With Congress's approval rating at now an all time low (since the beginning of polling on such a question), it is obvious to me, and I would hope it would be equally obvious to the vast majority of American that something has to be done about it, and that the "it" is throwing out virtually all of the 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives. And that is what I would call a good start.
The trouble is that doing such a thing would not be effective if we just traded all of the Democrats for new Democrats and all of the Republican for new Republicans, or just flipped all of the Democrat seats into Republican seats and vice versa. No, that would most likely just take a bunch of people who have wanted to be in the current system and put them there, rather than electing people who have no use for the current system, or the current values of our national political scene.
As I have commented, the current Two Party system is broken. One of the most substantial (and ever-growing) ideological groups, the Fiscally Conservative & Socially Liberal/Moderate, is without a unified political movement in the United States. Now, many people discount the viability of Third Party movements, primarily because they have, in the lifetimes of everybody alive today, been the province if racist groups (George Wallace), or other extremist groups (the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, the Constitution Party), and has not focused on carving out a particular niche in the mainstream, but that is heavily underrepresented in the current system.
Another reason people often discount the viability of third party and independent candidates is the believe that they have to win a majority of the votes in order to get elected. Except in Louisiana, this is not true. The United States House is elected by Single Member District Pluralities, meaning that it is a "first past the post" system wherein the person who gets the most votes wins. Let's look at what that means in practical terms.
In 2004, in the 32nd Congressional District of Texas, two incumbents faced off after the Texas re-districting plan took effect. Pete Sessions and Martin Frost engaged in one of the most heated House races in the '04 cycle, and with high turnout, in a Presidential election year, just over 202,000 votes were cast in that election. Considering that each Congressman represents about 750,000 constituents, 202,000 votes is not a terribly high threshold. Now let's imagine a viable, strong third party candidate is in the race. Assuming that the race is roughly even, a third party candidate could win with as few as 67,334 votes. More people watch some of the most obscure and ridiculous videos on YouTube every day than that. Assuming four candidates in a race, that number decreases to just 50,501 votes.
Americans are a strange bunch, and they hate voting for losers, which is why front-runners generally end up winning, and polling ends up having an impact on the outcomes of races. Slight leads often develop into larger leads simply because the lead existed at all. If American voters would develop just a slight sense of discipline when it comes to not supporting front runners and incumbents, and would be willing to throw their votes away from time to time, the status quo can in fact be changed.
In theory, assuming a minimum threshold scenario applied across the board, it would take only about 14.7 Million votes to create a Congressional Majority for a Third Party. That's fewer people than live in the New York City-Newark Metropolitan Area.
It is possible, and it's about time.
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