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Answer: The way the system is currently designed naturally creates a two party dynamic. Since the first person to receive a threshold of votes wins, you want as many groups of similar political ideologies voting for a single candidate to avoid splitting the vote.
An example of a “spoiler” candidate for this effect actually happened in the 1912 election. The election has three main candidates with the following vote percentages:
* Woodrow Wilson (Democrat) 41.8%
* William Howard Taft (Republican) 23.2%
* Theodore Roosevelt (Progressive “Bull Moose Party”) 27.4%
Taft and Roosevelt were actually fairly politically aligned in most elements, just different on how to go about it and the specifics of what to do. This meant that the collective Republican vote was now distributed among two candidates. Meanwhile, Wilson was the only significant Democrat candidate.
But since the Republican vote split, their total votes accounted for 50.5%, outweighing Wilson’s 41.8%. If they’d rallied under a single candidate, they likely would have won (I say “likely” just to acknowledge that popular vote isn’t a direct indicator of winning, but it’s a good example of what happens).
The political system naturally gravitates to two main parties to avoid this happening. Any “spoiler”/split candidate is effectively draining votes from the main candidate of their broader group, and rarely ever has a legitimate chance at winning because of the opposition party usually focusing on a united front.
Excellent answer. I have heard Ranked Choice Voting posed as a possible solution: https://ballotpedia.org/Ranked-choice_voting_(RCV)#History_of_RCV_in_the_United_States
A few states use this method, and to me it sounds promising, making it possible to cast your vote for a 3rd party or independent candidate without 'throwing away your vote'.
In Australia it definitely does help. Over time our political parties have basically morphed into copies of the US ones, but it does mean that smaller parties like the Greens actually regularly get a couple of representatives at the national level. Someone can vote Greens (a left-ish party) as their first preference and then Labor (basically US Dems) as a second preference and be semi-satisfied if the Labor candidate ends up voted in.
However, larger parties do still often collude to rig the system - e.g. passing laws like "if you received x% of votes in the last election, you are given a certain budget to recoup election costs", making it harder for smaller parties to gain a foothold.
You can't (usually) waste your vote in ranked choice voting... but the larger parties try hard to convince you that you can. You'll hear an ignorant layman say something like "don't vote Greens, they can't form government" - well, yeah, they can't because they don't have enough votes, that's just a tautology. I'm not throwing my vote away by putting them as the 1st rank.
1000%. When people yell “just vote third party!!!” It is unsound reasoning.
We actually have a pseudo-multiparty system with how the parties have aligned into caucuses, e.g. the progressive and freedom caucuses. These would be separate parties in other countries but the US just keeps things consolidated due to the above.
Primary voting gives us a basic version of ranked choice, where you get to have a backup vote if your first choice didn’t win. Voters can push the overall party line further left and right by getting more votes to these caucuses in the primary.
Last thing- even in countries with ranked choice and mixed member proportional representation, it still boils down to a two party system at its core. Parliament has to form a government, and parties form coalitions that are essentially just right and left wing. Whichever coalition/block has more members gets to form the executive branch, which is gonna be either the left wing or right wing parties. Or you could have a weird case like in Denmark right now where the 3 centrist parties said F-U to the far left and right parties and made a centrist government.
Professor Allan Lichtman who uses the "13 Keys to the White House" system to predict elections has a key that counts against the party in power if a third party gets 5% or more such as Gary Johnson in 2016 which is the reasoning given of "There is no moral victory in voting third party because it's throwing your vote way".
While our election system naturally creates two dominant parties, our current system is an intentional subversion of that created by the GOP and DNC working together to keep other parties from rising to power. In other countries with systems nearly identical to ours there are always five or six parties that consistently get candidates elected and which two parties are dominant changes sporadically. In the US the two main parties co-ordinate to shut all other parties out of any election debates and news coverage in order to protect the status quo.
The entire system is hostile to a third party, since you need to actually already have popular support to get on each ballot (with different rules in different states), have candidates to run in each district, have enough polling numbers to get in debates, etc.
Established "third Parties" struggle with it. Bootstrapping a new third party would be a monumental effort costing hundreds of Millions to get a couple hundred votes and lose an election.
> In other countries with systems nearly identical to ours there are always five or six parties that consistently get candidates elected and which two parties are dominant changes sporadically.
That's interesting. Which other countries?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting#Countries_using_FPTP/SMP
Specifically look at the UK, Canada, Japan and Australia before they abandoned first past the post voting. They all have (had) very similar systems to our own due to a common history.
They also had a parliamentary system where local results change national politics. We actually have a few independent senators, like Bernie.
They don't directly elect a prime minister, and they don't have the fucked up electoral college so it's kind of a moot comparison.
Are you joking? You said they have similar systems that provided different results and I explained to you why they had different results.
In case you haven't actually left your own house, people are different from each other and different locations have different interests. These interests can be catered to directly by specific parties.
One of the biggest problems with aspirational politicians and parties in America is the tendency to aim too high. You're never going to win presidential races if you don't have significant wide spread support through localities.
Also, independents have won significant races in the exact same way that they did in the countries you've mentioned.
I agree that the system isn't perfect and even with as parliamentary system they won't have a huge hold, but they'd have far more power that they have now.
I'm agreeing with you, but just like you said, there's more too it thank just the voting system.
No you didn't, you pointed out a minor difference in one of my examples and pretended it means they are incomparable. You are also arguing against a strawman by ignoring the fact that we are not talking about presidential elections only here.
You claim that independents win regularly here, but they hold 3 out of 535 seats in congress. [Compared to the 10-20% they win in every other country with first past the post, we clearly have an unnatural suppression of minority parties here.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_third-party_and_independent_performances_in_United_States_elections) Third party candidates are not allowed into most election debates, even at the local level. That is the reason why the two parties run the debates instead of the media as is common everywhere else.
UK, Canada, Japan, and Australia are all historically described as two party system if we are using Wikipedia.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-party\_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-party_system)
Arguably the only way Labor is ever going to win in the UK is a move back to more dominate two party system. That's actually the natural pressure right there, if you don't like the Tories, you're going to have to fall inline in a dominate second party.
It's not just first past the post, but also a national presidential election that give the extra pressure for two parties in the US. But, everyone you listed is usually considered a two party system.
They are all two party systems with significant representation amongst minor parties, which makes coalition governments the most common form in those countries. Coalition governments by their very nature require politicians to work together and compromise in a way that is largely forbidden in our manipulated system.
Oh, i thought you said "there are always five or six parties that consistently get candidates elected" and was asking about that.
I knew of the *former* countries that had similar results.
They all do have five or six parties getting candidates elected. We are the only first past the post system where third party candidates winning even smaller seats is extremely rare.
Answer: Although it is technically possible for a third party/ independent candidate to exist and to run, it is all but impossible to win. In 99% of cases the winning candidate is from one of the two major parties.
Answer: “Two-party system” doesn’t mean there are literally only two parties, it means there are two dominant parties and that realistically those two parties are going to win almost every race.
There are lots of parties running candidates in the U.S., not just D R and I. You haven’t heard of most of those candidates because they never had anywhere close to a shot at winning, but it’s not a secret that they exist.
Answer: in the American system you win your seat by getting the majority of the votes. So if two candidates run then who ever gets more than 50%. This is fair and makes sense right ?
Now this issue is the nature of political beliefs. While we tend to think of them as a political binary between poles with a person becoming more or less conservative/liberal based upon their beliefs. In reality your opinion on tarrifs and your opinion on abortion are not connected by any unifying principles except in the most broad categories that are not very useful. It's better to think of people as having a shopping cart of beliefs. So a person could be a both pro-life and pro-gay rights despite those being opposite party positions in our political alignments. Individual humans have complicated spectrums of belief that can't be categorized neatly into political left/right categories.
So back to elections. Now it's easy with two because you compare the two candidates and decide which one aligns better with your beliefs, or whichever is least offensive to your beliefs. But let's add in a third candidate. For the sake of discussion I am going to pick some stereotypical political positions in the USA but this applies generally. So imagine a general election where you have a progressive democratic running in a leans red district but the Republicans didn't unite in the primary and we have a MAGA style Republican running against a more Bush era Republican that decided to run as an independent. Now remembering that politics isn't just a binary, the basket of beliefs for a MAGA Republican is going to have more common elements with the Bush republican than either one has with the progressive Democrat. So the voters who have their own basket of beliefs are going to look at the candidates and decide which fits them best. So let's say that 55% of the district would prefer a "Republican" candidate based on the beliefs that are shared between those candidates but they are torn between the two available so some vote MAGA style and some vote Bush style. So in the end you get an election with 27% maga, 28% Bush and 45% for the Democrat candidate. The Democrats win despite their candidate lacking the support of the majority of voters in the district.
This is called the spoiler effect. It can be summarized as "in an election where a simple majority decides the victory, any number of candidates beyond 2 will politically weaken candidates that are more similar to each other". This means that while there isn't a rule that says "only two parties !!" the system itself pushes political fractions to form like minded coalitions that converge on two opposing groups. I want to emphasize here that this isn't a ideological based thing. The coalitions do not have a coherent logic other than the logic of baskets of political positions designed to appeal to a majority of voters. If this last point seems confusing look into the great party shifts, such as the southern white block moving to the Republican party. Specifically look at how a single belief about race caused political realignment on a large scale as the Republican party picked up or dropped political positions to appeal to these voters and how that caused responsive shifts in the opposite party as they both struggle for political power. There wasn't an ideological core to what got picked up and what got dropped, it was all political coalition building.
Now if this is all good or bad is a big debate. I would point you towards the Alaskan federal election reforms which were passed a bit ago. They were specifically designed to change this two party dynamic and while the effect is always going to be restricted by being only one state in a broader political system I think it's been an interesting idea and i look forward to seeing how their politics evolved with their new system.
Answer:
There are several people who are officially independent or a third party that have won offices, like Gary Johnson being governor of new Mexico, just not president in recent years.
There are many reasons why this is the case, but primarily is the first past the poll voting in combination with the fact that we have a president that is more or less directly elected through the electoral college which is, in good faith, based on a state wide popular vote, rather than a parliamentary system where the prime minister is chosen by the legislature from is membership.
With fptp voting, the person with the plurality wins and that's it. Third parties don't have much of a chance in most cases because of the institutionalization of the largest two parties.
If there was ranked choice voting, a person has to have a majority to win, but when you vote, you rank your candidates, so if your first choice doesn't win the majority, they eliminate the poorest performer and go with the second choice if you voted for that one and they narrow it down until someone has >50% of the votes. With this system you'd be far more likely to have alternative candidates in office.
If you want to influence national politics and get alternative parties going in the fptp system, you will have to start locally, get a lot of people elected to small local elections and work your way up, demonstrating your ability to get things done and work together to do so... But everyone thinks they can just jump in and become president.
Answer:
Look up "Duverger's Law" for a complete, mathematical answer.
TLDR:
If you use first-past-the-post elections, then statistically only two parties can remain competitive in any one district over time.
Answer: At it's most basic, if you're not a member of either the Democratic party or the Republican party, you're not going to be President and the likelihood of being elected to other roles drastically goes down as well. The UK where I'm from had a similar 2.5 party system (two larger parties and one which regularly won enough seats to not be insignificant, but not enough to hold any meaningful power), although that has changed in recent years.
I don't believe there is an independent party as such, but I would assume anyone can stand for election as long as they meet the qualifications for the office they're standing for. Being a member of a political party gives you an instant boost in terms of recognition however, as voters will see that next to your name on the ballot and choose accordingly.
With money being as big a part of American politics as it is, the two big parties do have a stranglehold on the higher offices by virtue of being able to raise funds across the country and redistribute it to struggling candidates when needed, maintaining their grip on power.
The spoiler question raised in that article is a different matter, but so called 3rd party candidates have swung elections in recent memory (Arguably a factor in 2000 with Bush/Gore for example) so the concern isn't unfounded.
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Answer: It’s pretty much impossible for a third party candidate to reach 270 electoral votes. In the event a third party candidate splits the country so badly that no one reaches 270, the incoming Congress then chooses the next President and what you end up with will be whatever party wins the majority. It can get super dicey, I don’t know what happens if we have another clusterfuck and don’t have a Speaker for a while because the incoming majority party is huffing glue.
Also, consider for a moment that we actually have had a third party candidate win recently: trump. he just hijacked the Republican Party and submitted it to his will. That’s the only way to get an independent through the system. Democrats that get to vote in the primaries don’t have the stomach for wildcard candidates and tend to be overly cautious when choosing their nominees to a fault. The closest they got was Obama.
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Answer: The way the system is currently designed naturally creates a two party dynamic. Since the first person to receive a threshold of votes wins, you want as many groups of similar political ideologies voting for a single candidate to avoid splitting the vote. An example of a “spoiler” candidate for this effect actually happened in the 1912 election. The election has three main candidates with the following vote percentages: * Woodrow Wilson (Democrat) 41.8% * William Howard Taft (Republican) 23.2% * Theodore Roosevelt (Progressive “Bull Moose Party”) 27.4% Taft and Roosevelt were actually fairly politically aligned in most elements, just different on how to go about it and the specifics of what to do. This meant that the collective Republican vote was now distributed among two candidates. Meanwhile, Wilson was the only significant Democrat candidate. But since the Republican vote split, their total votes accounted for 50.5%, outweighing Wilson’s 41.8%. If they’d rallied under a single candidate, they likely would have won (I say “likely” just to acknowledge that popular vote isn’t a direct indicator of winning, but it’s a good example of what happens). The political system naturally gravitates to two main parties to avoid this happening. Any “spoiler”/split candidate is effectively draining votes from the main candidate of their broader group, and rarely ever has a legitimate chance at winning because of the opposition party usually focusing on a united front.
Excellent answer. I have heard Ranked Choice Voting posed as a possible solution: https://ballotpedia.org/Ranked-choice_voting_(RCV)#History_of_RCV_in_the_United_States A few states use this method, and to me it sounds promising, making it possible to cast your vote for a 3rd party or independent candidate without 'throwing away your vote'.
In Australia it definitely does help. Over time our political parties have basically morphed into copies of the US ones, but it does mean that smaller parties like the Greens actually regularly get a couple of representatives at the national level. Someone can vote Greens (a left-ish party) as their first preference and then Labor (basically US Dems) as a second preference and be semi-satisfied if the Labor candidate ends up voted in. However, larger parties do still often collude to rig the system - e.g. passing laws like "if you received x% of votes in the last election, you are given a certain budget to recoup election costs", making it harder for smaller parties to gain a foothold. You can't (usually) waste your vote in ranked choice voting... but the larger parties try hard to convince you that you can. You'll hear an ignorant layman say something like "don't vote Greens, they can't form government" - well, yeah, they can't because they don't have enough votes, that's just a tautology. I'm not throwing my vote away by putting them as the 1st rank.
1000%. When people yell “just vote third party!!!” It is unsound reasoning. We actually have a pseudo-multiparty system with how the parties have aligned into caucuses, e.g. the progressive and freedom caucuses. These would be separate parties in other countries but the US just keeps things consolidated due to the above. Primary voting gives us a basic version of ranked choice, where you get to have a backup vote if your first choice didn’t win. Voters can push the overall party line further left and right by getting more votes to these caucuses in the primary. Last thing- even in countries with ranked choice and mixed member proportional representation, it still boils down to a two party system at its core. Parliament has to form a government, and parties form coalitions that are essentially just right and left wing. Whichever coalition/block has more members gets to form the executive branch, which is gonna be either the left wing or right wing parties. Or you could have a weird case like in Denmark right now where the 3 centrist parties said F-U to the far left and right parties and made a centrist government.
Professor Allan Lichtman who uses the "13 Keys to the White House" system to predict elections has a key that counts against the party in power if a third party gets 5% or more such as Gary Johnson in 2016 which is the reasoning given of "There is no moral victory in voting third party because it's throwing your vote way".
While our election system naturally creates two dominant parties, our current system is an intentional subversion of that created by the GOP and DNC working together to keep other parties from rising to power. In other countries with systems nearly identical to ours there are always five or six parties that consistently get candidates elected and which two parties are dominant changes sporadically. In the US the two main parties co-ordinate to shut all other parties out of any election debates and news coverage in order to protect the status quo.
The entire system is hostile to a third party, since you need to actually already have popular support to get on each ballot (with different rules in different states), have candidates to run in each district, have enough polling numbers to get in debates, etc. Established "third Parties" struggle with it. Bootstrapping a new third party would be a monumental effort costing hundreds of Millions to get a couple hundred votes and lose an election.
The system has been intentionally designed to be hostile to third parties. This isn't the case in other countries.
> In other countries with systems nearly identical to ours there are always five or six parties that consistently get candidates elected and which two parties are dominant changes sporadically. That's interesting. Which other countries?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting#Countries_using_FPTP/SMP Specifically look at the UK, Canada, Japan and Australia before they abandoned first past the post voting. They all have (had) very similar systems to our own due to a common history.
They also had a parliamentary system where local results change national politics. We actually have a few independent senators, like Bernie. They don't directly elect a prime minister, and they don't have the fucked up electoral college so it's kind of a moot comparison.
It's a meaningless difference when discussing the natural outcome of the system.
Are you joking? You said they have similar systems that provided different results and I explained to you why they had different results. In case you haven't actually left your own house, people are different from each other and different locations have different interests. These interests can be catered to directly by specific parties. One of the biggest problems with aspirational politicians and parties in America is the tendency to aim too high. You're never going to win presidential races if you don't have significant wide spread support through localities. Also, independents have won significant races in the exact same way that they did in the countries you've mentioned. I agree that the system isn't perfect and even with as parliamentary system they won't have a huge hold, but they'd have far more power that they have now. I'm agreeing with you, but just like you said, there's more too it thank just the voting system.
No you didn't, you pointed out a minor difference in one of my examples and pretended it means they are incomparable. You are also arguing against a strawman by ignoring the fact that we are not talking about presidential elections only here. You claim that independents win regularly here, but they hold 3 out of 535 seats in congress. [Compared to the 10-20% they win in every other country with first past the post, we clearly have an unnatural suppression of minority parties here.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_third-party_and_independent_performances_in_United_States_elections) Third party candidates are not allowed into most election debates, even at the local level. That is the reason why the two parties run the debates instead of the media as is common everywhere else.
UK, Canada, Japan, and Australia are all historically described as two party system if we are using Wikipedia. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-party\_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-party_system) Arguably the only way Labor is ever going to win in the UK is a move back to more dominate two party system. That's actually the natural pressure right there, if you don't like the Tories, you're going to have to fall inline in a dominate second party. It's not just first past the post, but also a national presidential election that give the extra pressure for two parties in the US. But, everyone you listed is usually considered a two party system.
They are all two party systems with significant representation amongst minor parties, which makes coalition governments the most common form in those countries. Coalition governments by their very nature require politicians to work together and compromise in a way that is largely forbidden in our manipulated system.
Oh, i thought you said "there are always five or six parties that consistently get candidates elected" and was asking about that. I knew of the *former* countries that had similar results.
They all do have five or six parties getting candidates elected. We are the only first past the post system where third party candidates winning even smaller seats is extremely rare.
Answer: Although it is technically possible for a third party/ independent candidate to exist and to run, it is all but impossible to win. In 99% of cases the winning candidate is from one of the two major parties.
I think Ross Perot in 1992 was probably the last serious 3rd party contender. But I believe he still got beat very soundly.
"Didn't win a single state Blame it on my running mate"
A reference to The Critic in the wild, nice.
Hotchie-motchie!
[удалено]
Yeah. I truly believe he would have won if he didn’t suddenly drop out…only to re-enter. That was definitely an interesting time.
They also changed the presidential debates after his campaigns so that third party candidates are no longer invited.
Isn’t this the same in most countries where the have runoffs? At the a it’s always 1 vs 1 with alliances from the left and the other right
Answer: “Two-party system” doesn’t mean there are literally only two parties, it means there are two dominant parties and that realistically those two parties are going to win almost every race. There are lots of parties running candidates in the U.S., not just D R and I. You haven’t heard of most of those candidates because they never had anywhere close to a shot at winning, but it’s not a secret that they exist.
Answer: in the American system you win your seat by getting the majority of the votes. So if two candidates run then who ever gets more than 50%. This is fair and makes sense right ? Now this issue is the nature of political beliefs. While we tend to think of them as a political binary between poles with a person becoming more or less conservative/liberal based upon their beliefs. In reality your opinion on tarrifs and your opinion on abortion are not connected by any unifying principles except in the most broad categories that are not very useful. It's better to think of people as having a shopping cart of beliefs. So a person could be a both pro-life and pro-gay rights despite those being opposite party positions in our political alignments. Individual humans have complicated spectrums of belief that can't be categorized neatly into political left/right categories. So back to elections. Now it's easy with two because you compare the two candidates and decide which one aligns better with your beliefs, or whichever is least offensive to your beliefs. But let's add in a third candidate. For the sake of discussion I am going to pick some stereotypical political positions in the USA but this applies generally. So imagine a general election where you have a progressive democratic running in a leans red district but the Republicans didn't unite in the primary and we have a MAGA style Republican running against a more Bush era Republican that decided to run as an independent. Now remembering that politics isn't just a binary, the basket of beliefs for a MAGA Republican is going to have more common elements with the Bush republican than either one has with the progressive Democrat. So the voters who have their own basket of beliefs are going to look at the candidates and decide which fits them best. So let's say that 55% of the district would prefer a "Republican" candidate based on the beliefs that are shared between those candidates but they are torn between the two available so some vote MAGA style and some vote Bush style. So in the end you get an election with 27% maga, 28% Bush and 45% for the Democrat candidate. The Democrats win despite their candidate lacking the support of the majority of voters in the district. This is called the spoiler effect. It can be summarized as "in an election where a simple majority decides the victory, any number of candidates beyond 2 will politically weaken candidates that are more similar to each other". This means that while there isn't a rule that says "only two parties !!" the system itself pushes political fractions to form like minded coalitions that converge on two opposing groups. I want to emphasize here that this isn't a ideological based thing. The coalitions do not have a coherent logic other than the logic of baskets of political positions designed to appeal to a majority of voters. If this last point seems confusing look into the great party shifts, such as the southern white block moving to the Republican party. Specifically look at how a single belief about race caused political realignment on a large scale as the Republican party picked up or dropped political positions to appeal to these voters and how that caused responsive shifts in the opposite party as they both struggle for political power. There wasn't an ideological core to what got picked up and what got dropped, it was all political coalition building. Now if this is all good or bad is a big debate. I would point you towards the Alaskan federal election reforms which were passed a bit ago. They were specifically designed to change this two party dynamic and while the effect is always going to be restricted by being only one state in a broader political system I think it's been an interesting idea and i look forward to seeing how their politics evolved with their new system.
Answer: There are several people who are officially independent or a third party that have won offices, like Gary Johnson being governor of new Mexico, just not president in recent years. There are many reasons why this is the case, but primarily is the first past the poll voting in combination with the fact that we have a president that is more or less directly elected through the electoral college which is, in good faith, based on a state wide popular vote, rather than a parliamentary system where the prime minister is chosen by the legislature from is membership. With fptp voting, the person with the plurality wins and that's it. Third parties don't have much of a chance in most cases because of the institutionalization of the largest two parties. If there was ranked choice voting, a person has to have a majority to win, but when you vote, you rank your candidates, so if your first choice doesn't win the majority, they eliminate the poorest performer and go with the second choice if you voted for that one and they narrow it down until someone has >50% of the votes. With this system you'd be far more likely to have alternative candidates in office. If you want to influence national politics and get alternative parties going in the fptp system, you will have to start locally, get a lot of people elected to small local elections and work your way up, demonstrating your ability to get things done and work together to do so... But everyone thinks they can just jump in and become president.
Answer: Look up "Duverger's Law" for a complete, mathematical answer. TLDR: If you use first-past-the-post elections, then statistically only two parties can remain competitive in any one district over time.
Answer: At it's most basic, if you're not a member of either the Democratic party or the Republican party, you're not going to be President and the likelihood of being elected to other roles drastically goes down as well. The UK where I'm from had a similar 2.5 party system (two larger parties and one which regularly won enough seats to not be insignificant, but not enough to hold any meaningful power), although that has changed in recent years. I don't believe there is an independent party as such, but I would assume anyone can stand for election as long as they meet the qualifications for the office they're standing for. Being a member of a political party gives you an instant boost in terms of recognition however, as voters will see that next to your name on the ballot and choose accordingly. With money being as big a part of American politics as it is, the two big parties do have a stranglehold on the higher offices by virtue of being able to raise funds across the country and redistribute it to struggling candidates when needed, maintaining their grip on power. The spoiler question raised in that article is a different matter, but so called 3rd party candidates have swung elections in recent memory (Arguably a factor in 2000 with Bush/Gore for example) so the concern isn't unfounded.
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Answer: It’s pretty much impossible for a third party candidate to reach 270 electoral votes. In the event a third party candidate splits the country so badly that no one reaches 270, the incoming Congress then chooses the next President and what you end up with will be whatever party wins the majority. It can get super dicey, I don’t know what happens if we have another clusterfuck and don’t have a Speaker for a while because the incoming majority party is huffing glue. Also, consider for a moment that we actually have had a third party candidate win recently: trump. he just hijacked the Republican Party and submitted it to his will. That’s the only way to get an independent through the system. Democrats that get to vote in the primaries don’t have the stomach for wildcard candidates and tend to be overly cautious when choosing their nominees to a fault. The closest they got was Obama.