Do you consider yourself an informed voter? If so, understanding Duverger’s Law can empower you to make strategic choices in upcoming elections, including the November midterms, regardless of your party affiliation.
In many undergraduate American Politics 101 courses, students learn that the United States has a “two-party system.” They study the histories of the Democratic and Republican parties, the shifting coalitions each has represented, their partisans’ general policy preferences, and the ideological differences between them. Yet considerably less attention is given to the electoral mechanics that preserve the dominance of these two large parties.
So-called “third parties,” of course, are
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