Missouri Libertarianism

THE TWO PARTY SYSTEM MYTH: Presidential Elections: The Multi-Partisan Truth by Jackie Bradbury, Secretary Missouri Libertarian Party

People in the United States have been clinging to a myth for a very long time now - that the United States is a two party system. Heck, they use the term "bipartisan" as if it means that all views are represented, when in fact it is only two opinions out of many. We Libertarians know this is incorrect (and we have been using the term ourselves lately in Columbia, meaning Libertarians and Greens), but it's nice to have it verified by outside sources.

The source I used is my old college days history textbook: _Essentials_Of_American_History_. It lists all of the Presidential elections from 1789 (I added 1988 and 1992): it lists most of the candidates who got anything near a significant vote total or an electoral vote.

See the chart below (Sysop note: adjoining file). As you can see, in fact a _three-way_ race is more common than any other. Three-way races make up 44% of all of our Presidential elections, as a matter of fact (23 out of 52 total), and two- candidate races only make up 37% of all Presidential elections in history... We have even had a few four and five-way races as well (19% of all elections). And as an interesting note, look at how rare a two-way race is in the 20th Century as compared to the previous one. Perhaps we could speculate WHY the cycle swings from multi-candidate elections to two- candidate elections.

It may have something to do with social upheaval - you can point to many of the multi-party swings and they tend to correspond with social movements such as women's suffrage, the civil rights movement, etc. They also somewhat correspond to economic stability as well, such as the current economic crisis (our national debt) corresponds with the current multi- candidate swing in the cycle. I'm sure a more competent political scientist than I can figure out what happens and why: the important thing is that, whatever the reasons, you can see that indeed multi-candidate and multi-partisan politics are no strangers to democracy in the United States.

(taken from the SHOW ME FREEDOM, June 1993 issue, a publication of the Missouri Libertarian Party).