The problem is that people still have a preference. If people viewed them as equally rotten choices a third party candidate might have a chance, but they don't so people will vote for whichever of the two they view as the lesser of two evils.

 

We're never gonna get anywhere! You're absolutely 100% right though, people that lean conservative think Democrats are worse, and the liberal leaning think Republicans are worse. But if I had a nickle for everytime someone regardless of party told me these two donkey's sucked I'd be retired. I keep telling them don't vote for either one, let Florida be the state that kicks the third party into gear.

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We're never gonna get anywhere! You're absolutely 100% right though, people that lean conservative think Democrats are worse, and the liberal leaning think Republicans are worse. But if I had a nickle for everytime someone regardless of party told me these two donkey's sucked I'd be retired. I keep telling them don't vote for either one, let Florida be the state that kicks the third party into gear.

 

If you want third party success the first order of business is getting instant runoff voting implemented.

 

Once that's implemented (and it would be difficult to get implemented as it threatens the two party lock on the system) third parties become immensely viable because people cease only getting a single chance to vote against someone they hate, they just rank their choices of candidates from most desired to least and if no candidate hits over 50% as people's first choice then the guy that got the least amount of first choice votes gets ignored and people whose ballots ranked that guy first move to their second choice, and the count is done over again (via computer) with the least popular candidate being removed each recount until someone gets over 50% of the vote.

 

It sounds complicated, but it's really simple for the voter and would eliminate the current problem of a giant douche and a turd sandwich as candidates.

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We're never gonna get anywhere! You're absolutely 100% right though, people that lean conservative think Democrats are worse, and the liberal leaning think Republicans are worse. But if I had a nickle for everytime someone regardless of party told me these two donkey's sucked I'd be retired. I keep telling them don't vote for either one, let Florida be the state that kicks the third party into gear.

Yeah, it's unfortunate. If we had runoff voting rather than FPTP things would be a lot better for third party candidates and voters in general. The voting system as it is encourages vote speculation which devolves into a two party system like the one we have, with runoff you can essentially "rank" the candidates.

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