Why does our system so strongly favor the formation of two dominant parties?

The Founders, looking back to their struggle against the king and parliament, built the Constitution to check and balance power. They warned against the concentration of power in the hands of the president and they kept much of the power in the hands of state governments. The Electoral College was part of that machinery to disperse and buffer power.  

As the nation grew, though, it became clear that to get anything done at the federal level officeholders from the states would have to reach across state lines to form alliances.

And each alliance created an opposition alliance. This tendency did not crystallize into two fully mobilized parties, though, until the emergence of Andrew Jackson. He won in 1828 by charging that John Quincy Adams had stolen the presidency from him in 1824–when he won a plurality but not majority in the Electoral College vote–through what Jackson and his supporters called the Corrupt Bargain when the vote went to the House of Representatives. For the next election, in a kind of personal retribution and under the party-building wizardry of Martin Van Buren of New York, Jackson’s supporters created an alliance of southern slaveholding states and northern allies. This party became the Democrats.  

In order to challenge the Democrats, an opposition formed. Again reflecting the way Americans still defined themselves in reaction to the British, they called themselves the Whigs, the party opposed to the unjust power of the king, in this case, King Andrew. They, too, reached across the divide between the North and the South. Over the next eight years, both parties worked to mobilize as many voters as possible, culminating in the election of 1840, when the upstart Whigs defeated Jackson’s hand-picked successor even though the Whigs ran a 67-year-old candidate who, his opponents charged, would be content to hang around a log cabin and drink hard cider. Unfortunately for the Democrats, a massive economic depression damaged the candidate his opponents called Martin Van Ruin. Harrison won, though he soon died in office.

[View map: Presidential Election of 1840, starting with Popular Vote]

As we can see from this dynamic map, produced by the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond, both parties showed strength in each state. And the graph along the bottom shows that the popular vote was close.

[View map: Presidential Election of 1840, Electoral College]

But the Electoral College vote created a clearer mandate for Harrison, as the map and the graph show. This was what it was intended to do: channel and contain popular sentiment.  

Five Presidents have won the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote: John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. How did the country react in each case?

We’ve already seen how the narrow election of John Quincy Adams in the House of Representatives sparked the very creation of the two-party system.  The next crisis came during Reconstruction, when Republican Rutherford B. Hayes received less than the popular vote

[View map: Presidential Election 1876, Popular Vote].  

As the map shows, Hayes received his support in the South from areas where newly enfranchised Black voters supported the party of Lincoln.  The Democrats attacked the legitimacy of those votes but were willing to support Hayes if he promised to remove troops from southern states where they remained. He did so.

[View map: Presidential Election of 1876, Electoral College Vote]

As a result, he received one more Electoral College vote than Samuel Tillman and became president.  That was the deal that ended the last vestiges of Reconstruction.

[View map: Presidential Election of 1888, Popular Vote]

12 years later, in 1888, reflecting the political order that would dominate the nation deep into the 20th century, the South in a solid bloc voted for the Democrat, and former president, Grover Cleveland. Still, Benjamin Harrison won convincingly in the Electoral College.  

[View map: Presidential Election of 1888, Electoral College]

In the next election, though, echoing Andrew Jackson’s retribution from 1828, Cleveland mobilized a strong national coalition to win the presidency in 1892 against Benjamin Harrison.  To this point, he is the only US president to be elected twice in discontinuous elections.

Tensions and polarization feel like they’re at an all-time high. Does that match the historical record? Which past American election, if any, happened at comparable levels of polarization?

[View map: Presidential Election of 2000 Popular Vote]

As the graph across the bottom of the election map shows, what we call “polarization” is actually more like “parity.” Throughout most of US history, the electorate was polarized geographically, first between slave states and free states, and then between North and South after the great majority of Black voters were disfranchised in the South for the first two-thirds of the 20th century. After the Voting Rights Act, that began to change.  

By 2000, a pattern we still recognize had crystallized, with the Democrats building an alliance on the coasts, in the Midwest, and in predominantly Black counties in the South. As we’ve seen, Al Gore won the popular vote then but George W. Bush won the Electoral College. 

[View map: Presidential Election of 2020, Popular Vote]

Twenty years later, that is still the pattern, though the difference in the popular vote was much greater.

[View map: Presidential Election of 2020, Electoral College]

As we all know, some Republicans challenged the legitimacy of the popular vote returns and sought to overturn the result in the Electoral College.

And that’s where we are today: the parity between the popular vote remains too close to call, and how that translates into the electoral college vote will determine who our next president is. That’s why some states are more important than others, and why fewer than 100,000 votes, in the key places, will likely determine the outcome of this election. The irony is that the Electoral College, designed to smooth out differences, seems now to magnify them.

What role have third parties played throughout American electoral history?

[View map, Voting America, Third Party dot density map]

As this video shows, third parties—or at least candidates who are in neither of the two major parties—have repeatedly emerged across US history. They were especially important at the time of the Civil War, in the Populist movement near the end of the 19th century, in the 1912 presidential election when Theodore Roosevelt ran against his former vice president, in the determination of the white South to resist the end of segregation after WWII, in the candidacy of George Wallace in 1968, in the candidacy of Ross Perot in the 1990s.  

Ironically, the current age of parity means that a third-party or independent candidate with a relatively small following can play a greater role than candidates in the past who had much larger followings. In the contested election of 2000, for example, a small fraction of the 6.7 million votes for third parties would have given the election to Al Gore.

Ayers, Edward L. “How We Elect Our President: The Electoral College and Two-Party System,” Remarks delivered to Citizen Travelers at the Travelers Institute: Gilder Lehrman Webinar. June 25, 2024.