If you want to understand why Sanders [was] still running for the Democratic nomination, [after he had already lost] look at the presidential election of 1912, when a war between former President Theodore Roosevelt and President William Howard Taft tore the Republican Party apart and put a Democrat — Woodrow Wilson — in the White House.
“Third parties have a very difficult time in American political history. Third parties sting and then they die.”

…Roosevelt introduced the concept of direct presidential campaigning that year and racked up a series of wins. Until then, candidates had relied on surrogates to get their messages out to the public and at political conventions.

“He [was] promoting the cult of celebrity into politics in a way that has ramifications throughout the 20th century,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley.

[The Peanut Gallery must interrupt to point out the ridiculous fiction these three paragraphs are predicated upon.

Within a two-party system, a political party is not a monolith. (To drill it down a bit further for all you multi-party parliamentary system advocates out there, its members viewpoints, although varied, almost certainly align more than the view points of many a coalition government.)

One does not belong to or vote for the party which exactly mirrors each political viewpoint one might hold. One votes for the party that is more closely aligned with one’s views. To claim the former is to ignore the representative nature of democracy as a system of government.

Democratically elected representative legislative body enact laws through compromise and only through compromise. There is no winner take all.

We pledge allegiance to the Republic for which it stands, the petulant fantasy of a country of people each of them having their own way all the time.

As you were.

Say a third-party candidate actually managed to split the electoral vote in a presidential election. According to the Constitution, the House of Representatives, which is controlled by one or the other of the two dominant political parties, would choose the next president. The [two-] party system has backstops.

OK…. One more pause to vent and throw peanuts.

For the love of Lincoln and FDR, a two-party system functioning in a way which reinforces the dominance of  two parties is not a design flaw. Two parties are kind of the point…

Does anyone pretend to know anything about civics these days, or are we all just pretending governmental systems are something akin to children’s make-believe. they are what ever our whims and preferences say they are?

Echo-chamber of idiots running around, missing the forest for the trees because they’ve convinced themselves they should be in a field.

The parties themselves are ever-evolving, but it seems pretty clear at the moment that there can only be two and whichever one can cram the most ideas into its tent can make a claim at power until people want to leave the tent.

By jove! Is that reality seeping in?

Add to that the massive diversity — geographic, racial, economic and otherwise — of a country of 350 million people. It’s both not reasonable to think two parties can sufficiently represent the viewpoints of Americans and not possible to imagine where a third party would fit.

Nope. At least not for very long. Dipshit, it is both reasonable to assume even a group as massive and diverse as the voting citizenry of the United States can be grouped into one of two group which loosely represent opposing ends of the ideological spectrum and for those parties to change and grow and assimilate new planks to platform to accommodate changing norms in society. Grow up and vote for the group who repsents you best instead of expecting a party to perfect represent one own point of view, Zach.

 

Race for the White House: What Democrats can learn from Roosevelt vs. Taft – CNNPolitics

Mmm,no actually. Interesting anecdotes about Roosevelt though.