Third-party candidacies have never fared well in American presidential elections. The last third-party candidate to win even one Electoral College vote was in 1968 when American Independent Party candidate George Wallace gleaned 46 electoral votes, all in states of the former Confederacy, in an election that saw Richard Nixon into the White House.
So these candidacies have been, as much as anything else, protest candidacies. That’s fine; the world has no shortage of windmills to tilt at. A great example of this kind of protest candidacy is that of Cornel West, who has about as much chance of being elected president as he does of being spontaneously transported to Tau Ceti by a random quantum tunnel.
However, like that sudden quantum tunnel, the chance of West being elected president isn’t zero, and if he does attain the title of Leader of the Free World, he has announced that his…
