One might opine that's certainly true within the two major parties, but a third party like the Greens represents something different, and if we can persuade enough disaffected progressives to vote third-party, then we can begin to mount a real progressive challenge to the two majors.
But let's consider what a third-party would have to do to have any significant effect.
It would have to get visibility in a dismissive media, which would probably require breaking a 10% threshold in the polls; it would have to get into the major-party-controlled debates, which now requires 15% in the polls; it would then have to disrupt an election, winning the margin of victory in crucial swing states.
Let's be clear: A truly independent third party of the left that takes itself seriously must be in the business of supplanting, not pressuring, the Democratic Party on the national political scene. The whole point of a third party, the only thing that will mean it's serious and will get it taken seriously, the only thing that will give it political power, will be if it hurts the Democratic Party.
No left third party will win a state before it makes the Democrats lose one. A party that follows a "Safe States" strategy, whereby it discourages its supporters from voting for it in key swing states, announces its political self-sabotage, and will be nothing more than an elaborate Bernie-ish pressure group on the Democratic Party. The swing states, where the votes mean the most, are where a third-party should campaign the hardest.
This means that a serious third party must be unapologetically willing to accept responsibility for its campaign being a factor in a Republican victory. If not, it should admit to itself and everybody else that it's content with running a series of parallel, adjunct Democratic Party campaigns, and that, like Bernie, is not in it to win, but to make sure the Republicans lose. Vote for us. We're safe! is the slogan of a party that will change nothing.
Sorry, but it's the present winner-takes-all-electoral-votes system that dictates what's effective or not, and sets the rules by which you must play to be effective. If you play in that game, you have to accept the damage it does, and requires you to do. Which is one reason why your first objective, before you play, should be to change the game. Or, as the enduring wisdom of 80s movies has it: Sometimes the only winning move is not to play.
Let's say that, in the present climate, with the most despised presidential duo in living memory, we have a determined third party and determined third-party voters, willing to pursue the political logic necessary to disrupt the two party system, and somehow able to overcome the walls of media and debate exclusion. Maybe the Greens can get over 5% in California! (Leftists should be chastened by the fact that the Libertarian Party consistently polls twice as high as the Greens, and would be the most likely to achieve 10%.) OK, 5% won't win anything, but maybe it's enough to change the outcome in a key state, and make the party impossible to ignore.
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