2016 Postmortem

scapegoated and vilified by a media that would love the opportunity, and will probably do their share of it anyway. Making 3rd parties into bitter attention-seeking spoilers is a national past-time.

So they are fighting against that, but arguably whether they admit to an effect or not, its not like the DNC or RNC doesn't have to take notice of what pulled voters away.

Regardless, almost nobody voted for Stein, and I would be very surprised if anybody on these boards voted for Johnson. I don't think anything about his platform aligns with democrats or liberals.

But while we're talking about how worthless 3rd parties are, we should be establishing terms, since there are plenty on this board that would have liked to bar sanders from running within the democratic party. Doing both suggests such a walled garden approach to who gets to run for president, its hardly democratic. Some sort of run-off voting would be the answer I think, where people are allowed to vote for first and second choices. Unfortunately, we have two established parties that will NEVER push for this. It only undermines their choke-hold on the system to do so.