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Unfortunately for third party candidates, the odds are always going to be stacked against them. This has less to do with the party structure than it does to the "winner take all" system that we have built in this country. What I sometimes find fascinating and somewhat hilarious is that when the United States was "bringing democracy" to other countries as we became a more powerful nation, one thing we never actually brought as part of the package was our political system. We would bring proportional representation (PR) systems, but political scientists working for our government realized that you would never get actual representation from a system such as ours, so they instituted PR systems instead.

So what does that mean for third parties in the United States? Well, in order to get into office, a third party candidate has to convince the population that it has a better plan than the two major parties competing for power. When people go to vote, part of what they bring with them in their thoughts is that a vote for one party or the other gives a certain amount of mandated power to that party that wins. There's a distinct realization that voting for a third party candidate means that not only will the person not get elected because of the reality of the numbers necessary to get a majority vote, but also the belief that the lesser of the two evils he or she would have chosen was given one less vote, so they end up with the worse of two evils because their vote does not even appear to have made a difference.

Part of that phenomenon rests in the American desire to come out on the winning side. Quite often, voters will watch the early returns of an election and then go to the polls, convinced that they are voting for the side that appears to be winning. Granted, this effect has lessened a bit due to media outlets reporting less poll information on election day until after polls close, but with Internet sites still updating the results by the hour, people still have access to information that persuades them to vote or not vote in specific circumstances.

The only real way a third party candidate will ever have the opportunity to become president is if that third party replaces one of the two main parties as the new relevant opposition party to the mainstream party. That is how it has happened in the past.

Unfortunately for most third parties, they tend to run on one or two main issues that one of the two main parties realize is significant, and then the idea is absorbed into one of the main parties, making that party appear almost completely irrelevant. This is almost always what happens to third parties their second time out during an election. The same thing would have happened to either Perot or Nader if either one had not achieved a status as the individual who caused the defeat of the party most likely to have been like them the election before.

So, no, a third party candidate has little to no chance of ever becoming president in the US. Granted, all sorts of miracles can happen, but this country is not built on the experience of miracles but in stability, even during the unstable times.

Learn more about this author, Duane Gundrum.
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