> 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.