America Has Six Different Party Systems

Strategies for party building in the US will look different depending on which of the country’s six distinct party systems you're working with. Some are fertile ground for independent politics.

Jacobin recently published my review of Les Leopold’s book, The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own. Leopold argues that labor should run independent populists in red states, a la Dan Osborn in Nebraska. The argument rests on the idea that many candidates — especially in red states — suffer from a “Democratic penalty.” Even though economic populism has considerable support in red states, populists can’t get a hearing if they run with a D next to their name.

Leopold’s argument doesn’t stop there, however. He goes on to argue, as the title of the book suggests, that these independent labor populists should come together to form a new political party. He’s realistic about the short-term odds of this happening, and so he urges an educational campaign to build support for the idea.

I’d highly recommend reading the book — it’s also short and easy to digest.

The strategy advocated in We Need a Party of Our Own is distinct from the one currently being pursued by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). DSA is primarily building political power for the labor left in big and midsize “deep blue” cities and doing so, in most cases, as a rebellious faction inside the Democratic Party. Leopold has his sights set on a different strategy: building political power for the labor left in “deep red” congressional districts (and states, in the case of Senate campaigns like Osborn’s). DSA’s strategy is based on mobilizing a social base anchored primarily among under-forty, college-educated, service sector workers. Leopold’s is focused on mobilizing unions and workers outside the DSA base.

As I note in the review, these strategies complement each other well:

There is plenty of room for two pro-labor electoral strategies to run parallel to one another: running left-wing candidates inside the Democratic Party in blue states and congressional districts, and independent labor populists in red states and districts. In mounting a challenge of this kind, the labor left would be turning the hyperpolarized political geography of the United States against both parties: eating away at the support for centrist Democrats in the big cities and on the two coasts and at the support for MAGA Republicans in the Rust Belt, the South, and the prairie states.

Leopold’s book did get me thinking, though, about other opportunities, besides running independents in red states, to escape from under the Democratic brand. Whether you believe that labor and the Left need an independent political party in the future or think that building a strong faction inside the party is the way to go, diluting the significance of the Democratic brand is a desirable goal. For those favoring the independent party path, diluting the party’s brand also means building up a different political identity, which could be a stepping stone to building an independent party. For those favoring the faction path, diluting the party’s brand also carries advantages. The less “being a Democrat” carries any real meaning, the easier it’ll be for a faction inside the party to assert itself and build its own social base. For instance, if the party brand loses significance, it will be harder for party leaders to influence voters to tip the scales in favor of centrist candidates.

The reason those on the labor left in the US historically have not persisted for long in trying to build an independent political party — or in some periods, like our own, have never even tried — is because of the unique disadvantages to doing so created by a system that both lacks proportional representation for legislative elections and has a powerful, directly elected executive.¹ (As I mention in my review, this is one reason why supporters of building an independent party in the United States need to take the growing interest in switching to proportional representation seriously.)

The good news is that the opportunities for building a political identity independent of the Democratic Party are much greater than I think many on the Left appreciate. This is because the US currently has not one but six distinct systems of conducting elections for legislatures (at the federal level, for the House of Representatives and the Senate; for state legislatures; and for city councils). Each method of election presents different opportunities.

Above is a map of congressional districts colored by how they elect members of Congress, plus a number of cities (you can also see a full-size version of the map in a browser here). More below on the six systems and the opportunities they create.

1. Fusion Voting

Oregon, Mississippi, New York, Vermont, and Connecticut all maintain versions of fusion voting. Prior to the twentieth century, this was more common across the country — laws forbidding fusion voting were adopted at the turn of the century to crush the People’s Party (aka the Populist Party), which had used fusion voting effectively to build an independent party. Candidates can run with the support of more than one political party, and each party appears on voters’ ballots, preserving their independent status. They appear separately (in New York and Connecticut) or on a combined line (Oregon and Vermont). Mississippi doesn’t forbid fusion voting, but no party there currently makes use of it.

Fusion voting presents the biggest opportunity to the labor left for building an independent political party. The Working Families Party (WFP) has made the most of this opportunity — and it’s a testament to the utility of having an independent ballot line that the New York WFP, which lacks a grassroots base, continues to play such a high-profile role in state politics. Unfortunately the labor left can’t simply make use of the WFP. It’s both highly resistant to democratic participation (hence why it can’t maintain a grassroots base) and is wedded to an insider strategy — trading endorsements and favors for access and influence. That’s why the WFP supported Joe Crowley over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018, Elizabeth Warren over Bernie Sanders in 2020, and Antonio Reynoso over Claire Valdez this year. Michael Lange had a great review recently of these problems with the WFP on his Substack.

2. Nonpartisan General Elections

This is primarily an opportunity in municipal elections (plus the state legislature in Nebraska) where party labels are absent from ballot lines. I’ve tagged the cities with more than half a million people where this is the case on the map, but the majority of city councils in the United States fall under this category.

There is no reason in these races for labor-left candidates to identify with the Democratic Party. But there is an opportunity to go further, to build local municipal electoral alliances along the lines of the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA). Projects like the RPA build a distinct electoral identity that brings candidates together and persists from election to election. It’s not hard to see how RPA-style projects at the local level in nonpartisan elections could be the building blocks of a future independent political party.

Some of my friends in DSA will object that there is no reason to build an RPA-style alliance in these races because DSA can serve that purpose. That argument is strongest in cities where the local progressive, social movement, and labor infrastructure is dominated by staff-led NGOs with no membership bases of their own. These groups are especially hard to build coalitions with. I’m sympathetic to the argument, but there are also many cities — like Richmond, California — where there is a stronger network of left-leaning membership organizations.

3. Multi-Party Primary Elections (“Jungle Primaries”)

California, Washington, and Alaska all use nonpartisan primaries to winnow down the number of candidates who go on to the general election. In these states, primaries pit dozens of candidates from both parties and a number of independents against each other. In a primary process with this many candidates, the idea that an independent left-wing candidate alone poses a spoiler threat is absurd. There is no “spoiler argument” for why candidates of the labor left should continue to run with a D next to their name.

4. One-Party Systems (GOP)

Almost 150 congressional districts and more than two dozen Senate seats are effectively one-party systems under GOP control. Here the result of the election is always determined by who wins the Republican primary. For the purposes of the map above, I included any congressional district where Democrats lost by 20 percentage points or more in this bucket. I don’t know how many of the more than 7,000 state legislative districts are one-party systems, but I’d bet a large proportion are. Likewise for many local legislative offices.

This is the terrain where the strategy backed by Leopold, of running independent labor populists, shows the most promise. Given the severe cost of the Democratic penalty, it’s in the interest of the labor left (and the Democrats for that matter) to experiment with independent runs in these places immediately.

5. One-Party Systems (Democratic)

Elections for more than fifty congressional districts and another dozen or more Senate seats are effectively one-party systems under Democratic control. Ditto for a large proportion of state legislative seats and the bulk of big city council seats in big cities, like New York City or Philadelphia, that elect councilors on a partisan basis.

Here I’m working with a definition of one-party Democratic districts that is especially conservative: places where Democrats take more than two-thirds of the vote. When Democrats win by such a large margin, a left independent could not spoil the election even if they split the non-GOP vote 50–50 with their Democratic opponent.²

While the idea of a Democratic penalty has mostly been applied to red states, there’s a similar phenomenon in blue cities, especially among younger progressive voters. My hunch is that this penalty is much stronger when there’s a Democrat in the White House and the party’s conservatism and reprehensible foreign policy can’t be disguised. I don’t think it’s an accident that NYC-DSA has made its strongest gains running candidates in Democratic primaries when Democrats were out of power — in 2018 and 2020 and again in 2025. But when Joe Biden was president, the chapter had a harder time whipping up the same level of excitement for its challengers: the 2021 city council slate and the 2022 and 2024 state legislative slates were less successful than what came before or has come since.

So running independents in one-party Democratic systems may be a strategy best experimented with if and when Democrats retake the White House. But there are still promising experiments happening this year along these lines, most notably in Chicago’s Fourth Congressional District, where DSA-backed Byron Sigcho Lopez is running as an independent against a lackluster Democrat who was handed the party’s nomination by the outgoing representative as his successor.

6. Competitive Systems

A comparatively small proportion of congressional districts and the bulk of Senate seats are places where the fear that an independent candidate of the labor left would spoil an election is valid. It’s remarkable though how few congressional districts really fall into this category: about 128 in 2024, or about 30 percent of all seats. These districts are the least hospitable to independent left-labor politics — the kind of places where the Left’s electoral strategy, as long as elections are conducted without proportional representation, will have to run through the Democratic Party.

1. Political systems that do not have this combination do not present the same challenges. The UK has winner-take-all, single-member districts but no directly elected executive. Brazil has the latter but combines it with a proportionally elected legislature. France is a unique case that combines winner-take-all legislative elections and a powerful president, similar to the United States. But France’s two-round process for electing members of the national legislature and president creates more opportunities for smaller parties to mount effective campaigns for both the legislature and the executive.

2. In a hypothetical district where a Democrat usually takes 70 percent of the vote to a Republican’s 30 percent, even if the Democrat and a left independent were to split that 70 percent evenly — taking 35 percent each — one of them would still come out the winner.