Sid Salter: Do the Two Traditional Political Parties Survive and Thrive After the 2016 Race?

As I write this column, the polls remain open, and voting continues in the 2016 presidential election. Democrat or Republican, Clintonite or Trumpster, liberal or conservative, the candle of hope for the candidate you support still burns bright.

But by the time you read this, the election will be history. Either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump will be our president-elect – unless we as a nation go down the rabbit hole of another recount, challenge, or long national tug-of-war over the outcome of the election as was the case in 2000 after the debacle in Florida.

This election came down to a choice between two wildly unpopular candidates. Even many of those who eventually voted for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump would tell you on the way into the ballot box that they didn’t really like either candidate.

In great measure, this election was about choosing what most of us considered the lesser of evils, the best of a bad choice, or which candidate we disliked the least. Of the prevailing sentiments from people who engaged me in conversation about the election, the thing I heard most often was: “I don’t want to vote for either one of them.” 

But Election Day has come and gone. The voters made a choice. In our system of government, the time has come for the victors to celebrate and for the losers to grouse but ultimately accept the will of the majority. In American politics, that means the will of the presidential electors.

It’s my hope that the system works that way this time. It’s my fear that it won’t. 

The notions of “rigged” elections, the conspiracy theories and the distrust of institutions may well have become so imprinted on many voters that they simply can’t accept the results and move on. Whether they get encouragement in clinging to those fears and that anger from their candidates is something that remains to be seen.

Regular readers will remember back in May that I revisited the writings of French sociologist, law professor and a member of the European Parliament the late Maurice Duverger, who died in 2014 at the age of 97.

Duverger developed the social sciences “law” that bears his name. “Duverger’s Law” seeks to define the relationship between the number of political parties in a country and that same country’s electoral system.

Duverger argued that “first past the post” systems like that in the U.S. — a single ballot, simple majority system like our general elections — tends to favor a two-party system while second ballot simple majority systems that feature proportional representation for political parties in the electoral system tend to favor multiple parties.

For example, the U.S. Congress essentially is comprised of Republicans and Democrats.As we watched the 2016 presidential primaries evolve in the U.S., the fact that avowed Socialist U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders gave establishment Democrat Clinton fits in a primary that she had every conceivable advantage to win should give us all pause.

And on the Republican side, a billionaire reality TV star blew both establishment Republicans and tea party favorites out of the race as Trump became the GOP nominee.

So the question remains, can our traditional two-party system survive in a political environment where division — even in the two historically dominant political parties that enjoy an electoral structure, according to Duverger’s Law – should nurture and protect a two-party system?

Do the Republican and Democratic parties as we previously defined them still exist after the 2016 elections? Will the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party return to the fold or will their insurgency continue?

What about the GOP? Will the establishment GOP, the Tea Party faithful, and the new cult of personality that supported Trump be able to get back together or will the fragmentation that dogged the GOP presidential primaries deepen and become institutionalized?

Who knows? We are in uncharted waters, and the post-election assessments have only just begun.

Sid Salter is a syndicated columnist. Contact him sidsalter@sidsalter.com.

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