason than it humiliated the republican party and the speaker.
FPTP systems are bad for delivering only two parties, but all systems cause parties of some scale.
That single member can “cross the aisle” without being instantly dismissed from their party and loosing all speaking rights, which is why we have two party. This gives the representative more ability to represent the interests of their district, by threatening to break ranks.
That depends on how the party primaries are arranged.
Current conditions seem to favor general elections with two extremists rather than a moderate who can win a plurality.
In Holland parties have to form a coalition after the elections. This is a very complex and time-consuming process but I'm very glad we have it. It's not perfect but way better than winner takes all IMO.
It's more like polarisation between party supporters. The parties themselves become virtually indistinguishable. Choosing between Tories and Labour is like choosing between Coke and Pepsi. They have very much the same agendas and are only different on minor issues (in the grand scheme of things) that are blown out of proportions.
In addition to that, politics becomes a 'zero-sum game'. Meaning a loss for one is automatically a win for the other. In other countries in Europe we don't really have this mechanism and it takes a lot of the sharp edge off politics. Because getting the other parties to fail is not automatically a win.
I think especially in the US this latter point is very clear right now, one party is always trying to undermine the other, even at the cost of the country's interests (which was the one thing they were supposed to care about!). Using the shutdown as leverage is a typical example.
I think any system that reduces politics to a zero-sum-game should be avoided as much as possible to reduce this very phenomenon. Because while the two parties in the US are fighting in the streets over internal issues, Russia and China don't have any internal political issues and can take full advantage of this on a geopolitical scale. That's the handy thing of being a "one party system", as awful as it is.
Not saying the EU countries are perfect. Coalition forming is an awfully complex process and sometimes it takes years (I think Belgium was without a government for more than a year recently). It also leads to inaction or slow response times to external events by having too many parties at the table. But it doesn't lead to this kind of extreme infighting and stalemates.
In other countries groups like the democratic socialists or the tea party would have to run as third parties because they could never get selected to run, but in America if you are in a fridge group it makes more sense to run in one of the two parties.