Our Radical Two Party System

Americans in general hate the House of Representatives and the Senate.

This seems a bit odd since we elect these people and then grow to despise them.

It used to be political wisdom that people hated the institution but liked the guy they elected.

However, its becoming less true and now it seems that we also hate the guy we elected, at least in many cases.

Now let's be clear, we have a system that allows candidates to get nominated with a small percentage of their parties voters.

This is because the number of people who vote in primaries are a small percentage of the eligible voters.

In the 2016 Presidential Election where primaries were actually raising a lot of interest the average turnout for was still significantly under 50% of eligible voters.

In most cases it was around 30%.

So a challenger who can get his base to turn out has a significant advantage in primaries where a lot of the party's regular voters stay home.

This is leading to the radicalization of our candidates but seems more pronounced in the Republican party, at least right now.

Now as our more agitated people get to select more extreme candidates we see a Congress that can't make deals or pass legislation.

It leads to candidates who are only supported by very unhappy people who are willing to turn on their own candidate quite quickly.

Of course many voters didn't like their parties candidate in the first place, but they didn't vote in the primaries.

Now, its sort of interesting in the sense that a lot of these people used to feel disenfranchised and complained about the way things were going.  Now they get to send people to congress who keep most anything from happening. 

Guess going no where is an improvement.

Of course things are likely to start falling apart.

It may have already started.