| American elections function as part of a two-party political system. But you won’t find any mention of this in the Constitution. The founding fathers were actually opposed to political parties. The problem is, our type of elections, which must be won by a majority vote (at least 50%) tend to create a two-party government. One group of people bands together to give their ideas more power, another group forms to oppose them and promote their own, and this eventually entrenches both parties in power and obstructs the growth and power of third parties. Occasionally, a third party will take the place of one of the two leading parties, but the system always stabilizes back into two parties. This makes it so that only a candidate from the two major parties has a realistic chance of winning the election. This is the basic environment in which all of American politics functions.
The presidential election can be broken into three major parts: the party primaries (and caucuses), the party conventions, and election day. |