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this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2026
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Leopards Ate My Face
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The closest a 3rd party candidate ever got was Teddy Roosevelt, Bull Moose Party in 1912, 27% of the vote, lost to Wilson, 42%. Voting for third party ensures your vote won't count for spit, but something tells me you're a Republican and that's the whole point of your op post.
https://www.pbs.org/thinktank/thirdchoice/timeline.html
That is what makes them a "third party," isn't it? When a third party starts doing well enough to win elections, they just stop being called a third party. And that has happened, or we'd be choosing between the Whigs and the Democratic-Republicans.
username checks out :D
That's never going to happen in a first past the post system.
So who did you vote for, the Democratic-Republicans or the Whigs? Since that can never happen in a FPTP system, it stands to reason that we must still have the two parties we started with. Was there some time period in history where the US didn't have FPTP where all the party shuffling happened?
You're being pedantic. It's obvious that I meant that it's never going to happen this far into our current system. There's a very obvious reason why things shuffled around a lot early on and have settled into two very distinct parties, and you're a complete idiot if you don't realize that...
Just to be clear, how "early on" is "early on?" Twenty years? Fifty years? A hundred? I'll give you a second to Google it so you can decide where the goalposts are.
They've settled into the two current parties because of one reason: a lack of will to change. There are other countries that have FPTP where the parties are not so static. Yes, it's a barrier. No, it is not insurmountable.
Fundamentally, there is no political system that is impossible to change. Monarchies were extremely hard to change, and yet they did, once the will was there. Political systems are designed and maintained by human beings. Treating them as if they were some innate, unchanging law of the universe is as delusional as thinking that the Supreme Court could overturn the law of gravity by finding it unconstitutional.
And indeed, our current system is unsustainable. It is, objectively, going to run up against physical constraints. It will bend or break. Trump is already an example of that. It's very simple: adapt, or die.
The Republicans are a third party.
If 10% of the vote goes to x then there's motivation to court voters from x.
If you only vote 2 parties then you're only courting voters from the other party.
Ross Perot got over 10% I think. Look how much that changed 🙄
In how many consecutive elections?