Our Two Parties Vs What We Deserve

Oath of Office: …I will well and faithfully discharge the duties…

The previous Post discussed:

· Confidence in Congress is 6% A Great Deal, 49% Only Some, and 44% Hardly Any · Party loyalty and its causes · Hostility, driven by Party Power and Careerism · Having only two parties is very much the exception among important countries. They average having 3.9 parties large enough to be effective, over 5%.

What voters want and deserve from the members of Congress is civility, respect for their colleagues, collaboration in solving problems, and results.

· Civility is courtesy, an attribute that is very reasonable to expect from professional public servants who have asked for an important problem-solving position. · Respect for colleagues means listening with an open mind. · Collaboration means cooperation with other members to achieve goals, cooperation which may have nuances that do not fit the member’s viewpoints perfectly. · Results means pursuing issues – including tough issues – and driving to reasoned solutions good for the country and its citizens.

There are certainly members who strive to meet these standards, but doing so is very difficult when the two parties (the duopoly) both emphasize winning as the supreme goal - in narrowly divided chambers. The circumstances result in block voting and other political techniques that are not focused on solving our big problems.

What are citizens supposed to make of this seemingly intractable predicament? How do we get out of this hole? It is not clear, but let’s stop digging and concentrate on another course of action. At the risk of being blunt, it must be obvious that having to decide between these two parties every two years is insane. A better outcome is being able to vote for a party that does not put power and careerism over country.

The current nationwide redistricting battle in the middle of a decade is clear evidence of what is important to our two parties. They want more gerrymandering despite the fact that in the past four elections for members of the House, an average of about 94% of existing members were returned with gerrymandering playing a role; see the graph in my preceding Substack post. Gerrymandering is defined by Webster as arranging election districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage in elections. This battle for more “unfair” seats comes at a time when our federal debt and other big issues are taking a back seat. The problem is not in the details of how, when, and who does the gerrymandering, it is gerrymandering itself! The fact is that one or the other of the two parties legislates the redistricting in most states. It is the party choosing the voters rather than the voters choosing the candidate. Why did we allow, and should we continue to allow a tool of unfair and non-proportional voting to be codified into our laws? Antitrust laws would not permit this for a corporation. Gerrymandering is just one of the ways our two parties undermine competition.

Control in both chambers of Congress has become very close since 1995, and the recent few elections have resulted in even tighter margins. See the chart below. It is difficult to know why this happened, but it has intensified the battle for power. One lesson is how important a few votes can be. Another lesson is that the presence of additional parties totaling several percent of the seats in each chamber could change Congress’s deportment very much for the better. Softening viewpoints and collaborating would be necessary.

ChatGPT

Imagine that election laws were impartial across the nation, making it practicable for additional parties to compete fairly for seats in the House and Senate. Even a single additional party with several percent of the seats in a chamber could keep both of the present parties from having a majority and thus require collaboration. Just this cooperation likely would change the atmosphere from domineering to productive. Even the elections for leadership of a chamber should produce more civil leaders.

Let’s explore some hypotheticals.

First, some facts: In the 2024 election, party A won the Senate 53% to 47%. The same party A also won the House by 220 to 215, a margin of less than 1% over the minimum winning vote of 218. Please excuse any rounding errors caused by using percentages rather than numbers of seats.

Scenario ONE

• Party A is the party that won a majority in both chambers in the actual election.

• Party B is the other of the duopoly.

• Party C is new and won 8% of the seats in each chamber in 2024 with 4% from each of the other two parties.

• In a hypothetical vote, Party C allies with party B.

SENATE RESULTS:

• Party A has 53-4 = 49% of the votes

• Parties B&C combined have 43% + 8% = 51%, a majority

HOUSE RESULTS:

• Party A has 50.6 - 4 = 46.6%

• Party B has 49.4 - 4 = 45.4%

• Parties B&C have 45.4 + 8 = 53.4%, a majority

OVERALL RESULTS

• The new party C partnered with the weaker of the duopoly Party B to pass a bill in both chambers; the legislation passed both chambers, ready to go to the President. Party A that dominated prior to Party C’s arrival no longer did so.

Scenario TWO

• Party C won 6% in each chamber, equally from A & B

• Party D won 8% in each chamber, equally from A & B

SENATE RESULTS:

• Party A now has 46%

• Party B now has 40%

• Parties C & D total 14%

• In a hypothetical vote, the combined vote of C&D goes 5% to A, 9% to B

• Party A + 5% = 51%, a majority

• Party B + 9% = 49%

HOUSE RESULTS:

• Party A now has 50.6% - 7% = 43.6%

• Party B now has 49.4% - 7% = 42.7%

• In a hypothetical vote, the combined vote of C&D goes 3% to A, 11% to B

• Party A + 3% = 43.6% + 3% = 46.6%

• Party B + 11% = 42.7% + 11% = 53.7, a majority

OVERALL RESULTS:

The two new parties split their votes differently in the Senate and the House, giving a win to Party A with new help in the Senate and to Party B with new help in the House. Party A did not dominate both chambers as it likely would have without the new parties. The bill failed.

I hope that wading through the numbers above wasn’t too painful. It must be obvious that there is a huge number of ways voting could go with additional parties, but it is useful to see a few written hypotheticals.

The important message is two-fold:

• New parties almost surely would be started and nurtured by politicians and citizens who were not happy with the ideas and actions of either of the two predominate parties. This would bring into play new and different perspectives.

• The two parties would immediately find the need to exercise Civility, Respect, and Collaboration to avoid finding themselves standing alone on the sidelines. This leads to better Results.

You might be saying “That sounds fine but isn’t making it happen is a challenge”. Yup, right on! But not accepting that challenge is confirming that we citizens are no longer in control of our government. Doing important things is not always easy.

Stating the Problem correctly is always vital to getting the solution. The Problem restated from the last post is:

Problem: Congress is not doing a good job of solving our country’s big problems.