do you think there's a chance for the inclusion of an actual competitive third party in national elections in the near future?
As someone more sympathetic to third party politics than the average person, I’ve argued since 2015 that the failure of third parties to take hold in the US is because the American electoral system is designed to ensure a duopoly. No third party will ever have a serious chance of victory until election laws are changed. I elaborate on all of this more in the article, but the problem is this:
First-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral systems like the US’ are constrained by Duverger’s law, ensuring that third party votes are wasted
One solution to FPTP systems is proportional representation. But because the US doesn’t have any electoral systems like that, small ideological minorities can’t win even if they hold a significant chunk of the total population, they can only win if they hold the majority of the population in one geographic area. 20 million Libertarians around the country gets you nowhere, you just need 200,000 concentrated in one congressional district.
Even if you did manage to get everyone in one district to support a third party, the two main parties could use gerrymandering to break up that concentration of people into multiple districts (this applies basically everywhere but the Senate and Presidency).
The other solution to FPTP is instant-runoff voting, which helps eliminate the “wasted vote” dilemma. This is only in place in a few areas of the US: Maine, plus a couple of cities.
Even without this structural problem, you still have the problem of campaign finance. Without public campaign financing, the only serious way to raise money for a major campaign is to have a chance of winning. It’s a catch-22: you need cash for a chance of winning, and you need a chance of winning for cash.
Finally, there’s a few ways in which third parties are just straight-up intentionally locked out of a lot of American politics: public debates are often set up by agreements between the two parties, who obviously have no incentive to allow access to third parties (fun fact: presidential debates are arranged by a private organization sponsored by both the Democratic and Republican parties).
Ballot access varies wildly across jurisdictions, and requirements are often too high for even serious third parties to get on the ballot everywhere they want too.
Under current US law, third parties can have a few minor state and local victories, but they are mainly limited to expanding the realm of debate on the margins and serving as a standardized outlet for protest voting. There is no chance of a multi-party democracy in the United States until the law changes.
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