Been saying this every time the subject it brought up. The Green Party is nowhere to be found three years of every four, and even in the election year- they seem to offer a lot of shit with no clear path to actually make it happen.

I think we’re finding out that they’ve always been a spoiler party. They were never meant to actually get elected. Just divide and distract.

And the did this VERY effectively. Just look at lemmy if you want a microcosm of how that shit works.

If your third party doesn’t run candidates in local or state elections, it’s not a real political party.

Might be nice if most of those third parties ran for lower offices once in a while too rather just go for the highest rung on the ladder.

You don't see too many Greens running for state legislature... or even city council. Sure, one or two here or there, but no collective effort. The Libertarians barely have their shit together and yet they still constantly field candidates up and down the ballot.

Honestly, third parties are a hard thing to discuss considering the two biggest ones in the US are fundamentally unserious. I still keep an eye on the Working Class Party locally.

Any third party that's really serious should be building candidates from the ground up, running in local elections where they could win the small seats and have an influence on policies which reflect their goals. That would not only gain experience for those individuals, it would build awareness of the party itself. Those candidates could then run for nonpartisan state offices, again building awareness and acceptance as well as their experience. Nobody should just be jumping into the Presidential election from some idiotic unrelated background like real estate or reality show hosting or stealing from cancer children or bankrupting their own casino... Oops, my brain went off the rails there, good thing I'm not responsible for anything important.

B-B-B-But Dems bad!1! (/s)

They're using the third party for what they were intended for, to run interference on the winning side.

My big wish is multi-winner STAR where possible.

Doesn't just make viable 3rd parties a reality, but makes it incredibly likely for them to get a leg into the race a lot sooner.

Instituting it at the congressional level can also eliminate the traditional stresses of coalition building that affect other multi-partisan democracies, because now when the government experiences a no confidence vote and the leader has to resign, we don't need new elections and new coalition talks, just go back to the original coalition vote results and promote the next guy in charge into the officer position that was vacated, voilà, new governing coalition ready to go.