Yesterday we had a brief look at some of Donald Trump’s adventures in foreign policy. But in recent days the big Trump news has been domestic, with the passage of his budget bill and the attacks on it by former First Bro Elon Musk. The feud culminated at the weekend with the announcement by Musk of the formation of a new political party, the America Party.
Getting a new party off the ground, of course, would require an enormous amount of work. To some extent, money (of which Musk has unimaginable amounts) can buy work, but not completely. If he’s serious about the enterprise, Musk will need to get a lot of experienced and knowledgeable people on side, and while there are some hopeful signs for him, it’s still a big ask.
It was Trump who, remarkably enough, offered the most cogent critique of the idea, with an unusual (for him) fidelity to the rules of spelling and grammar: “He even wants to start a Third Political Party, despite the fact that they have never succeeded in the United States – The System seems not designed for them. The one thing Third Parties are good for is the creation of Complete and Total DISRUPTION & CHAOS.”
Even leaving aside the capitals, there is some hyperbole there; the Republican Party itself was a third party once. But it’s quite true that third parties have enjoyed a uniform lack of success for a very long time, and that the system is very much designed to work against them. And while the United States is an extreme case, the problem is more widespread.
Consider Britain, where Keir Starmer’s Labour government has just marked its first year in office and is not travelling well. As you’ll remember, it won a landslide majority with just 33.7% of the vote, setting up a dangerous disconnect between its solid appearance and its actual level of support. It is now down another ten points in the opinion polls, and Starmer’s own approval rating is negative to the tune of some forty points.
Writing back in May, George Monbiot argued that Labour’s woes presaged the destruction of the two-party system, calling for a concerted attack on first-past-the-post voting – which, as he put it, “is grossly unfair not by accident but by design” – by progressive forces. You don’t have to buy Monbiot’s whole political package (I don’t) to agree that Britain’s electoral system has led it to a strange and unstable place, with leaders who “seem to despise people who voted for them, while courting and flattering those who didn’t and won’t.”
Australia is better placed, but something of the same dynamic is at work. Our system of preferential voting, discussed here two weeks ago, mitigates but does not eliminate the unfairness of a system based on single-member districts, and the unfairness is most obvious in an election with a decisive margin. That’s what we had in May; here, in summary, are the results (copied from this table, but with the Coalition merged into a single line):
| Party | Votes | % | Actual | St-Lag. | d’Hondt |
| Labor | 5,354,138 | 34.6% | 94 | 52 | 54 |
| Coalition | 4,929,402 | 31.8% | 43 | 48 | 50 |
| Greens | 1,889,977 | 12.2% | 1 | 18 | 19 |
| Independents | 1,126,051 | 7.3% | 10 | 11 | 11 |
| One Nation | 991,814 | 6.4% | 0 | 10 | 10 |
| Trumpet of Patriots | 296,076 | 1.9% | 0 | 3 | 3 |
| Family First | 273,681 | 1.8% | 0 | 3 | 2 |
| Legalise Cannabis | 186,335 | 1.2% | 0 | 2 | 1 |
| Libertarians | 83,474 | 0.5% | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Gerard Rennick People First | 71,892 | 0.5% | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Katter’s Australian Party | 51,775 | 0.3% | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Centre Alliance | 37,453 | 0.2% | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Others | 198,168 | 1.3% | 0 |
“Actual” records the number of seats won, while the following two columns show the seats that would have been won under the two main systems of proportional representation, Sainte-Laguë and d’Hondt. The enormous bonus that our system gave to Labor, mostly at the expense of the Greens and One Nation, is obvious. In a fair election, Labor would not have won an outright majority; it would have had to depend on the Greens and independents, just as Labour in Britain would have had to depend on some combination of Liberal Democrats, Greens and Scottish Nationalists.
Now we can see Musk’s problem in sharper relief. If Australia,* with preferential voting, lies somewhere between Britain’s dysfunctionality and the consensus-based systems that use proportional representation, the US is at the other extreme, with not just single-member districts and first-past-the-post voting but a raft of other measures to entrench the two-party system: restrictions on ballot access, partisan officials, state-run primaries and the weird machinery of the electoral college.
That’s a lot for Musk to overcome, but it’s hard to see who would be better placed to have a go at it. If he’s serious about the attempt it could at least be a lot of fun to watch.
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* And France, where a fresh election has become an option and proportionality has also returned to the agenda.
The World is Not Enough 
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