See what Alaska did recently for an example of how to fix this
Personally, I see political parties as potentially important to a well-functioning democracy. The main problem I think is lack of competition. I would love to see at least a third party, maybe half a dozen or more, emerge in the United States. Obviously people have been trying to make that happen for decades, without success. I wonder what type of solutions there are to increase the number of viable parties? The one that seems most plausible to me is ranked choice voting, for one of the many minor variations of the idea. Are there other things?
No, it's not. California has eliminated primaries in the usual sense (what is called a “primary”, outside of Presidential nominations, in California is the first round of a two-round majority-runoff general election where you aren't allowed to win outright on the first ballot even with a clear majority), and yet here we are talking about the effect in California, so partisan primaries can not be the issue. We’ve ruled that out by not having them.
The issue is FPTP single-member district legislative elections, which supports partisan duopoly and narrows the meaningful space of political debate toward a single high-salience axis and issues where splits align well with that axis, marginalizing all other issues. This has been somewhat extensively studied in comparative study of modern representative democratic systems, see, e.g., Lijphart’s Patterns of Democracy.
This is much less true than it seems superficially; its true that the state-level government is dominated by Democrats (including many offices that are nominally nonpartisan), but important local government offices, particularly Sheriffs–which are also nominally nonpartisan–are dominated by Republicans. This was particularly significant during the height of the COVID pandemic, because enforcement of public health orders is, under the State Constitution and laws, almost entirely entrusted to county Sheriffs, and every single county Sheriff in the State publicly announced one form or another of non-enforcement.
Which is not what I said, Sheriffs were an example, not an exhaustive list of exceptions.
> 95% percent of the government is not law enforcement.
That’s strange, because law enforcement, corrections, and criminal legal system is about 10% of California’s budget.
> And all the prosecutors are dems
No, they aren’t. Like all local offices, it’s a formally nonpartisan office, but its fairly common for Republicans or (especially in Dem-leaning areas), “independents” who were Republicans before running for the office and whose stances on policy issues are indistinguishable from Republicans to be DA’s, though DA’s are less consistently hard-right than Sheriffs.
Name any three blue counties with Republican county sheriffs.