n Act bestows special benefits on the major parties, including public funding of presidential campaigns (over $60 million in 2000), public financing of national conventions, and matching funds to candidates for presidential nominations. America’s distinctive nominating process is an additional structural barrier to third parties. Among the world’s democracies, the United States is unique in its reliance upon primary elections to nominate partisan candidates for state and congressional offices and its use of state-level presidential primaries in the selection of presidential nominees. In most nations, partisan nominations are controlled by the party organizations. But in the United States, it is the voters who make the ultimate determination of who the Republican and Democratic nominees will be. This system, of course, contributes to the fact that the United States has weaker formal party organizations than most other democracies. This participatory nominating process has also contributed to the Republican-Democratic domination of electoral politics for over 140 years. By winning party nominations through primary elections, insurgents can gain access to the general election ballot and thereby enhance their chances of election victories without having to organize third parties. Thus, the primary-nomination process tends to channel dissent into the two major parties and makes it unnecessary for dissidents to engage in the difficult business of forming a third party. BROAD-BASED SUPPORT AND CENTRIST POSITIONS American parties are multiclass and broad based in their electoral support. With the exception of African-American voters — who are approximately 90 percent Democratic — both the Republican and Democratic parties draw significant levels of support from virtually every major socioeconomic group in society. Although members of labor union households, for example, are commonly thought to be Democrats, the Republica...
