Jill Stein enters the presidential 2016 race.

[SheilaT]

15. It's the problem with any and all third party candidates.

If someone already affiliated with either of the two major parties runs as an independent (think John Anderson in 1980) were to win, he or she would just revert to his or her original party designation, and all would be reasonably well.

I am NOT suggesting that anyone in this current cycle do so, although maybe a couple of the Republicans could and totally split that vote.

Another problem with an outsider like Jill Stein is that while she's smart and has well-thought-out positions on many things, she strikes me as rather naive about the actual political process. Better, in my opinion, that she'd joined the Democratic party and got elected to at least one of the many offices she's run for. She clearly has the energy for campaigning, but especially at the presidential level there's not any chance at all she can influence the electorate. If we had a parliamentary system in this country that allowed more than two political parties to be competitive, it would be one thing. But we have the system we have. It's almost impossible to change from the outside.

Even more to the point, Senators and Representatives are very tied up in their party. A few years ago a young man here in New Mexico sought the nomination as a Republican for the House seat in this part of the state, and he honestly thought that he could, if elected, behave independently and not be beholden to his party at all. He was running as a Republican because he felt that in this state the Dems have far too much power and simply did not want to be associated with them. But he had absolutely no understanding of how these things work, especially at the level of getting elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. I think he wound up dropping out before the Primary, and I'm not entirely sure which year it was, either 2010 or 2012. But I'd hear him being interviewed on the radio, and he honestly thought he could call himself a Republican, run for the House, and not be in any way held to behaving as the party would want him to do.