There is much that’s accurate in this explainer in The Washington Post. But there is one sentence that jumped out to me as highly inaccurate and misleading: “For much of U.S. history, there were more than two major political parties, and that could emerge again.” That’s just not true. To be sure, third (and fourth, etc.) parties have attempted to compete against the two dominant parties since fairly early in the nineteenth century, and the upstart Republican Party was able to replace the Whigs as the second dominant party before the Civil War. But never has there been a period when three or more “major political parties” have been competitive amongst each other at the same time. The closest the nation came to that was 1912, when Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive (Bull Moose) party eclipsed the GOP to come in second for the presidency (in both the Electoral College and the national popular vote). But the Progressive Party was not able to sustain itself as a “major” third party. The role of minor parties in the nineteenth century, like the Greenbacks, was much the same as the role of minor parties, like the Greens, today.
The Post’s explainer correctly observes that the “plurality” winner rule that states to award their electoral votes prevents third parties from effectively competing. But the piece fails to discuss the kind of electoral reforms that would enable third parties to compete without simply serving as spoilers for one of the two major parties. Instead, the explainer concludes by saying: “So until there is a popular rejection of the two major parties, or an official divide in one of them, the two-party system dominates.” Instead, a better conclusion would have been something like this: “So unless election laws are changed to adopt procedures that would enable third parties to compete effectively, like various forms of ranked choice voting, the two-party system dominates.”