You’d think midterms would be a great time to get your name out there and run high profile candidates to win House districts led by charlatans…

    • kbotc@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      2 years ago

      Ross Perot was the last time a 3rd party actually made some noise. He took 18.9% of the popular vote, founded the reform party, then withered on the vine.

      • frezik@midwest.social
        9·
        2 years ago

        In following elections, the Reform party would go on to nominate Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader as Presidential candidates. It also ran Jesse Ventura for governor, and even Trump had a brief turn in there.

        Not so much withering on the vine as being completely incoherent.

        (If you don’t know about Pat Buchanan, since he’s been out of the limelight for a while, he was basically all the worst impulses of racist GOP voters back in the 90s. Exactly the kind of people Trump uses as his base now.)

      • DMBFFF@lemmy.worldBanned from community
        2·
        2 years ago

        and IIUC caused a war-mongering President, and former CIA leader, whose popularity less than 18 months before the election at one point was above 90%, to lose.

    • NateNate60@lemmy.world
      5·
      2 years ago

      Localist parties can probably win as well. I think there are some observations that can be made from UK elections, which also use first-past-the-post.

      • Local political parties can win. The Scottish National Party did well in Scotland for several years (until their poll numbers collapsed after their former leader quit and got arrested)
      • It makes more sense for small parties to pour all their resources into contesting a small number of seats than to contest and lose a large number of seats. The UK Green Party spent a lot of effort to get their leader elected to Parliament in the Brighton Pavillion constituency.
      • Local representation matters. When your party controls several seats on a local council or devolved assembly, they have more chances to gain visibility or even govern. US parties should spend a lot more effort on state legislative races than the presidential one.
      • Vote-splitting is less of a concern when one ideology is already overwhelmingly dominant in a region. That is a good region to try to win. For example, the DC Statehood Green Party is the second-largest political party in Washington, D.C. because the DC Republican Party is tiny and terrible (polls in the single digits). That’s a good place to try to win some seats.
    • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.worldOP
      4·
      2 years ago

      Not to mention, a third party did get 5%+ with Perot and the Reform Party. But I don’t think Reform even exists anymore, and if they do, they’ve done a terrible job of making themselves known.

      They’ve been trying their strategy of “get our name out during presidential elections and hit 5%” for a long time now, and it’s clearly a losing strategy.