The USA is a two-party state because of the voting system. If people could confidently vote for another party there wouldn't be just two parties.

It's even reflected in the language, like how people task about being "bi-partizan" instead of "non-partizan".

> If people could confidently vote for another party there wouldn't be just two parties.

If multimember districts are used with RCV yes. If not it tends to maintain a duopoly. Australia’s Senate uses RCV like voting with multimember districts and has more diversity than its House which uses single member districts.

That said there is some benefit to using RCV even with single member districts as in theory it tends to moderate the candidates a bit as they want to appeal to more people. That said I think it’s a serious missed opportunity to press RCV without multimember districts.

While multimember districts would be a huge improvement, I wonder if we also should start having the conversation if geography based representation is the right approach for the internet age.

I for one, have more in common with a minority identity widely dispersed across the country but connected through the internet than I do my next door neighbors. My niche identity never gets proportionately represented in government because I'm overwhelmed by local majorities.

No. Government and politics are primarily local because most problems are local.

For instance, I have zero clue about life in NYC. Letting me directly influence decisions in NYC is wholly unfair. I have no skin in the game! How good or bad their transportation is doesn’t affect me. Whether their local tax rate is high or low doesn’t affect me. But it most definitely does affect them.

Likewise, nobody in NYC is affected by the repeat wildfires we’ve had recently on the west coast. Letting them directly say, “Nah, it’s no big deal” is also unfair.

I definitely empathize, though. Lots of my beliefs aren’t represented where I live, either.

The Congress does not decide the New York local tax rate or how west coast cities handle their forest. You can have a local government and Congressional elections that are not tied to your specific location. As far as I know now the only position that both someone in California and someone in New York would vote for is POTUS.

Congress does, however decide how western states manage much of their land - a majority in some states.

Ironically, a lot of people who decide how to develop NYC subway sit in Albany, NY.

> a lot of people who decide how to develop NYC subway sit in Albany, NY

Albany bailed us out, so it retains oversight. But the vast majority of the MTA’s decisions are made by people with boots on the ground.

There is always a trade-off between the representation of regions, demographic groups, and opinions. Single-member districts are the right solution when regional representation is the most important concern and the representation of various opinions is the least important one. Sufficiently large multimember districts are the opposite.

When it comes to regional representation, the right district size depends on population and mobility. If you live in a rural area, a single-member district probably covers you local area reasonably well. In major cities, the boundaries of electoral districts are often arbitrary and meaningless. If you live in one district, work in another, and use shops and other services in a third, which of the three is most important to you? And what happens if you move to another place within the city?

I think that RCV is at best a hack, a compromise for people who don't want to get too far from FPP.

IMHO if you are electing individual people (a mayor, a US president, a city council, a US Senator) then STV is more equitable (it is pretty close to RCV if you are electing a single person). But if you are electing parties (like the US House) then MMP is a fairer solution

> But if you are electing parties (like the US House)

I'm not sure why you are phrasing it this way. Voters don't pick a party for their House representative, they pick a candidate. Each House district election is independent of all the others.

Yes but if each house district is FPP 3rd parties generally don't get a look in, people who vote for them get no representation at all, and can produce governments where the party with the most seats got fewer votes than the others.

MMP provides local representation, and proportional representation (at the expense of having larger local seats, or more representatives).

Voters pick a candidate knowing that the candidate will have to play within a two party legislature.

Third party legislators are shunned. Their bills get no traction, and they get no committee assignments. If they are seriously divergent, the House could easily have them removed.

Further evidence for this exists in the demise of ticket splitting: if you vote R at the top of the ticket, you're very likely to vote R the rest of the way down the ticket, regardless of who the downballot R's are. It wasn't always this way, but has been for some time.

Some States even have a single box you can check to vote entirely for that party’s candidates, “straight ticket voting”.

Texas removed it a few years back and it’s removal was challenged (and lost) by Democrats: https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/30/texas-2020-election-...

Ranked ballots in single member districts are really a hack on electoral reform movements. It creates the appearance of improving the system while only solving one of many problems.

The hack worked in Canada and GB, where it was used to divide, confuse and ultimately scuttle the electoral reform process.

I'm Australian so I might be biased, but I don't like MMP. It seems to be optimising for democratic outcome (well at least a parliament that looks like the distribution of first party votes) while ignoring all other factors. Many countries that use it seem to have weak governments that can't get much done. There is parties that won't work together because one is secessionists (Catalans), right wing (national rally in France, AfD in Germany), different ethnic group (Arabs in Israel, Flemish vs French speakers in Belgium). Some parties seem to get more popular if they refuse to compromise. This can end up in endless elections (e.g. Israel), inability to form government for years (e.g. Belgium) or parties that aren't acceptable for mainstream parties to form coalitions with becoming the only opposition (e.g. National Rally). Even well run countries like the Netherlands and Sweden can seem to take forever to form a government. RCV mostly allows one party to form a majority government and get things done. There is clear accountability. While at the same time there is still the incentive to appeal to a broad base. And over time new parties can break into the system if they are appealing enough.

You seem to be assuming that doing something is usually better than doing nothing. I believe the opposite is true in politics. It's difficult to make things better with political decisions, but it's much easier to break things or make them worse. If you can't convince a clear majority that something is a good idea, doing nothing is probably a better choice.

Presidents, prime ministers, and governors are always enemies of liberal democracy (the republic for those more familiar with American terminology). Nobody should be given that kind of power, but unless we can figure out how to run a country without such leaders, we have to tolerate them as a necessary evil.

It works well here in NZ - I think that part of it is that we've built a political culture around MMP that understands that to be successful at MMP parties need to build coalitions and compromise (very transparent public compromises) - the current government is the first we've had in 3-4 decades where one party could form a government by themselves, and they still formed a coalition of sorts

Just to be clear - most of the countries you give as your examples aren't MMP systems, they are other proportional representation systems, and the problems you have with it are common to proportional representation systems broadly rather than MMP.

It's interesting you gave France as an example, because they have a nice workflow/system to avoid this.

There are presidential elections every 5 years, which are "standard", if no candidate gets over 50% of the votes, there's a second round between the first two candidates from the first round. A month later, there are legislative elections, the concept being that people will send the new president a parliament he can work with if they're OK with him. Macron won with 20 something % in the first round ( second round was against the aforementioned National Rally, so his victory was guaranteed), but his party got 50%+ in the legislative elections because people decided to give him a chance to enact his program, even if he wasn't their first choice. That isn't always the case, and if the far right wins the presidential elections next year i'm certain they won't have a parliamentary majority.

To avoid a popular wave sweeping everything, the legislature id bicameral, the aforementioned legislative elections only for the lower chamber, the National Assembly. The higher chamber, the Senate, which is more limited in powers but can still exert influence over the lower chamber's law making, is indirectly elected by mayors, local/departmental/regional councilors with staggered 6 year terms ( every 3 years half the seats are up for election).

IMHO it's overall a good system that allows for everyone to be represented, enables governments to be stable ( but doesn't force it). The main thing i'd improve is ranked choice voting for single seat elections ( presidential, local).

And besides all that specific to France, i disagree about "classic" MMP. It forces cooperation and compromise, much better than a party forcing through with whatever they want because there's nobody that can opose them.

That’s not correct, Chirac won the parliament in 2002, the first time the presidential election was for 5 years. The former system (7 years president) allowed more diversity and that’s how he got to work with a left prime minister, 10 years after having been himself the prime minister of a left president.

Hm, i remembered my history wrongly, i've now removed that stuff, thanks!

> The former system (7 years president) allowed more diversity

Yeah, but 7 years is a lot and it's a remnant of when France wad supposed to be a monarchy, so i completely understand why they changed it.

I see RCV and STV used interchangeably. And the way I’ve seen RCV described in the US it is just STV with a better name for easier marketing. But I may be missing some subtlety. I also prefer MMP for parliamentary systems but changing the US to use MMP is several orders of magnitude harder than implementing RCV, which can be done state by state. It can even be implanted using multimember districts without changing anything. So it gives the US the best path to a better electoral system I think.

What I like about RCV is that it benefits moderate candidates. You can also argue that moderate candates have more influence at a national level, and if your representatives have more influence they have more bargaining power on behalf of your state.

All in all RCV can be a moderating factor AND it does not require top down changes to the election system.

> That said there is some benefit to using RCV even with single member districts as in theory it tends to moderate the candidates a bit as they want to appeal to more people.

RCV has a bigger impact when used in conjunction with primaries. The is a not unusual situation where more extreme candidates win primaries when the more moderate candidate would have won the election by a larger margin. The more extreme candidate then ends up elected because the district has been jerrymandered to belong to their party.

Yeah. The solution there is to get rid of primaries altogether. And they’re unnecessary with RCV.

Although I think they’re unnecessary already under the current system and the US would be a lot better off without them. You could get rid of them and just leave it up to the parties themselves to decide which candidate they will back for each district via whichever means they prefer internally amongst party members.

> The USA is a two-party state because of the voting system.

There's much more to it than that. The two-party system is codified into many laws. A lot of effort goes into maintaining it; the voting system isn't up to that job.

That's just a circular argument though. It's codified because the voting system has historically only allowed for two parties to flourish.

> The USA is a two-party state because of the voting system. If people could confidently vote for another party there wouldn't be just two parties.

There are plenty of other parties, for example: Libertarian, Green, and Constitution.

In practice, these minor parties (could be) funded by the opposite end of the spectrum to weaken the other side (just a hunch).

But that gets at one possibility of why these minor parties never do better than, say Ross Perot (who got no electoral votes, but sunk Bush41 in 1992): scale.

It takes a whale of a party to carry a pond the size of the US.

And really, the remaining two nominal parties seem wings of a deeper, stateful organization putting on a show every couple of years.

If there is interest in altering the equation, I would suggest https://conventionofstates.com/

Plurality voting systems lacking runoff elections lead to two-party states. Maurice Duverger pointed this out in 1964.

The Convention of States is a campaign by the Tea Party movement to form an Article V convention, but they are more likely to present a balanced budget amendment, not electoral reform. Key people involved like Jim DeMint have also advocated for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage—a pretty silly idea if you ask me.

The 16th and 17th Amendments, plus the Federal Reserve Act, all in 1913, along with the capping of the House of Representatives at 435 members in 1910, have driven the growth of the Administrative State. And the debt.

So now there is a quasi-aristocracy running plays and putting on these electoral shows every couple of years.

Calls for substantial reform.

Technical people understand the need for clean architecture and political systems.

Humans are not code, but our political- and tax systems are a Byzantine train wreck. On a good day.

But go ahead and worry about DeMint's opinions, boss.

I agree that our political system is a train wreck, but I don't see why the political positions of the people you're suggesting amend the Constitution wouldn't be relevant.

Ah, so.

I submit that perhaps the communication challenge may be rooted in the modern insistence in making ansolutely everything political.

A Federalist construct would seek to assign appropriate tasking to each level of government, and have DC manage international and inter-State concerns.

Arguably, a single, monolithic state try to manage every personal and local concern leads to gridlock, Q.E.D.

Incorrect. I voted in today's NYC mayoral primary. There are 13 candidates on the Democratic primary ballot. Perhaps 3 are considered "front-runners" but everyone's aware it's entirely possible at least a couple of the others could wind up winning. The race is entirely up in the air.

Because NYC is overwhelmingly Democratic, this election almost certainly determines who will be mayor.

And not only do you need to do your research on these many candidates, but there are similar lists of more than 2 candidates for Borough President, Comptroller, etc.

Welcome to actual democracy where you suddenly do get to express meaningful choices that aren't just between a single candidate preselected by two parties! And know that if your first-choice candidate doesn't win, your vote isn't effectively thrown out. :)

> And not only do you need to do your research on these many candidates, but there are similar lists of more than 2 candidates for Borough President, Comptroller, etc.

Can you say how many such choices "etcetera" was eliding here? And if possible if there were roles where you had no idea about any of the candidates beyond stuff like incumbency ? I can see New York City is too big to make just having a Mayor on the ballot enough to properly establish democratically elected local government, but in general it seems Americans elect way too many roles.

Here’s a sample ballot from today’s primary in Brooklyn. Voting was for 7 offices, 5 of which were RCV.

https://nyc-static.electionhub.com/sampleballots/384760/12/2...

Yeah :/ that does seem excessive. Delegates to the Judicial Convention in particular don't look to me to have a role that justifies expecting citizens to choose eleven of them each cycle.

I believe those, in particular, are part of the party infrastructure, and just on there because it's a Democratic Party Primary ballot.

We elect some form of party-apparatus delegates here in California too, though the Democratic Party here holds those elections separately and privately.

The only one I've ever been actively aware was happening was because I was dating someone working for a prominent state politician, and got dragged along to vote for people I'd never heard of in some park.

> Welcome to actual democracy

Fake democracy where you get to choose viable candidates exclusively from one party, and only one party.

Aka a party dictatorship, the same as they have in most authoritarian states, and ideologically enforced in a similarly regressive manner. If you're not of the party, you will be an outcast and blockaded from any chance at winning. The opposite of democracy, and very clearly so.

If you don't represent the views of the voters you won't win.

Another way to say it is "if you're not of the society, you will be outcast and blockaded from any chance of winning."

Anyone can join that party and run in the primary.

What are you even talking about...?

Literally anyone can run in the Democratic primary, you just have to be registered as a Democrat, which is just filling out a form where there are no wrong answers.

Have you even been following the NYC primary at all? "Ideologically enforced" is hilarious. The difference between, say, the current #1 and #2 candidates Adams and Wiley is basically the difference between Trump and Bernie Sanders, and the the rest are everything in between and then some.

If you think anything is being ideologically enforced in this race, if you think anyone is being "outcast and blockaded" -- I mean, this dude Paperboy Love Prince [1] is actually on the ballot, not even joking -- then quite frankly you're delusional. This isn't Communist China, this is the Democratic Party which is, well, famously a bit of a mess.

I don't know where you live or what news you read, but if you're trying to claim America isn't democratic and open then, ha... you sure picked the wrong race to use as an example! :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperboy_Prince

Are you hinting at the Overton Window? It's notoriously small in the US.

What you say is true if general elections in the US, but often not the primary elections where a party determines who its candidate will be. At that stage it's pretty common to have a wider field of candidates.

Also, ranking could change the US dynamic of only have 2 choices. Being able to vote 3rd party and then then choose someone from one of the two main parties might drive a lot more people to vote 3rd party because they wouldn't feel it's hurting the chance of having a candidate that represents at least some of their views. This may not change national elections much, but for Senate, and especially House members it could make a difference. Enough to force more coalitions and compromise between parties instead of winner take all. Sure, that outcome isn't guaranteed, but it seems more likely to produce that sort of result than what we have now.

Americans may not know that most countries don't have public primaries the way that the US does - here in NZ it varies from party to party - at one extreme the Greens hold a very public transparent democratic process, at the other the National party use closed 'smoke filled' rooms

I'd guess that most people don't know the detailed rules of elections in other countries.

With that argument China is also a democracy, since you can vote who will get to run the party. I'd argue that a proper democracy requires new parties to be easily formed and quickly gain momentum and power if they have support from a fraction of the population. I don't think that ranked choices allows for that, as even if the third party "Greens" in this case got 25% of the votes they'd get thrown away in favour of peoples secondary choice.

Minor nit: I believe only party members vote on party leadership, and it's actually difficult to get into the party. Also, I'm under the impression that the voting is multi-tiered, where you vote on your level and region on which member gets elevated to the next level.

It's actually an interesting system, and as usual, it seems adding indirection solves some problems while introducing others.

I don't know how you got from my comment to China. I speculated that ranked choice might have more of an impact on which candidates are selected in primary elections. If you think voting for who will be the party's candidate is undemocratic then we're already there, that's already how it works, and I don't see anything in my comment that would lead to a single-party system like China. Maybe you could elaborate on why you think ranked choice in primary elections would take us to a single party system.

What I don't understand is why you think 3rd parties should rapidly gain power if they only have support from a fraction of the population. Why should their power be disproportionately larger than the # of people supporting them? I don't think it's very democratic to have a candidate with only 25% of the vote win the election.

I mean... are you suggesting that some system where someone could get elected with only 25% of the vote would somehow be more democratic? If a party or candidate can only get 25% of the vote in an election for a single position, like mayor, they aren't going to get elected, that's just democracy, right?

RCV makes it more likely a third party could get 50% of the vote though, since people can vote for it without worrying about "throwing their vote away", or throwing the election to a right-wing party when they want to vote for the lesser left-wing party.

I think once people see that their 'other party' preferences are at least being represented in the early rounds, they will gain confidence in their ability to express their actual desires in the ranking. The understanding that third parties actually have a real chance if they get enough voters' first choices will wake up the Ds and Rs that they can't just coast and hand wave anymore or they'll get tossed out.

Yes if this voting style extended to primaries or other elections with multiple candidates from one party, it also has benefits. You can vote for the less popular candidate that better suits you, while falling back to the popular one you're willing to settle for. Preferences are generally reported, so people will see 'unpopular' options actually getting votes and things shift over time.

Imagine there are two major party candidates, D and R, and also a third candidate X who is well-kmown and well-loved, but few believe X can win.

Now voters go to the election and mostly put R or D on top place, but consistently put X on the second place. X has a really fair chance to win.

This is how the two-party system can be cracked. This is how an already well-known person can be elected without having to join either major party.

More over, a way this can actually play is that there's a third candidate Z who has policies many people strongly agree with, but, since they aren't a member of the big parties and don't attract mainstream news focus, few believe they'll win. Under RCV and several other systems, many R and D voters will put Z first, because it can't hurt. They expect Z will be eliminated, since they "know" R or D must win, and their R or D second choice is what they expect to matter but at least they made their preference clear.

And then Z wins with 55% of the vote. Even though this is a surprise to Z's voters, it's a pleasant surprise. They wanted Z they just didn't expect it to be possible.

Under FPTP this can be made to happen, but you have to persuade people Z can actually win, because they're worried they are "throwing away" their vote until it really happens. Consider Brighton Pavilion in the UK. In 2005, Brighton was held by a Labour Co-Op incumbent, and the Green candidate came a close third. The Greens had to really sell the message that when Lucas stood in 2010 they genuinely had a chance to elect her, if only people who supported Green policies looked past the Red/Blue split and gave Caroline their vote.

They made it happen, but it was close, turnout was up considerably, and much of that new turnout voted for Lucas. If you voted for Lucas despite vague Tory leanings, and she hadn't won, you've have been devastated because right behind her was the new Labour candidate whereas even a modest fraction of Lucas' votes going to the Tory would have won them the election.

Once she'd shown it was possible Caroline Lucas never looked back, and she now routinely secures a clear majority in elections not the mere plurality required to win.

But this has been hard for her party to replicate elsewhere, and while Lucas is an especially personable candidate that can't explain the entire phenomenon. There are likely other constituencies in the UK where Greens could secure a majority if the voters believed the Green candidate has a chance and didn't vote their second or third choice to prevent their least preferred from winning.

I'm actually not bullish for RCV, but this sort of problem is exactly why it makes sense.

I think most people would put X in first place, then D or R in second just in case. If X can't get enough votes, then they fall back on D or R

> There are almost always only 2 choices - the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate.

We really need to get rid of the canonization of the party. If there are only going to be two candidates, let it be two individuals. The party shouldn't even be listed on the ballot. If you haven't done enough research to know which individual belongs to the party you support, then you haven't done enough research to vote. More individuals make this even better because it becomes a forcing function that forces people to actually learn about the individuals they are voting for and each individual's policies.

If I ruled the world, I'd go further and require a short 5 question pop quiz about the policies of the candidate you chose and you need 3 out of 5 questions correct for your vote to count.

>...If I ruled the world, I'd go further and require a short 5 question pop quiz about the policies of the candidate you chose and you need 3 out of 5 questions correct for your vote to count.

Yeah, we know how that goes when we try to keep the "wrong" people from voting in the US.

> Anyone voting for another candidate is simply saying that's who they /REALLY/ wish would win, but most people aren't willing to throw their vote in the garbage to virtue signal.

Interesting to apply the term "signaling" to a behavior which other people cannot observe.

It is observable in the aggregate statistics. x% of people voted for so-and-so candidate.

> In this US, you would rarely need to do any additional research. > > There are almost always only 2 choices - the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate.

In NY, what's being discussed in the OP, the ranked choice system is being used only for the primaries. Whoever wins the Democratic party will certainly win the mayoral general election -- but ranked choice voting isn't being used there anyway.

So what you're describing isn't actually the context of ranked choice voting in this election.

In Chicago, another city where the Democrats always win, they actually have, since 1999, non-partisan primaries. Just one primary, for all parties, top two candidates go on to the general election -- so the general election can be between two generals. It would be interesting to see instead a single ranked-choice election, no primary at all.

> There are almost always only 2 choices - the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate.

I’m an immigrant so some of this may be wrong, but the party system in the US seems to operate very differently to that in most other countries.

Primaries make races far more focussed on the individual representative so there is less incentive for serious third parties to emerge as their potential candidates can instead challenge an incumbent in a primary within the same party affiliation.

With voters registering with an affiliation rather than joining a party as a member and being subject to that party’s rules, so far as I can tell there is no way for a party to prevent someone from running under their banner so long as they win the primary.

The whole point of this kind of voting is that you would have to relay on primaries. You can just put up 2 or 5 candidates per party without hurting the parties chances of winning.

This is the whole point of such voting systems.

It would mostly be for primaries, where the field is wider, but don't discount how ranked choice voting could lead to more than 2 viable parties.

Primaries mostly exist due to the FPTP voting system - dropping that would remove a pretty big reason to have them at all which could lead to cheaper elections... campaign fundraising was ever reigned in - rather, the elections will probably be cheaper but it's unlikely you'd notice due to the insane campaign budgets that are common.

Cost of elections is not an issue, but replacing FPTP with ranked choice makes candidate less dependent on the party.

Remember Trump 2016 elections, when Trump disagreed with the way debates were conducted. Trump had to bend because there could be only one Republican candidate.

Not saying Trump was right, but making candidate less dependent on the party (i. e. redistribute the power from the party committee to the candidates) would be good thing.

If ranked voting happened everywhere at same time, the independents, who outnumber both Democratic and Republican party numbers combined, might become a force onto themselves and change everyone's assumptions on 3rd party candidates. This won't likely happen without national voting reform, but it is an interesting thought experiment.

At the very least you might given enough independents are elected, hand them the balance of power where the governing party has to deal with them to get bills passed rather than the increasingly difficult task of skimming votes from the rival party.

What you really need is a Don "keep the bastards honest" Chipp type to splinter off one of the major parties and form a viable third party with a group of like-minded moderates. Given the state of the GOP it could be time for the likes of Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney backed by operative groups such as the Lincoln Project to give it a crack.

Local elections usually have more interesting options for candidates.

For example the recent mayoral election in Portland, where the incumbent was pretty much a Democrat and was challenged by a couple of more progressive candidates. The incumbent ended up winning with less than 50% of the vote

Does this vary in different parts of the US? Where I live many municipal elections are nonpartisan (no D or R next to someone's name). In some cases (e.g. jungle primary) there may be multiple viable candidates from the same party

New York is a fusion voting state with all sorts of parties. Most, like the “Rent is Too Damn High” party fade, but there is a bunch of third parties of varying degrees of relevance.

If this achieves widespread in the US I could see regional libertarian and green candidates picking up spots in certain areas in US.

Do you have something US-specific to indicate that this would be the case? Neither empirics nor theory support your claim. https://rangevoting.org/TarrIrvSumm.html

The very first line of your source references Australia as an example of why ranked voting would not give third parties any influence.

This seems like an odd choice, given that Australia currently has five different parties in Parliament, and has in recent history had a third party be the deciding "vote" on who forms government. It seems like an even odder choice for you to reference it as a counterpoint in this specific case given that one of those parties is literally called "the Greens".

The goal of voting for a 3rd party is go get to 5% of the popular vote to fully fund the party across the next election cycle.

Libertarian party has come the closest, earning 3.1% in 2016 while total 3rd party votes were over 5.5%. If the Green Party voters had voted LP we’d have validated a 3rd party that year.

So much political messaging focuses on fear of the other major party that people feel they have to vote opposition rather than voting for who they really want. US elections have been fear driven for years.

Statistically, in the US a 3rd party has a 0% chance of winning because a third party has never won.

Maybe within the first 100 years; history isn’t my strongest subject.

> Statistically, in the US a 3rd party has a 0% chance of winning because a third party has never won.

Not recently for President, but third parties have won at every other level of government including Governors, Representatives, and Senators.

> Not recently for President,

Not ever. The Federalists collapsed before we got a Whig, and the Whigs before we got a Republican, and those and the Democratic (ex-Democratic-Republican) parties are the only four that have won the Presidency.

> but third parties have won at every other level of government including Governors, Representatives, and Senators.

Sure, but its easy to overcount them; state two-party systems (where they haven't been effectively one-party systems) haven't historically always aligned with the national two-party system (e.g., Missouri’s [ed: or, in the real world, Minnesota’s] Farmer-Labor Party was the second (and later first) party in the state for years, alongside the Republicans, before it merged with a local third party—and thereby joined the national Democrats—as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

I would consider Sanders to be a pretty legitimate third party candidate - VT democrats have coalesced around him recently but his initial bid for Senate was pretty spectacular. He managed to ride an extremely popular mayoral career into a state that is extremely dominated by Burlington population-wise. Burlington metro is roughly as large a proportion of the VT voting block as NYC metro is for NY.

> I would consider Sanders to be a pretty legitimate third party candidate -

While he identifies as a socialist by ideology and has some association with the Vermont Progressive Party, AFAIK he has always run for federal legislative office as an independent, not third-party, candidate.

> VT democrats have coalesced around him recently but his initial bid for Senate was pretty spectacular.

IIRC, his original House campaign was spectacular, but Democrats in VT coalesced around him in his 8 terms in VT’s sole House seat.

Oh excuse me yes - I'd forgotten he initially stepped into congress as a house rep.

It was MN not MO:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Farmer%E2%80%93Labor...

> It was MN not MO:

It was, and I am embarrassed that i managed to do that.

I would mention that everyone's favorite example in this category (Bernie Sanders) does secure the democratic primary nomination for senate each election - he just refuses to leverage it in the general election. But failing to do that would lead to a much harder general election since the Dems would likely put up a competing candidate and split the vote three ways.

A third party candidate gave America one of the worst presidents ever - Woodrow Wilson was essentially elected on a fluke because Teddy split the vote with Taft - the two together had a strong majority of the overall vote while Wilson only took home 41%.

FPTP systems strongly encourage bipartisan politics but it's silly to say third parties have never won and it's also incorrect. Early American politics were much more diverse before things coalesced around the slavery question leading up to the civil war - after the war there was a brief re-emergence of multi-party politics but it quickly collapsed back down to two as campaigning became less policy driven and new media opened up the door for a lot more fear-based advertising.

I would agree that it's highly unlikely that a third party candidate would ever win in the current political atmosphere - though if the GOP continues to move toward Trump and the Dems shift way to the left we might see a third party fiscal conservative have a real shot at it.

You're 100% wrong because the third party has won many times and both democrats and republicans started out as third parties.