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The amount of “left-right” entrenchment seems to be at an all-time high and increasing.
No matter what side of the political spectrum you fall on, what would it take to get you to vote for a new party?
Would implementing a better electoral system that would eliminate the two-party see-saw and allowing for more granularity in candidates help (See Single Transferable Vote or STAR depending on the type of election)?
Do you have other solutions to this issue?
Proportional representation is what I advocate.
Yes, this means perennially-minority governments that have to form a coalition government to govern. I view this as a good thing.
In a de facto two-party system like the USA, there is nothing that fixing the voting structure will solve. (Even in the slightly-more-diverse politics of Canada the system is still pretty broken.) Not even fixing the nomination structure (the source of most of the evils of the American approach) would solve things in the long run. The reason is simple: in a (de facto) two-party system—or even the de facto 3-4 party system of Canada—there is zero incentive to cooperate, and a huge incentive to be “the party of ‘no’” when not in power.
A proportional system looks like chaos to the outside world used to black-and-white thinking, but I submit that such systems force politicians to do something they are literally incapable of doing in a two-party system without slitting their own throats in the process: compromise. Coalition governments have two or more parties, typically, who are roughly compatible with each other in the large details, but who disagree in small things (methods, approaches, minor issues, etc.). But if any of those parties want to retain power instead of getting tossed out at the next vote of confidence, they have to grow the fuck up and start acting like adults: compromising on small things to keep the big thing together.
And in the end that’s how countries survive: the people at large, by the example of their leadership, compromise on the small things to keep the big thing (society) together.