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pernament Third party in United states.

I think the AIP has a pretty solid chance if the Republicans don't move so much on civil rights in the 60s. The move to abolish the electoral college that came so close to succeeding post-1968 actually doing so could also help (ironically, since it was in many ways an anti-AIP thing).
The Reform Party is more difficult. I can - especially if there's no electoral college at the time - see a space like that being regularly filled by noticeable parties, but that kind of niche is quite difficult to stabilise even in countries where it is a big thing.
 
I think the temptation to be a wing of the big two you're closest to is always going to be there. It gives you much more power to choose the president and the primary system means you can still dominate local politics at the exclusion of other party groupings.

A position in between them is unlikely to remain steady, as outreach efforts are likely to succeed more on one side than another at some point.

So you'd need a reason not to link up with the big two. Which mean that Reform might do better than the AIP despite their dispersion making any local win very unlikely... Simply because the anti establishment stance is part of the selling point.
 
I think the temptation to be a wing of the big two you're closest to is always going to be there. It gives you much more power to choose the president and the primary system means you can still dominate local politics at the exclusion of other party groupings.

A position in between them is unlikely to remain steady, as outreach efforts are likely to succeed more on one side than another at some point.

So you'd need a reason not to link up with the big two. Which mean that Reform might do better than the AIP despite their dispersion making any local win very unlikely... Simply because the anti establishment stance is part of the selling point.
Electoral fusion remaining the rule could have an effect on that earlier on - I think the Supreme Court came quite close to ruling banning it unconstitutional in the 90s as well.
Then again, it hasn't had that much impact in the states that still have it.
 
Electoral fusion remaining the rule could have an effect on that earlier on - I think the Supreme Court came quite close to ruling banning it unconstitutional in the 90s as well.
Then again, it hasn't had that much impact in the states that still have it.

NYC is the only place where it's significant that comes to mind.

I could see fusion being adopted by a party like the AIP in the EC though. They'd be able to run their candidates for all local offices and still weight in on who the president should be by dangling in their party nomination as a reward for one of the big two picking someone amenable to them.
 
The Timmons v. Twin Cities ruling going in the opposite direction is probably the best chance that third parties would have under America's current electoral system. A POD could be in 1996 Pat Buchanan decides to leave the Republicans and run with the Constitution Party, something he threatened to do if Bob Dole didn't select a pro-life running mate. The Republicans already blamed Perot on 1992 and now this would be the second time a third party split their vote. It could lead to Republican leadership pushing for electoral fusion as a way to divert that energy back into their party. The Republican Party's legal team voiced their support for a pro-fusion voting ruling in OTL because they believed that electoral fusion would hamper Democrats more. But in this timeline, you may see actual party pressure towards getting the ban on fusion voting lifted.
 
In my opinion, the lack of success of third parties in the United States is neither the First-Past-the-Post, nor the presidential system. It's not even the fact that third parties generally have no sense of strategy.

The problem is that the United States has historically, and continues to this day, to have a very loose party system, with decentralized leaderships and low internal party discipline with regards to ideology and policy positions. In places like the United Kingdom and Canada, the selection process for candidates for the constituencies have always been matters left entirely to fee-paying party members, with lots of room for the central leadership to meddle. The leader of the Liberal Party of Canada can still go in and veto the selection of a particular candidate in any given riding, for instance.

By contrast, in the United States, there has long been a history of open primaries and fusion tickets. Consequently, it was always eminently possible for politicians who in Canada and the United Kingdom might have felt more at home in third parties to get to prominence and even win in one of the Big Two.
 
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