Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, and I am sitting here in our usual spot in Jerusalem, looking out at a surprisingly clear afternoon. The Judean Hills are looking particularly sharp today, and there is a crispness in the air that you only really get in February. And as always, I am joined by my brother.
Herman Poppleberry here. And you know, Corn, as I was walking over here, I was just thinking about how different the political atmosphere feels here in Israel right now, especially as we head into twenty twenty-six, compared to what we see in the states. It is a completely different flavor of chaos, isn't it? Here, we are always talking about which tiny party is going to hold the balance of power in the next coalition, whereas in the US, the conversation is almost always about the two giant monoliths.
It really is. The contrast is jarring if you spend time in both worlds. And that actually ties in perfectly with today's prompt from Daniel. He is curious about the United States political system and why it seems so locked into just two major blocks. Especially when you compare it to the highly fragmented systems we have here in Israel or the incredibly rigid party whip dynamics in places like Ireland. He is asking about the diversity of opinion within those two big parties, how the whip system compares, and if there is any real momentum for reform to let smaller parties in.
That is a deep dive, and honestly, it is one of those topics where the more you look at the plumbing of the system, the more you realize that the two-party outcome isn't just a choice people are making because they like it. It is almost a mathematical inevitability based on how the rules are written. It is what political scientists call path dependency. Once you set the tracks, the train really only has one place to go.
Right, and I think that is the best place to start. Because for a lot of people outside the United States, or even for Americans who are frustrated with their options, it feels like a lack of imagination or a failure of the voters. But there is a technical reason for it, right? What is that principle you are always talking about?
You are thinking of Duverger's Law. It is named after Maurice Duverger, a French political scientist who observed this back in the nineteen fifties and sixties. The basic idea is that a political system that uses single-member districts and a plurality rule, often called first past the post, will naturally gravitate toward a two-party system. It is one of the few things in political science that almost approaches a law of physics.
Okay, let us break that down for the listeners who aren't political science majors. First past the post. That means whoever gets the most votes wins everything, right? Even if they only get thirty-five percent of the vote in a three-way race?
Exactly. Imagine you have a district where you are electing one representative. If the Blue Party gets forty percent, the Red Party gets thirty-five percent, and the Green Party gets twenty-five percent, the Blue Party wins the seat. The sixty percent of people who voted for Red or Green get zero representation from that district. Over time, voters realize that voting for the Green Party is effectively helping the party they like the least—the Blue Party—because it splits the opposition vote. This is what we call strategic voting.
This is the famous spoiler effect. We saw it in nineteen ninety-two with Ross Perot, arguably in two thousand with Ralph Nader, and certainly people talked about it in the twenty twenty-four cycle with the various third-party and independent bids.
Right. And it isn't just the voters who behave strategically. The candidates do too. If you are a small party with a specific agenda, say you are a hardcore environmentalist or a strict libertarian, you realize you will never win a seat on your own under these rules. So, you have a choice: stay pure and stay invisible, or fold your movement into one of the two big parties to have a seat at the table. You trade your independence for influence.
It is so different from what we see here in the Knesset. In Israel, we have proportional representation. If a party gets five percent of the national vote, they get five percent of the seats in parliament, provided they pass that three point twenty-five percent threshold.
Exactly. That is why we have a dozen parties in the Knesset. You don't have to be the biggest to get a voice. You just have to be big enough to matter to a coalition leader. In the United States, if you are the third biggest, you are essentially invisible in the legislature. You could have ten million supporters nationwide, but if they are spread out across fifty states, you might not win a single seat in Congress.
But that leads to Daniel's second question about the diversity of opinion. If you only have two buckets to put three hundred and forty million people into, those buckets have to be enormous. We hear about caucuses and wings all the time. How much dissent is actually tolerated within the Democratic or Republican parties? Because from the outside, it sometimes looks like they are just two warring tribes where everyone has to march in lockstep.
This is where the United States system is actually quite fascinating and often misunderstood. Because the parties are so broad, they function more like coalitions that form before the election, whereas in Israel or Ireland, coalitions form after the election. In a parliamentary system, the parties are distinct, and they negotiate a platform to form a government. In the US, that negotiation happens inside the party during the primary process.
That is an interesting way to put it. Pre-election coalitions versus post-election coalitions.
Right. In the Democratic Party, for example, you have a massive range of views. You have the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which includes people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman. They are often pushing for much more radical shifts in policy, like the Green New Deal or universal healthcare. But then you also have the New Democrat Coalition and the Blue Dog Coalition, which are much more centrist, business-friendly, and fiscally conservative.
And on the Republican side?
It is the same thing. You have the Freedom Caucus, which is very hardline on spending and social issues, often willing to shut down the government to get their way. But you also have the Main Street Partnership, which represents more traditionalist or moderate Republicans who are more interested in governance and compromise. These groups often loathe each other. They fight over the party platform, they fight over leadership, and they fight in the primaries.
But how much can they actually disagree when it comes to the final vote? If a Democrat in a conservative-leaning district in, say, Pennsylvania or Ohio wants to vote against a major party bill because their constituents hate it, can they do that without being exiled?
They can, and they do, much more often than you might see in a parliamentary system. This brings us to the party whip comparison Daniel mentioned. In Ireland or the United Kingdom, the party whip is incredibly powerful. If you are a member of the Irish Dail and you vote against the government on a confidence motion or a key budget bill, you are often expelled from the parliamentary party immediately. You lose the party's support, you lose your funding, and you are essentially an independent. In Ireland, they call it the "three-line whip," and defying it is a political death sentence for most.
And in the United States?
It is much softer. The whips in the House and Senate—like the Majority Whip or the Minority Whip—are there to count votes and try to persuade people. They use carrots and sticks, sure. They might offer a committee assignment, or help with campaign funding, or promise to include a project for the representative's home district in the bill. But they can't really fire you.
Why not?
Because in the United States, the candidate is often more powerful than the party brand in their specific district. If a representative from a rural district in West Virginia votes against a climate bill that their party wants, the party leadership might be furious, but they know that if they kick that person out, they will just lose the seat to the other party. The representative has their own base of support, their own donors, and their own brand.
So the lack of a centralized party list makes a huge difference. In Israel, the party leaders decide who is on the list and in what order. If you annoy the leader, you are moved to the bottom of the list and you are out of a job. In the states, you have the primary system.
Exactly. The primary system is perhaps the biggest difference. In most countries, the party leadership picks the candidates. In the United States, the voters in that district pick the candidate in a primary election. This means a candidate can actually run against the party establishment and win. We saw this with the Tea Party movement years ago, we saw it with the MAGA movement, and we see it with the insurgent wings of the Democratic party. The party leadership often hates it, but they are stuck with whoever the primary voters choose.
So, in a way, the diversity of opinion is handled through internal warfare rather than through multiple parties. Instead of a small party leaving a coalition to topple a government, you have a small caucus within a party refusing to vote for a Speaker of the House until their demands are met. We saw that quite a bit in the last few years, especially with the multiple rounds of voting for Speaker in twenty twenty-three and the subsequent leadership challenges.
We did. It creates a different kind of gridlock. In a parliamentary system, if the coalition breaks, the government falls and you might have new elections. In the United States, the government stays, but it just can't pass anything. It is a system designed for stability and stasis rather than rapid shifts. It is very hard to do something new, but it is also very hard to undo something old.
I want to go back to the party whip thing for a second. You mentioned that in Ireland, the whip is very strict. Does that make the individual representatives less important? Like, are they just voting machines for the party leader?
That is the common criticism of the Westminster-style systems. In a strict whip system, the individual member of parliament has very little leverage unless they are willing to blow up the whole government. In the United States, a single Senator can hold up an entire national agenda. Think of someone like Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema in the early twenty-twenties. They weren't the party leaders, but because the margins were so thin, they had immense power to dictate the terms of major legislation. That kind of individual leverage is much rarer in the Irish or Israeli systems, where the party blocks tend to move as one.
So, while the US has fewer parties, the individuals within those parties might actually have more autonomy than a backbencher in a multi-party parliamentary system.
That is exactly right. It is a trade-off. You get fewer choices on the ballot, but the person you elect might have more power to buck their own party leadership. Of course, the downside is that it makes the system incredibly vulnerable to individual holdouts. One person's "autonomy" is another person's "obstruction."
Okay, let us look at the last part of Daniel's prompt. Reform. Is there any serious consideration at the federal or state level to change this? Because as we sit here in early twenty twenty-six, it feels like the two-party system is under more strain than ever. Polarization is at an all-time high, and a lot of people feel like neither party represents them. Is there a way out?
There is actually a lot of movement at the state level. The federal government is very hard to change because the Constitution is so difficult to amend, and the two major parties have a shared interest in keeping the rules the way they are. But the states have a lot of power over how they conduct elections. The biggest one right now is Ranked Choice Voting, or RCV.
We have talked about this briefly before, but let us explain how it actually addresses the two-party problem.
Sure. In Ranked Choice Voting, instead of just picking one person, you rank the candidates in order of preference. First choice, second choice, third choice, and so on. If no one gets a majority of first-place votes, the candidate in last place is eliminated, and their votes are redistributed to the second choice of those voters. This continues until someone has a majority.
And this solves the spoiler effect, right? Because I can vote for a third-party candidate as my first choice, and then put a major party candidate as my second choice. If my third-party candidate loses, my vote isn't wasted. It just goes to my second choice.
Exactly. It removes the fear factor. It allows smaller parties to build a following and show their strength without being accused of being spoilers. Alaska and Maine have already implemented this for federal elections. In Alaska, it led to a very interesting result in twenty twenty-two where Mary Peltola, a Democrat, won a House seat in a very Republican state because she was the second choice for a lot of moderate voters who didn't like the more extreme Republican candidate.
And we saw Nevada pass a ballot measure for Ranked Choice Voting in twenty twenty-four, right?
They did. It was a long road because they had to pass it in two consecutive elections, but it is now part of their system. Oregon also passed a major RCV initiative in the twenty twenty-four cycle. So we are seeing this "laboratory of democracy" effect where more and more states are trying it out. It doesn't necessarily mean we will see a third party win the Presidency anytime soon, but it changes the incentives for the major parties. They have to worry about being people's second choice, which usually means they have to tone down the vitriol.
That seems like a massive shift. Does it lead to more parties, though? Or just more moderate candidates within the two parties?
Initially, it seems to favor more moderate or broadly appealing candidates. But over time, it lowers the barrier for third parties to get to ten or fifteen percent of the vote. Once a party hits those numbers consistently, they start to be taken seriously as a political force. They might not win the seat, but they can influence the platform of the major parties who want those second-choice votes.
What about other reforms? I have heard about something called Fusion Voting.
Oh, Fusion Voting is fascinating and very "old school" American. It used to be common across the United States in the nineteenth century, but now it is mostly just in New York and Connecticut. It allows a third party to cross-endorse a major party candidate. So, you might see a candidate on the ballot as both the Democratic nominee and the Working Families Party nominee.
So I can vote for the person I like, but on the line of the party that matches my values.
Right. It gives the third party leverage. They can say to the Democrat, "We will give you our five percent of the vote, but only if you support this specific policy on housing or labor." It is a way of having a multi-party influence within a two-party structure. There are groups like the Protect Democracy project and various state-level organizations working to bring that back to more states because it is a very effective way to break the duopoly's hold on policy without needing a constitutional overhaul.
It is funny, because as we are sitting here in Jerusalem, our problem is almost the opposite. We have so many parties that it is nearly impossible to form a stable government. We have had five elections in four years recently, and the negotiations to form a coalition are often seen as a form of legalized extortion by the smaller parties.
Yeah, the instability here is the price of that high representation. In the United States, you have the opposite problem. You have extreme stability—the same two parties have been in power since the eighteen fifties—but a lot of people feel like their specific voice is being ignored because it is being smoothed over by the big party machines. It is the classic trade-off between "representativeness" and "governability."
It makes me think about the historical context too. The United States didn't start with two parties. Or rather, the founders were famously terrified of factions. George Washington's farewell address in seventeen ninety-six was basically one long warning against the spirit of party. He thought it would lead to "frightful despotism."
It is one of the great ironies of American history. They designed a system to avoid parties, but the very rules they wrote—like the Electoral College and the way Congress is elected—made parties inevitable. Even before Washington left office, the system was already splitting into the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. They realized very quickly that if you don't organize, you don't win.
And we have had different parties over time. The Whigs, the Federalists, the National Republicans. But it always settles back to two. It is like a biological equilibrium for that specific environment.
It really is. When one party dies, like the Whigs did in the eighteen fifties over the issue of slavery, a new one immediately rises to fill the vacuum. The Republican Party went from a brand new third party in eighteen fifty-four to winning the presidency with Abraham Lincoln in eighteen sixty—just six years. But that only happened because the Whigs completely collapsed and the Democrats split in two.
So, for a third party like the Greens or the Libertarians or a new "Forward" style party to actually become a major force today, one of the existing big two would almost have to cease to exist.
Or the rules have to change. That is why the reform movement is so focused on things like Ranked Choice Voting or proportional representation at the state level. If you change the math of the election, you change the behavior of the voters and the parties. There is actually a proposal called the Fair Representation Act that has been introduced in Congress. It would require states to use multi-member districts with ranked choice voting for the House of Representatives.
Multi-member districts? That sounds like a huge jump for an American state. How would that work?
Instead of having one representative for one small district, you might have one larger district that elects three or five representatives. If you use ranked choice voting in a five-member district, any candidate who gets about seventeen percent of the vote wins a seat. This would almost guarantee that in a Republican-leaning state, Democrats would still get some seats, and in a Democratic-leaning state, Republicans would get some. It would also open the door for third parties to actually win seats.
It would basically end gerrymandering, wouldn't it? Because you can't really draw the lines to exclude people if you are electing five people at once.
Exactly. It would make most seats competitive and ensure that the minority in every state still has a voice in Washington. Illinois actually used to have something like this for their state legislature until nineteen eighty. It was called cumulative voting. It resulted in much less polarization because you would often have a Republican and two Democrats representing a city, or two Republicans and a Democrat representing a rural area. People had to work together because they shared the same constituents.
Why did they stop?
It was a casualty of a push for smaller, more efficient government. A populist movement led by Pat Quinn argued that it was too complicated and that the legislature was too big. They passed a "Cutback Amendment." But now, looking back at the intense polarization we have today, a lot of political scientists are saying that the old Illinois system was actually a lot healthier for democracy. It forced the parties to compete everywhere, rather than just retreating into their safe strongholds.
It is interesting how these technicalities, like whether a district has one representative or three, end up shaping the entire culture of a country. We think of politics as being about ideas and values, but so much of it is just the shape of the container the ideas are poured into.
Absolutely. The container in the United States is a two-liter bottle. It is big, it is sturdy, but it is hard to pour just a little bit out, and it is hard to mix in new flavors. The container in Israel is twenty different espresso cups. You get a lot of variety, but it is very easy to spill, and it is hard to get everyone to drink the same thing at the same time. You are going to get a different experience drinking from them, even if the liquid—the actual political issues—is the same.
I like that. So, to answer Daniel's question about how the US ended up here, it is a combination of the math of first past the post, the historical collapse of previous parties into a stable duopoly, and a set of rules that makes third parties look like spoilers.
And the diversity of opinion is there, but it is internal. It is messy, and it happens in committee rooms and primary battles rather than in coalition negotiations on the floor of a parliament. The "party" in America is more of a franchise than a unified army.
And the whip system is more like a nudge system compared to the Irish or British versions.
Definitely more of a nudge. Or a bribe. Or a very stern talking to in the Speaker's office. But rarely a firing. Unless you do something truly egregious, the party is stuck with you as long as your voters keep sending you back.
So, Herman, if you were an American voter, would you be pushing for these reforms? Or do you think the two-party system has some hidden benefits we are overlooking?
That is a tough one. The two-party system, for all its flaws, does tend to force a certain amount of moderation at the national level because the parties have to appeal to a broad middle to win. In a multi-party system, you can have very small, very extreme parties that end up becoming kingmakers. We see that here in Israel, where a party with four seats can hold the entire government hostage to their specific demands. That can be very destabilizing.
That is a very good point. The tail can wag the dog in a multi-party system.
Exactly. In the US, the extreme wings have to convince a majority of their own party before they can even get to the table. It is a different kind of filter. I think the sweet spot is probably somewhere in the middle. Maybe a system like Ranked Choice Voting that allows for more voices but still encourages broad-based support. I think the American system is currently too rigid, and the Israeli system is currently too fragmented. We are both looking for that "Goldilocks" zone of governance.
It feels like the US is in a period of experimentation right now. Alaska, Maine, Nevada, and Oregon are the laboratories, and we will see if other states follow. There are movements in dozens of other places, from Colorado to Massachusetts.
It is the beauty of the federalist system. The states can try things out. If it works in Alaska and leads to better governance and less screaming on cable news, it might work in California or Texas. It takes time, but the "plumbing" can be updated.
Well, I think we have covered a lot of ground here. Daniel's prompt really touched on the core of why American politics feels so different from the European or Middle Eastern models. It isn't just that Americans are different people; it is that they are playing a different game with different rules.
It is all in the plumbing, Corn. It is all in the plumbing. If you want to change the water pressure, you have to change the pipes.
Before we wrap up, I just want to say, if you are enjoying these deep dives into the weird mechanics of how the world works, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It genuinely helps other curious people find the show. We are seeing more listeners from all over the world, and it is great to have you all here.
Yeah, it makes a big difference. We love seeing the feedback and the new prompts that come in. It keeps us on our toes.
You can find us at myweirdprompts.com. We have the full archive there, and if you want to send us a question or a topic like Daniel did, there is a contact form right on the site. Or you can just email us at show at myweirdprompts dot com.
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Thanks for listening, and thanks to Daniel for the prompt. It gave us a lot to chew on today. I am going to go enjoy the rest of this clear Jerusalem afternoon before the clouds roll back in.
Absolutely. Until next time, I am Herman Poppleberry.
And I am Corn. We will see you in the next episode.
Goodbye everyone.
