Comment by 0xbadcafebee

Even if first-past-the-post could change, it's not the whole ballgame. To get on a state ballot you need thousands of petition signatures, and those signatures can be invalidated on technicalities brought up by major parties' legal teams. To be covered by the media or be included in a debate you need to poll at a high percentage. You can't get public funding to campaign unless you already had a high percentage of the vote in a previous election. Nobody will donate to you because the third party just detracts from the other two that will give the big donors what they want. And gerrymandering ensures the same people keep getting elected. All those roadblocks are in place because the two major parties put them there to prevent 3rd party challengers. The whole thing is rigged.

Just to show up and get 1% of the vote, you would need a grassroots national movement to elect someone who was wildly popular, who could build a 50-state network of volunteers (including legal, political, financial, community organizing, etc), sponsored by someone with extremely deep pockets that doesn't want anything from established political figures. And you'd still lose.

We have representatives already. The problem is we never hold their feet to the fire. We keep voting for the same useless bastards, and we don't vote them out when they do nothing. Half the country doesn't vote. That's our own responsibility we're shirking. Rather than get a new party, we need to get off our collective asses, and use the existing power we have to force the parties to do their jobs.