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A two-party system is way too good for those two parties.
Sep 18, 2025
The system [in U.S.] is designed for a two-party system. And those two parties have an interest in keeping third parties out. There's too much of the structure that works in the two-party way. They will keep the third party out.
Saying we should keep the two-party system simply because it is working is like saying the Titanic voyage was a success because a few people survived on life-rafts.
Pay attention America. Third party might not win it this year, but we could be seeing the shift away from a two party system unfolding.
In a two-party system, if both parties ignore public opinion, there is no place voters can turn.
People have been unhappy for a long time about the two-party system.
The two-party system has served America very well. We always have political movements one way or another but the evolution of a lasting third party probably will not happen.
I do think that we may be looking at a period in the next few years where the two-party system will fracture.
Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can throw the rascals out at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.
It is important that the United States remain a two-party system. I'm a fellow who likes small parties and the Republican Party can't be too small to suit me.
The free electoral process is one of the things that outsiders envy most about this country. The distinctly American two-party system is perpetuated through that process.
The recent AP poll that came out last month said that approximately 90% of the American people felt that the two-party system was failing us in the presidential election.
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.
The War Party has two wings: the Democrats and the Republicans. All others are outsiders, whose ability to storm the gates is 'legally' restricted by a nearly impassable series of bureaucratic obstacles designed to keep them out while still maintaining the 'democratic' illusion, i.e. the phony two-party system, which is in reality a single entity.
The real two-party system in America is the Meanies and the Weenies. The Meanies want to take away your benefits, and the Weenies want to compromise with them.
The US two party system is very different, of course. Here the people decides about who should rule them, but it is not reasonable to claim that the people rules itself through the political institutions. In comparison, I find that the standard European system is better, also as a model for global democracy.
The two party system just means that the corporations cut two checks instead of one.
Politics is a damn expensive business. I had one hell of a time trying to raise money as a candidate. I had to put a second mortgage on our house to get that campaign started, and I ended up spending over $300,000 to get elected. I believe that public financing of federal election campaigns is the only thing that will insure good candidates and save the two-party system. It is the most degrading thing in the world to go out with your hat in your hand and beg for money, but that's what you have to do if you haven't got your own resources.
Today, candor compels us to admit that our vaunted two-party system is a snare and a delusion, a fraud upon the nation. Our two parties have become nothing but two wings of the same bird of prey.
There are only two (major) parties today: The Stupid Party and The Evil Party. Once in a while the two parties get together to do something that is both stupid and evil, and that's called Bipartisanship.
Our two-party system is a fraud, a sham, a delusion. On foreign policy, trade, immigration, Big Government, we have one-party government, one party press; and conservatives are being played for suckers.
The only thing dumber than a Democrat or a Republican is when those pricks work together. You see, in our two-party system, the Democrats are the party of no ideas and the Republicans are the party of bad ideas. It usually goes something like this. A Republican will stand up in Congress and say, 'I've got a really bad idea.' And a Democrat will immediately jump to his feet and declare, 'And I can make it sh*ttier.'
We have a two-party system: The Democratic Party, which is a party of no ideas, and the Republican Party, which is a party of bad ideas.
The Republicans are the party of bad ideas. The Democrats are the party of no ideas.
I was never interested in the two-party system per se. I was interested in how authority was abused by government, and how lies were told, and rewritten, to seem to be true. I came up out of a tradition of radical journalism.
I did vote Obama. But I've never believed in the authenticity of the two-party system.
In The United States, the only real change I know has been Instant Runoff, which is usually applied to municipal elections. I see no real improvement. There's another aspect which comes out of the two-party system, which the primary, a funny kind of two-stage election. And people certainly have complained.
I am more convinced than ever that a lively two party system is essential to our democracy.
There is nothing I dread so much as the division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our constitution.
The two-party system is a bad joke on the American people; when it comes to Republicans and Democrats remember they are two sides of the same coin. Voting for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for evil and not an answer to our problems. A vote for a Republican or a Democrat will not fix anything and is a wasted vote.
As much as I cherish your [McCarthy's] right to a platform as an independent candidate I am not going to sit here quietly and listen to you denigrate the two party system. It has served our country well over the last two hundred years.
The most momentous fact about the pattern of American politics is that we live under a persistent, obdurate, one might almost say tyrannical, two-party system. We have the Republicans and we have the Democrats, and we have almost no one else, no other strictly political aggregate that amounts to a corporal's guard in the struggle for power.
But Al Jazeera America represents something more than news that isn’t profit or ratings driven — they represent foreign investment in a country where the two-party system outsourced your jobs. They represent facts over opinion and they represent our cultures coming together just a little more, whether you bigots like it or not.
In America, we are not lacking solutions. We are lacking a two-party system that is willing to agree on solutions. Part of this is due to rigid ideological positioning that substitutes for really thinking about the facts and solutions.
In this rigged, two-party system, third parties almost never win a national election. It's obvious what our function is in this constricted oligarchy of two corporate-indentured parties - to push hitherto taboo issues onto the public stage, to build for a future, to get a young generation in, keep the progressive agenda alive, push the two parties a little bit on this issue and that.
We are inclined to confuse freedom and democracy, which we regard as moral principles, with the way in which they are practiced in America with capitalism, federalism, and the two-party system, which are not moral principles but simply the preferred and accepted practices of the American people.
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