In his Wall Street Journal column William Galston declaims that Americans long for a “new beginning”:
In a recent poll from the Pew Research Center, 10% of Americans reported that thinking about U.S. politics made them feel hopeful, and 4% were excited. By contrast, 55% said they were angry, and 65% were exhausted.
This isn’t the first poll to note a pervasive sense of exhaustion, and I suspect it won’t be the last. Americans are tired of partisan quarrels that rarely reach a resolution. Issues like immigration reform linger for decades, and the Supreme Court has brought new ones such as abortion back into the arena.
and
It isn’t surprising that the share of Americans with unfavorable views of both parties has reached a record high (28%), up from only 6% three decades ago, or that 37% wish there were more parties from which to choose. Nor is it surprising that challenges to the major-party duopoly are proliferating—from Cornel West’s Green Party and a likely No Labels bipartisan centrist ticket to the insurgent candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose grievances against Democratic Party officials seem to multiply by the day.
Voters might be in a better mood if they believed that these third-party campaigns were likely to improve the political system. But two-thirds of the public think it’s unlikely that an independent candidate will win in the next 25 years, and only 26% say that having more political parties would make it easier to solve the nation’s problems. (About the same proportion believe that additional parties would make problem-solving harder.)
I hate to disabuse Mr. Galston but there will be no “new beginning”. The system is rigged in favor of the present political parties, at least if Illinois is any gauge.
For any candidate to have his or her votes tabulated, they must follow certain rules and those rules are sufficiently stringent it means that only established parties need apply. Write-in campaigns are impossible in practice—a write-in candidate must follow essentially the same rules as the party candidates to get on the list of “authorized write-ins” which largely negates the purpose of a write-in campaign.
I don’t think it’s an accident that the last two Illinois governors’ campaigns have been, essentially, self-financing.
Maybe it’s different elsewhere but I suspect not.
