It's funny in a dark sort of way that this year, when you have two candidates who are probably the two most disliked candidates generally for many years, you're still unlikely to see any significant third party gains, because people are so scared of 'throwing their vote away'.
Makes me wonder if their vote was really worth much in the first place, if they couldn't cast it where they wanted.
Nah, most of the reason the third parties haven't been getting much gains is that they've been going sodding insane. If someone that did decent by the party's general spirit and
wasn't johnson or stein was running, they may have done better. Though yeah, probably would have done better if it was someone besides trump running, too. Iirc from what I've seen of the early voting so far there's a fair number of independents et al (folks that would be more likely to go 3rd) that are voting clinton, almost certainly to a large extent because holy
hell is trump a terrible candidate. For all some folks try to equivocate the two there's really no sane grounds for doing so, and the folks more likely to vote 3rd party tend to be more sensitive to that sort of thing than our more partisan voters.
That said, one of the more amusing things about this whole shitflinging mess is that clinton's got decent odds of being one of the better liked
presidents in recent-ish history. She's got this strange and fairly consistent pattern going on where she's actually pretty damn liked/approved off... when she's
not running for a higher office than she previously had. Probably all sorts of reasons, but I do rather imagine having the airways drowned in manufactured scandal 24/7 doesn't help much. That cuts back a bit (or at least gets ignored more) during off years.