ANDREW YANG , FORMER PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE
ON 7/6/23 AT 10:12 AM EDT
Americans are fed up with our current political system. President Biden’s approval rating has been sitting in the low 40s for most of his presidency. Congress is sitting at 20 percent. Even the Supreme Court, long seen as the branch with the best reputation, is currently sitting underwater, at 40 percent approval vs. 58 percent disapproval.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Congress has gotten into debt ceiling fights almost like clockwork for the past decade. The Supreme Court has been overturning decades of precedent, even on issues that were widely viewed as settled like Roe v. Wade. If anything, it’s fair to say that our current leaders are creating new problems rather than solving long-standing ones like our broken infrastructure, overwhelmed immigration system, and failing public education.
This reality has led Americans to grow hungry for new and better options. Seventy-five percent of the country is effectively under single-party rule, and both the Republicans and Democrats have given up on even trying to contest in vast areas of America. Nearly three out of five Americans believe a new political party is needed, and younger generations are showing even less of a desire to continue to operate in our two-party system. Only 40 percent of Americans think that the two parties are doing an adequate job of representing them. Independents and unaffiliated voters are the largest voting bloc by far, and, with the two parties seeing their membership decline precipitously, there are almost more independent voters than Democrats and Republicans combined.
What’s driving this? A belief that the two parties are increasingly catering to their bases and the extremes. That’s a feature of our current system, not a bug.