How many major political parties do we need in the US?

When it comes to the question, "Am I a Democrat or a Republican?" the only answer I can readily choose is, "None of the Above".  I wish there were other choices on offer.

Among the items which flashed across my smartphone this week is the news that Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is stepping down.  Consequently, Israel will hold elections for the fifth time in the last three years.  Israel, like Great Britain, is one of those countries with many political parties which are capable of getting candidates elected to parliament; for such countries, it seems to be the rule rather than the exception that coalitions of several parties are necessary in order to achieve the necessary parliamentary majority to select a ruler.

Since the end of the Civil War era, the United States has had two major parties.  There are other parties, and sometimes they may make an impact: some folks claim the Green Party candidate won sufficient votes in certain states in 2000 and 2016 to prevent the Democratic nominee from winning the presidency.  But the Greens mattered in those two elections only because the vote totals between the two major parties were so evenly split.  As a general rule, the 1%-2% earned by these minor parties don't make any difference at all in American election outcomes.

The Democratic Party and the GOP have had very long runs in American politics - the GOP since just before the Civil War, the Democrats since the days of Thomas Jefferson.  Both parties have proven to be extremely resilient: over those spans of many decades, the parties have changed ideologies, policies, and voter profiles a number of times, but the parties themselves have endured as major parties.  

For example: during the Civil Rights era, the Southern governors who opposed ending Jim Crow were Democrats.  Yet Democrats (mostly in the North) also were in the forefront of the civil rights movement.  I suppose citizens of the UK or Israel, contemplating that state of affairs, would expect the party to splinter into two or more regional parties.  Perhaps that happened to some extent - George Wallace ran as a third party candidate in 1968 -  but in retrospect, that convulsion seemed to be the harbinger of party realignment rather than the birth of a new party: Southern whites did indeed leave the Democratic Party, but rather than provide the foundation for a third party, they largely migrated to the GOP - a migration which the Reagan campaign seemed to consolidate in the 1980 election.  More recently, educated and prosperous whites in the North have become Democrats, so that business executives and the moneyed class no longer are the preserve of Republicans; many observers note that these wealthy urban/suburban whites are more progressive than Blacks and Hispanics who have been part of the Democratic base for many years now.

We seem to be in the midst of another seismic shift in party identity, which began in 2016 when Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the GOP nomination for president.  Trump's brand of race-baiting, grifting, thuggish, traitorous populism has transformed the GOP brand to something that Reagan-era Republicans, at least on their good days, would scarcely recognize today.  Trump's hostile takeover in 2016 left many party elders disgruntled.  Yet by the time the general election rolled around in  November of that same year, party resiliency had asserted itself once again: GOP leaders fell into line behind Trump nearly unanimously.

Still, the fallout of the hostile takeover continues.  During the 2022 election season, the most prominent story line has been: who has Donald Trump endorsed, and did s/he win the nomination?  To try to simultaneously be their own person and win Trump's coveted endorsement, GOP candidates are contorting themselves into shapes that the human body previously wasn't thought to be able to assume.

This is personal for me: I'm among those who, prior to 2016, could vote Republican with a reasonably clear conscience, but this newly transformed party is like alien terrain where, whatever one is breathing in, it's not oxygen.  

I mention this because Illinois holds its primary election in six days.  I've volunteered to serve as an election judge.  In Illinois - and I take this as another sign of the resilience of the two major parties - one can't be a non-partisan judge; judges have to declare their partisan allegiance.  So for election-judge purposes, I self-identify as a Republican.  But I'm not proud of it.  I simply don't fit into the Trumpified GOP.  Those folks, or reams and reams of them anyway, are not my folks.  

But I'm not really a Democrat, either.  And I've been waiting for several years now for an old-school Republican (Mitt Romney?  Mitch McConnell?) to declare, "I can't, in good conscience, remain a member of a party which would condone _____________" (there are many items with which to fill in the blank; "the January 6 assault" works as well as any, but there are a lot of other perfectly sound choices).

One needn't be an expert game theorist to understand what the outcome of such a move would be: let's suppose that the new party attracted one out of every 10 Republicans.  That might not be enough for the new party to win a single election; but it's surely enough to prevent the GOP from winning many elections, starting with the presidency.  It would be a Democratic Party dream come true.  

But - contrary to what is popularly believed in the United States now, there are worse things than letting the other party win an election.  Until someone gets around to doing what needs to be done, I'll continue to gaze upon the new GOP, plug my nose and say, "Ewwwww".