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to found the
     Democratic-Republican Party. Then you get backing from your own friends, southern planters, and set up your own party organizations
     in all thirteen states.
    Thus the provenance of American political parties. The founders invented them to get out of a jam.
    Which brings us to the next question. What’s so special about the number two? If Hamilton and Jefferson gave us two parties,
     why didn’t Monroe give us a third? And Madison a fourth? For that matter, why didn’t each of the founders establish a party
     of his own, giving us a couple of dozen? We return, once again, to our fundamental institutions of government. A couple of
     institutions in particular endow the number two with special properties. The first is plurality elections.
    In discussing electoral systems, there is always a danger of getting lost in the jargon of political science—when I was reading
     about the subject I got lost in the jargon myself. But the point to grasp about plurality elections is simple. Probably the
     easiest way to see it is to compare plurality elections with majority elections. In majority elections, the winning candidates
     must capture more than 50 percent—that is, a majority—of the vote. If, in any given contest, many candidates compete, splitting
     the vote so many ways that none receives a majority, runoff elections are held, pitting fewer and fewer candidates against
     each other until one finally succeeds. In plurality elections, all that the winning candidates have to do is capture more
     votes than any of their opponents—that is, a plurality. Runoff elections never occur. Now here is the point. Under a majority
     system, the candidates who are defeated in each round can throw their support to other candidates in successive rounds, helping
     the candidates whose views are closest to their own. But under a plurality system, all that minor or doubtful candidates can
     do is hurt their own causes, drawing votes away from other candidates. Consider, for example, a race in which several liberal
     candidates compete against just a single conservative. While the conservative keeps the conservative vote to himself, the
     liberals will split the liberal vote, handing the conservative an easy victory. (As long as I was presenting a hypothetical
     example, I thought I might as well make it to my liking.) The liberals would do a lot better to get together beforehand, uniting
     behind a single liberal candidate. Thus in a plurality system it makes sense to have only two candidates in each race. And
     since it makes sense to have only two candidates in each race, it makes sense to have only two parties.
    Third parties do indeed appear. But most remain tiny, like the Libertarian or Green parties. The few that do grow large seldom
     last. Whenever a third party begins to attract a sizable following, it also attracts the attention of the two major parties,
     who suddenly find themselves scrambling to discern the source of the third party’s appeal. Once they do so, they adjust their
     own positions accordingly, putting the third party out of business. Just look at the Reform Party. Ross Perot’s major issue
     when he ran for president on the Reform Party ticket in 1992 was the federal deficit. Then the Republican and Democratic parties
     picked up the issue, claiming to be as dedicated to reducing the deficit as was the Reform Party itself. When Perot ran for
     president on the Reform Party ticket a second time in 1996, his vote fell from the 19 percent that he had garnered four years
     earlier to just 6 percent. Now that the federal deficit has been replaced with a federal surplus, the Reform Party must identify
     an entirely new issue—at this writing Pat Buchanan, seeking the Reform Party’s nomination, appears to be running on protectionism,
     an issue with little national appeal, while Donald Trump, also seeking the Reform Party’s nomination, appears to be offering
     the country only his ego—or remain