In short · Summary by AI
The video explains why the US has effectively a two-party system despite many voters identifying as independents and wanting a viable third party. It argues the cause lies in institutional factors like first-past-the-post, single-member districts, and Duverger's Law, plus voter behavior, with the spoiler effect pushing people toward the lesser of two evils. Reforms like rank choice voting could open space for third parties.
- As of 2025, more US voters identified as unaffiliated independents than as Democrats or Republicans, yet no third party has won a US presidential election in 175 years.
- Most other democracies, such as Sweden and Kenya, allow multi-party competition, while the US is effectively a two-party system.
- In 2025, 62% of Americans said the country needed a viable third party, but only 15% said they'd be very likely to vote for a third-party candidate.
- Parties can be mapped on economic and social axes, and the US has two major parties filling the main positions while smaller parties like the Greens, Libertarians, and Forward Party remain minor.
- Plurality, first-past-the-post voting in single-member districts creates winner-takes-all outcomes that disadvantage third parties.
- Duverger's Law and the spoiler effect lead voters to abandon third parties and back the more viable major-party candidate they can tolerate.
- Independents are not a unified bloc: many lean toward one major party, so they cannot easily form a competitive third party.
- Reforms such as abandoning single-member districts or adopting rank choice voting could make third-party competition more viable.
Why Two Parties Dominate
0:00Are you tired of politics as usual? Democrat or Republican? Are you looking for something new? Well, you're not alone. As of 2025, more US voters identified as unaffiliated political [music] independents than as specifically Democrats or Republicans. But wait, there's more. Consider how many presidential elections a third party has won in the last 175 years.
0:27None. Wait, what do you mean none? Well, as it turns out, nobody but a Democrat or a Republican has won a US presidential election since the mid-19th century. And even before that, even though the party names were different, the two-party system was largely the same. But with so many people who don't identify with Democrats or Republicans, why do they still feel like the only two options?
0:51Hi, I'm Kushan Avidar. This is Crash Course, and we're answering big questions on US government.
The US Versus Global Democracies
1:03See, even though we have other parties, the US is effectively a two-party system, where voters mostly choose between just two major party candidates for national elections. And that is actually kind of weird. Most other democracies don't work like that. All over the world, from Sweden to Uruguay, multi-party democracies are set up to allow multiple political parties to actually compete in national elections.
1:28Heck, Kenya has 92 registered parties. So, in terms of global democracy, we are actually the odd ones out. But it seems like we'd rather not be. In 2025, 62% of people in the US thought the country needed a viable third party to represent the people's interests. But, and here's where it gets even weirder, the number of people who said they'd be very likely to vote for a third party candidate, it's not 62%.
1:53It's only 15%. I guess they just haven't heard of the anti-obrugala party. We're pro spinach, down with spicy lettuce. So, what's up? Why is the US trapped in this two-party system when over half the country wants out? That dissonance is really interesting. And to really unpack it, we can start by thinking about what the point of having Democrats and Republicans is supposed to be in the first place.
2:20The United States is a representative democracy, which means it's supposed ruled by and reflect the interests of the people who live here. It's also a country of over 340 million different people who presumably have over 340 million different interests. And we can't all make the laws together. Imagine that Zoom call.
What Political Parties Are For
2:42And we can't get much accomplished by ourselves either. So, instead, we organize into political parties that share some basic interests and elect representatives who promise to more or less represent those interests. We can understand political parties based on what kinds of interests and ideologies they fight for.
3:00Sometimes political scientists put all those parties on a big chart where one axis runs from economic liberal to economic conservative, or more government involvement in the economic spending to less government involvement in the economy. And the other axis runs from social liberal to social conservative, or push to make changes for the common good to protect the status quo.
3:23So, mainstream Republicans would fall somewhere in the upper right quadrant for small government spending, big traditional values. And mainstream Democrats would go somewhere in the lower left quadrant for more public funding and cultural progress. Those two dots sit in opposing quadrants. In multi-party democracies, other political parties might fill in the gaps between and even extend out on either side.
Where Parties Sit Ideologically
3:47Like Sweden has eight major political parties across the social and economic axes with the ultra-conservative Sweden Democrats way over here and the socialist left party way over here and the Social Democrats, Moderates and Center Party filling in the middle. But here in the US, we just have the two major parties.
4:12Everyone else is a bit player. Like sure, we've got the Green Party who are big on sustainability and social justice and would land even deeper in the lower left and libertarians who land in the lower right quadrant for economic conservatism and social liberalism. We've also got some centrist options like the Forward Party who lands closer to the you guessed it center or even more niche parties like the United States Pirate Party whose platform among other things seeks to abolish patent rights.
4:42They're socially liberal since their platform includes things like anti-bigotry and police reform while their economics are closer to the center. So really, the US does have more than two parties to represent all our 340 million interests. They just can't seem to ever win an election. Okay, that's not totally true.
5:02Sometimes they can get ahead in local and state elections and once in a while even snag a seat in Congress. But even that is tricky. In the US, it's usually easier to just glom onto one of the two major parties. Like Zohran Mamdani who was elected mayor of New York City in 2025 is a democratic socialist but ran as a Democrat.
Why Third Parties Struggle
5:23Or Justin Amash, a libertarian who was a Michigan House Rep for 10 years, ran as a Republican. And of course, a third party hasn't won the presidency or even come close in two centuries. So we're still left with a big question. Why not? Well, according to political scientists, there are two explanations.
5:44Explanation one, the institutional explanation. It basically comes down to our elections. The way we choose political representatives in the US boxes out third parties and makes it very hard for anyone but a Democrat or Republican to win. This explanation lays the blame at the feet of the system and there are a couple different facets of said system that support it.
Institutional Explanation: Elections
6:07Like consider the fact that most US elections require just a plurality rather than a majority of votes to win. So say nine out of 10 candidates all get around 10% of the vote, but the 10th one gets 11%. They win the whole thing. This is known as a first-past-the-post system where whoever has the most votes wins even if the majority of people didn't vote for them.
6:34Like in this 10 candidate scenario, the winner barely came out on top leaving [music] 89% of voters represented by someone they didn't choose. An example of minority rule where suddenly all voters are being represented by someone only a small fraction actually supported. And compare this with the fact that the US, unlike Sweden and a lot of the countries we mentioned earlier, mostly votes in single-member districts where the country is broken up into different geographic areas that are each
7:06represented by a single elected official. This leads to a winner-takes-all situation where the person who gets the most votes wins everything. There's no prize for coming in second. Now, this doesn't immediately disqualify a third-party candidate, but it does make things a lot harder for them because of something called Duverger's Law.
Duverger's Law and Spoilers
7:25I did not know I had that in me. Like say you're a voter in that 10 candidate election throwing your hat in the ring for the Pirate Party candidate, but one year that candidate doesn't do so hot. Instead of the usual 10-ish percent of the the he only gets 7% and it doesn't look like he's going to do much better next time.
7:44You want the Pirate Party to win, but what you want even more [music] is to make sure the Copyright Party doesn't win. So, instead of wasting your vote on a party that's looking less and less competitive, you decided to give it to someone a little more mainstream like the Net Neutrality Party. >> [music] >> They might not align with all of your values, but they do on some big issues and on the other side of the spectrum, discouraged members of the Hunt Copyright Violators for Sports Party are
8:14doing the same thing, jumping ship to a more popular, more moderate candidate to keep Net Neutrality out of office. And so, all of a sudden, that diverse political field is dominated by just two big parties and voting for anyone else doesn't really make any sense. And while there's no such thing as the Hunt Copyright Violators for Sport Party, unfortunately, this kind of thing actually happens in the real world like when Green Party supporters vote Democratic or Libertarians vote
8:45Republican. Duverger's Law helps explain how single-member districts and winner-takes-all elections tend to weed out third-party candidates. When US politics are so polarized and every election is a bloody 1v1 knockout, voting your conscience can feel less important than keeping the wrong guy out of office.
9:05This is called the spoiler effect where voting for a third party just seems too risky. We'd rather vote for the major party candidate we kind of like than risk spoiling the race and handing it over to the other major party we really don't like, which leaves a lot of us feeling forced to vote for the lesser of two evils.
9:26Not to be confused with the lesser of two weevils. Check out SciShow or Bizarre Beasts for your insect content needs. Those institutional factors help explain why less popular third-party candidates can't get a foothold in most of our elections. But, they don't explain why the 45% of unaffiliated independents don't just band together and make an actually competitive third party.
9:48Remember, I said we had two explanations? Here's where the second explanation comes in, the voter explanation. See, the thing about independents is they're, well, independent. They hold a wide variety of political beliefs all across those ideological and just because they're all independent doesn't mean they align with each other.
Voter Explanation: Independents
10:09Like lots of independents call themselves centrists, but seem to actually lean toward one major party over another. And by lots, I mean literally 78%. So, in the voting booth, all these self-proclaimed independents are basically indistinguishable from those folks who call themselves Democrats or Republicans out loud.
10:28And others might even be more liberal or conservative than the major parties, but choose to align with them anyway when they cast votes in elections. Like the ultra-conservative Tea Party movement of the late 2000s and today's MAGA movement, both of which have done their business from within the Republican Party.
10:47Then, of course, you have the folks who hold values and ideals that are totally outside of the ideological axes we're working with. Like my neighbor who believes the only money the US government should spend is on soundproofing his apartment so he doesn't have to hear a very promising trumpet player practicing at 3:00 a.m.
11:05"Excuse me for trying to keep the arts alive in this country, Robert." And the true neutral independents, they typically don't have much interest in politics at all. Nothing like being oblivious to give you some peace of mind in this country. So, in the end, trying to lump all those independents together in one party makes even a little less sense than trying to lump them into two competitive parties we already have.
11:28All that to say, it's not ideal, but for now, it's the system we got. Partly because the system isn't really set up to be able to represent everyone's individual interests, and partly because people are worried that their interests wouldn't be represented even if they did vote for another party. I don't blame you if you feel like we're stuck.
Can the System Change?
11:47But there's nothing to say it has to be this way forever. Other democracies do things differently, and with some reforms to our systems, like swapping away from single-member districts or adopting rank choice voting, we could conceivably get some pretty competitive third-party action going. But for now, politics in the US remains a zero-sum game between the Democrats and the Republicans.
12:12When Republicans win, Democrats lose. When Democrats win, Republicans lose. And every time, it seems, independents end up picking the lesser of two weasels. [music] Speaking of things that are grubby, in our next episode, we'll talk about campaign spending. I'll see you then. In the meantime, this one's for you, Robert.
12:33This episode of Crash Course Big Questions on USFacts, a non-partisan civic tech project that makes government data easier to understand. For more resources that go along with these videos, go [music] to usafacts.org/crashcourse. Thanks for watching this episode of Crash [music] Course Big Questions on USFacts, which was filmed in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was made with the help of all these nice people.
12:57If you want to help keep free for everyone forever, you can join our [music] community on Patreon.
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