> First past the post results in a two party system. Nobody can gerrymander that away.
Really?
Consider the Democratic party lock on the US southern states for roughly 50 years after reconstruction.[1] A huge portion of the population wasn't permitted to vote (despite laws on the books being racially blind, most blacks were prevented from voting in many of these states up until the passage of the Voting Rights Act. And even among those who DID vote, a single party remained utterly dominant.
Does this counterexample mean anything to you?
(PS: I agree with you that I'm strongly in favor of changes to our voting system to move away from first-past-the-post and government gerrymandering. But I'm NOT going to claim that single party rule is impossible when there are hundreds of examples of it across the world.)
> Consider the Democratic party lock on the US southern states for roughly 50 years after reconstruction.
Yet each party still controlled the government around half of the time, because the Republicans took the North.
Each party will change the amount necessary to flip the marginal district. The districts in the South were harder for Republicans to flip than some others, so they took ones it was easier for them to get, and didn't take the ones they didn't need.
> But I'm NOT going to claim that single party rule is impossible when there are hundreds of examples of it across the world.
The rest of the world uses different voting systems (or lack thereof). There was "single party rule" in the USSR and it wasn't because of gerrymandering.
Sure, elections aren't that frequent and then you get large variation because the sample size is small. Notice that your stopping point is just before FDR and Truman (both Democrats) held the Presidency for 20 years straight, which was still before the South stopped going for the Democrats.
Really?
Consider the Democratic party lock on the US southern states for roughly 50 years after reconstruction.[1] A huge portion of the population wasn't permitted to vote (despite laws on the books being racially blind, most blacks were prevented from voting in many of these states up until the passage of the Voting Rights Act. And even among those who DID vote, a single party remained utterly dominant.
Does this counterexample mean anything to you?
(PS: I agree with you that I'm strongly in favor of changes to our voting system to move away from first-past-the-post and government gerrymandering. But I'm NOT going to claim that single party rule is impossible when there are hundreds of examples of it across the world.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_South