How Natural Is the Two-Party System? (Spoiler Alert: Not at All)

The latest This Old Democracy podcast features political scientist Lisa Disch on the artificial roots of two-party rule, the buried history of multi-party democracy in the US and a credible strategy for creating a better party system.  If you've ever felt trapped by a disagreeable, binary choice at the ballot box — known in elite political science circles as the "hold your nose" vote — Lisa Disch wants you to know that feeling isn't a personal failing. It's a structural condition, and not a natural one. It didn't have to be this way. And it doesn't have to stay this way. Disch, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan and author of The Tyranny of the Two-Party System, joins host Micah Sifry on the latest episode of This Old Democracy for a wide-ranging conversation about the rules, myths, and suppressed history behind America's duopoly. The result is an illuminating conversation — essential listening for anyone who wants to understand not just what's broken about our politics, but how it got this way, and what we can do about it. Disch opens with a provocation: she would ban the very phrase "two-party system" if she could. Not because two parties don't dominate American politics — they obviously do — but because calling it a "system" implies something organic, inevitable, and permanent. It's none of those things. "Most people in the US accept third party failure as a matter of course. They feel that third party candidacies put them in a terrible position — in the grips of a terrible dilemma. Do I vote for a candidate who might represent me better, but may end up throwing the election to the candidate whom I, and actually most people, least prefer? And we assume that this is just a natural feature of the two-party system. And we don't think about the institutions that make this game so stacked against third political parties."  That's not a description of nature. It's a description of rules — rules that were deliberately designed, largely at the turn of the 20th century, to choke off the extraordinary multi-party vitality that had characterized American democracy for most of the 1800s. The history Disch tells is one familiar to regular readers of this Substack, but unfamiliar to most Americans. Before the adoption of the government-printed "Australian ballot" in the 1890s, parties printed their own ballots, and fusion candidacies — where a single candidate could and did appear on the ballot under multiple party lines — were common and powerful. They allowed third parties to build real coalitions, elect real officeholders, and sustain real organizations. Then came a two-step trap. First, states adopted ballot access thresholds that made it costly and difficult for minor parties to qualify. Then — and this is the critical piece — some states quietly banned fusion by requiring that no candidate could be nominated by more than one party. The effect was devastating: "What this meant was that partisans of one party would not vote for the candidate that looked like it was the candidate of the other party... populist voters [would say], 'I'm not voting for the Democratic party. They're a terrible party. They supported slavery. Why would I do that? I'm going to lose votes.'" A populist organizer of the era saw it coming with brutal clarity, as Disch quotes: "Whenever a fusion candidate running under the Democratic heading alone produced many stay-at-home votes – that is to say abstainers –  in the future, we populists will have to get on the ballot by petition." They understood exactly how the new rules would hollow out their organizations. And they were right. "This is one of the reasons why it is so difficult for third political parties to have any lasting presence in US elections — because you spend an enormous amount of resources just getting on the ballot." The near-destruction of fusion voting didn't just limit ballot options. It destroyed something more fundamental: the capacity of ordinary peop