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No it’s not. No third party has anywhere close to a meaningful support level to start talking about the system being the reason. Not only are they nowhere close, they run unqualified or failed two party system candidates with untested or even well thought out ideas and use the entire thing as largely a grift to sell books or gain klout. Recently party officials have even run because no serious candidate actually tries to win any national office at all.
No ones gonna fund a party no ones voting for. Not to mention they get federal funding money if they reach a certain vote threshold, a threshold we can hit to fix those problems you speak of. The numbers of voters are there, but if you like the duopoly just say that but you're not gonna make third parties viable by voting for the two parties that benefit from there not being large third parties. If you don't want third party choices to be viable sure what you say makes sense, but you cannot keep voting for the same thing and expect a different outcome. Its either stop supporting the duopoly or resign yourself to voting for a duopoly candidate for the ret of your life.
The big problem is that the First Past The Post system always devolves into 2 parties. Let's say a Progressive Party launched tomorrow and got 25% of the left leaning votes. Some of those people would be folks who didn't vote before, but many would be Democrats who feel this party represents them better.
This isn't a bad thing in and of itself. People should be able to vote for parties that represent them the best. I'd be upset if my only ballot choices were "Classic Republican" or "MAGA" because neither would represent my views.
However, remember that many of the hypothetical Progressive party's voters would come from Democrat voter rolls. This would mean that Democrat support would drop. Again, not a bad thing but itself. Keep up with the times or get left behind.
The problem comes when the Democrats drop so low that Republicans start winning elections due to the Progressives pulling votes away. Maybe this is all temporary and would eventually right itself when the Progressive Party becomes the dominant party. Still, there would be a stretch of time when Republicans would rule nearly uncontested.
Just looking at Congress, imagine a Congress that was 70% Republican, 15% Democrat, and 15% Progressive. Items like a national abortion ban, banning any mention of LGBTQ, shooting illegal immigrants on sight, and arresting liberals for speaking up would have a shot at passing and wouldn't be able to be stopped. Even if the situation righted itself eventually and the Progressive Party took control by enough to enact their agenda, they'd have a massive mess to clean up.
That's why we need Ranked Choice Voting or Approval Voting first. It would let third parties grow without taking votes from the closely aligned major party.
if they didn’t hit the threshold in 2020 they’ll never hit it. If they had any desire to actually govern they would have put more effort into their candidates too. Jill Stein was less qualified to be President than Trump, and that’s saying a lot. She literally wasn’t qualified enough to run a medium size organization. It was a complete joke how she went around and agreed with every crackpot far-left conspiracy theory in her town halls because she couldn’t risk either upsetting any voter or possibly crossing her questionable Russian backing. Not saying she was a Russian plant, I think she was much more a useful idiot than anything. Gary Johnson didn’t know so many basic facts that he should have known it was clear he just ran to keep his name out there. We see this time and time again. Nader was the last genuine one to run and even he figured out he was accomplishing the opposite of what he wanted to eventually.
Wow it almost seems like the only people who can afford to run third party are those who have financial wealth from somewhere other than the party they represent and therefore have ulterior motives. Shocking, I wonder if there's some way to get them public funding so they could get better candidates and smoother organizations.
Are you advocating that people or groups who have done basically nothing should get federal funding to run for President? Sounds like a great grift.
Im suggesting challenging them so they have a reason to not be such shitty parties. Are you suggesting the current system is not a grift? May I direct you attention to Trumps PPP loans, or even Biden not restoring the taxes the wealthy pay to what they were in the Obama era, effectively sitting at a compromise between Trump and Obama. Since HW Bush its been R, D, R, D over and over and yet we keep ratcheting further right in this country. If that's fine with you just say so, but I advocate for anything that challenges that because it's not like we have all the time in the world to let the problem work itself out, we're literally on an environmental timer and every vote for the duopoly just guarantees no challenges to the powers that maintain that destruction are challenged. More republicans would lose votes over this than democrats too according to the polls in this very article, so they are very thankful for people like you ensuring that the only choice for people who dont vote democrat is them.
Plenty of representatives in Congress right now are there because of grassroots campaigns. Third-party candidates could get elected without major backing, but they for some reason act like it's impossible. And that's the problem with third-party supporters: you all want all the clout and recognition of the major parties, without decades of putting in the footwork to get there. Just saying "We're here! Vote for us!" isn't gonna cut it.
When a third party creates a platform with clearly-defined policies and objectives, ideas on how to accomplish those objectives, and puts in effort to win local and state elections, then they'd be considered a viable alternative. But when a party only pops up every four years and whinges about being taken seriously... it's obvious they're nothing but a spoiler.
I firmly believe they just want to complain without ever having the responsibility of governing. It’s easy to criticize and never needing to test your own solutions.