What the hell is a FPTP? The U.S. political system allows for CUSA, Greenies and even Algazera to run as 3rd parties. The dirty little secret is that mostly democrats who can't abide the party that daddy voted for and grand daddy voted for are fed up with the democrat agenda or lack of it and can't bring themselves to register as republicans and pretend the political system was different but it ain't.
You could have looked it up. The internet has all kinds of information.
Intelligent search from Bing makes it easier to quickly find what you’re looking for and rewards you.
www.bing.com
Here's a search on bing, first thing that comes up is Wikipedia.
en.wikipedia.org
First Past The Post is the electoral system that the US uses.
The US system "allows" for other parties. Shall we do a breakdown?
President - there hasn't been a president that wasn't Rep-Dem since 1853. That was Whig, which essentially the Republicans surpassed, so even then it was a two party system, more or less.
Congressmen and women. House is either Rep or Dem, no other parties. The Senate has two "independents" who are essentially Democrats.
Supreme Court. Either Rep or Dem.
The whole system in Federal govt is Rep or Dem.
It's easier to do state politics by party.
The Libertarian Party, third party of the US has
No president
No congressmen or women
No state governors
No state congressmen or women
No territorial governors
No territorial congressmen or women
They have 148 elected officials. (for comparison there are 500,396 elected officials who are not part of the federal or state governments). That's 0.02% of the elected officials. And they're the THIRD PARTY.
The Green Party has 163 elected officials, and like the Libertarians has no member of state or federal government. (This is probably the US's third party right now)
Only two political parties have seats in state legislatures.
The Vermont Progressive Party has 5 seats.
The Forward Party has 1 seat.
The simple reality is that people know if they vote for a third party, they're wasting their vote. So they don't. They vote for which ever party, Rep or Dem, they hate the least.
The Greens got 813,000 votes in the US presidential election in 2024.
California was its biggest vote. People know that the Dems will win, the Dems got 20% of the vote more than the Reps. So people can afford to vote Greens. 167,000 did, the Dems got 3.2 million votes more.
Then Texas, where they got 82,000 votes, Reps got 1.5 million votes more than Dems. So, again, not a wasted vote, because all votes are essentially wasted, the Reps will win whatever.
People are only voting Greens if they think the result is a foregone conclusion.
In the House elections, The Greens got 182,000 votes IN THE WHOLE COUNTRY. Rather than 862,000. So, most people who wanted to vote Green felt they couldn't and probably voted Democrat.
With Proportional Representation, people could vote for the third party knowing it would not dilute the votes.
In the UK the Lib Dems and Labour dilute the votes.
The Tories (conservatives) got 13,966,454 of the votes.
Labour got 10,269,051
The Lib Dems got 3,696,419
Add up the votes for Labour and the Lib Dems and you get 13,965,470
That's 984 votes more for the Tories. The first time in a long time they got more votes than Labour and the Lib Dems combined.
And the Tories got 365 seats, Labour got 202, the Lib Dems got 11.
So, Labour and the Lib Dems with more or less the same votes as the Tories, got 213 seats to 365 seats.
That's a difference of 152 seats. 152 seats is 23% of the seats, as there are 650 seats.
Is that what the people wanted? No, it's not. They voted equally for left and right. But got right, because the system says so.
