So, Are We Moving Toward Four-Party Politics?

[MineralMan]

Steve Bannon is encouraging extreme right-wing people to run in primaries against congressional and Senate Republicans who aren't far enough to the right. Most recently it's Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater and a dedicated dominionist Christian, who is thinking about running against a Wyoming Republican Senator.

On the left end of the political spectrum, we see some people encouraging people to run in primaries against incumbent Democrats who aren't "progressive" enough to suit a certain group of people who find the Democratic Party unsuitable. In some cases, such challengers to Democrats with a narrow hold on their offices might well cause the incumbent to lose in a primary.

So, the status quo is being challenged from both sides. Both groups seem to believe that purity of belief must be preserved and that those who don't hold precisely the views those groups hold must go. It's an interesting phenomenon, with an outcome that isn't yet known.

On both sides, it could result in newcomers winning primaries, since primary elections are generally low turnout events. That allows an incumbent to be unseated if that incumbent doesn't have enough of a margin of strong support to keep a challenger from winning a primary race. But, what happens then? Does the challenger automatically win in the general election? Nope. The result, most often, is that a strong candidate from the other side ends up winning.

A number of incumbents, mostly on the Republican side, have decided to finish up their legislative careers with their current term, and won't be running again. Bob Corker is the most prominent example of that. Such decisions are made, in part, due to challenges from the extremer members of their own party. At some point, it's just no longer worth the fight, apparently.

In 2018 and 2020, we may see this phenomenon cause some very, very interesting congressional races on a national basis, and it may well alter the balance in November of those years. It's too early to tell, but we may be seeing the beginning of four-party politics as a reality in future elections.

Here's the thing: While this trend may seem disturbing to some, it actually presents an opportunity to flip seats in some districts. An extreme candidate winning in a primary race is a chance to use GOTV to ensure that a candidate we prefer wins in the general election. The introduction of four-party politics can be an opportunity for either party to bring voters to the polls and win in unlikely districts and states. We should be thinking about that, wherever such primary interventions are occurring.

[FM123]

1. You make some good points - definitely food for thought!

[brooklynite]

2. The asnwer to this question is the same as it was the last 100 times...no.

There is no infrastructue or financial support for outlier parties; the different factions will fight for dominance in the two Parties that exist.

[MineralMan]

3. That struggle produces the equivalent of four parties, though.

Not everywhere, of course, but we saw the effects of this in the 2016 election. What should have been an easy Democratic victory for the White House race ended up being a debacle that stretched down into the legislative races, as well.

Splinter parties do not win elections, generally but they can sure screw elections up. I don't see that trend going away. In fact, I see growing strength on the fringes of both major parties. The result of that is massively unpredictable at this point. It's something to consider.

[GreenPartyVoter]

4. Could be that it breaks down into the political compass quadrants. I do

wish we had something other than plurality voting in elections. That could help the current vote-splitting issue. Also still need to deal with election funding, gerrymandering, and vote tally security, among other issues.

[MineralMan]

6. Frankly, I think that whole "political compass" thing

is bogus. It was created by a bunch of libertarians and has never appeared to have any validity to me. I can, and have, gone through the questionnaire several times and can answer to locate the result anywhere in those quadrants at will. I barely have to even think about it. The entire thing is completely transparent.

What is most bogus of all about it is the way people relegate individuals who have never even filled out the questionnaire into particular parts of the graph. If I can casually locate the result anywhere on it, so can anyone else when answering the questions for someone else.

I see no credibility in it at all.

[GreenPartyVoter]

8. I am referring to the quadrants, not the validity of the quiz.Granted,

people are not easily pigeon-holed, but I do see a possible 4 way grouping as you mentioned, and suspect that politicians could be loosely organized under those quadrants headings.

[MineralMan]

9. The makers of that quiz created the quadrants, too.

It's not some universal way to measure political position. It was invented by the people who wanted to use it.

[Willie Pep]

5. I see this as more evidence of the decline of the party system.

Political parties can no longer maintain discipline these days so you have a lot of factionalism, individualistic campaigns by "mavericks" and ideological crusaders preventing the parties from maintaining any semblance of order.

Jonathan Rauch has discussed this issue quite a bit. His major article in The Atlantic is a good piece on the issue.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/how-american-politics-went-insane/485570/

Here is an excerpt by Rauch on primaries:

Primary races now tend to be dominated by highly motivated extremists and interest groups, with the perverse result of leaving moderates and broader, less well-organized constituencies underrepresented. According to the Pew Research Center, in the first 12 presidential-primary contests of 2016, only 17 percent of eligible voters participated in Republican primaries, and only 12 percent in Democratic primaries. In other words, Donald Trump seized the lead in the primary process by winning a mere plurality of a mere fraction of the electorate. In off-year congressional primaries, when turnout is even lower, it’s even easier for the tail to wag the dog. In the 2010 Delaware Senate race, Christine “I am not a witch” O’Donnell secured the Republican nomination by winning just a sixth of the state’s registered Republicans, thereby handing a competitive seat to the Democrats. Surveying congressional primaries for a 2014 Brookings Institution report, the journalists Jill Lawrence and Walter Shapiro observed: “The universe of those who actually cast primary ballots is small and hyper-partisan, and rewards candidates who hew to ideological orthodoxy.”

Edit: I don't think these developments are good for the country since it is fueling extremism and causing the public to have less faith in our institutions which makes people more open to demagoguery. Trump is the perfect example of where our current political climate is taking us.

[MineralMan]

7. Yes, that, too.