Moving to a four-party system
By: Wash Hunt
Tags: Politics, Voting, Future, Prediction

I have often thought that one of the biggest weaknesses in current-day US politics is the fact that it is controlled by a two-party system.

With how many issues are in our world today, these parties have had to adopt huge platforms to address everything that a potential voter could care about. This leads to the inevitable issue that a voter may agree on one issue with a specific party but disagree with other issues. The paradox of choosing has led to the “single-issue voter.”

President Trump may be changing all of that without even knowing.

In 2016, as the presidential race was coming to a close and as then-candidate Trump was issuing statements about how if he lost, it would be because the democrats cheated. I thought of a different race that happened over 150 years ago, Andrew Jackson versus John Quincy Adams.

In 1824, Andrew Jackson won, or at least, he had the most votes but something happened that we haven’t seen since the early days of our country: no one got the majority of electoral votes. When this happens, the House of Representatives takes over and picks the president. Even though Jackson had won the popular vote and had more electoral votes, the House chose Adams.

This didn’t go well with Jackson or his supporters. Now one thing to quickly note, during this time there was only one major political party in the US: the Democratic-Republican Party. Four years later and Jackson was running again, but this time in his own new political party, the Democratic Party. While his opponents decided they should form their own party as well, the Republican Party.

Jump back to 2016 with this in mind and my prediction as the vote was about to happen was this: if Hillary Clinton won, Trump would run again in four years but this time he would have rallied his supporters to form a new political party with him as the head.

Of course, Hillary lost, yet now looking forward, I think my prediction still may happen.

With how much doubt was thrown into this current election by President Trump, I think a few things will happen down the road.

My updated prediction is this: there will be a group of more moderate Republicans who will break away leaving the Republican Party the party of Trump.

This will seem like a windfall to the Democrats who now have the advantage of a split voter base between those on the right but this new moderate, centralist party will draw away the more moderate Democrats who have started to be pushed out by their more liberal colleagues.

This leads to a three-party system but I predicted four, so what causes that? Abortion.

Abortion for many Republicans is that single issue they vote on. It doesn’t matter what else you stand for, they will vote for you if you are pro-life.

This new moderate political party will be divided on this causing a split along this line.

This leaves us with four parties to choose from with Republicans and Democrats occupying further ends of the spectrum and two more moderate parties near the center. The current third parties will hang around and will probably even see a boost as that stranglehold of the old two-party system crumbles.

All that will happen or maybe civil war.