Third-party candidates would have a shot if there wasn’t an electoral college and if we had ranked choice voting.

As the system is designed right now, anything that’s not one of the two mainstream parties is a spoiler vote.

In addition, campaign finance laws are so broken any third party candidates cannot compete on a financial level. They simply don’t have enough money to market, advertise, travel, and campaign.

Add to that that most voters don’t understand how government works and are only concerned about one maybe two policy issues. They only vote for the candidate that mentions the one issue they care about. For Republicans, that’s typically gun laws, immigration, and lower taxes. For Democrats, that’s typically medical reform, education, and abortion rights.

Most voters in the last 20 to 30 years, honestly don’t give a shit about policy issues or campaign promises because the politicians have consistently proved that they’re lying. They politicians only listen to lobbyist and corporate interests which pay for their reelection campaigns.

This is why Republicans have been so successful in the last several election cycles without any meaningful platform or policies. They run on gut feeling, cult of personality, and meaningless single voter issues that they know they will never truely change because the lobbyists and incorporate interests will never allow it.

One major problem I never hear anyone talk about is that each of the people who want to vote third-party want to do so for very different reasons, often at political extremes. Which is why there's no "third party" but a bunch of very different tiny parties with very different goals and no electoral pull. So even if you convince every undecided/independent/major party hater voter in the country to vote third party, their votes will never coelesce under any one party enough to make any difference. Of course it all leads back to winner-take-all and first-past-the-post, which are the real enemies of truly representative democracy.

The vote is only three weeks away, what is the plan for changing everyone else’s mind in time?

Truth! But the current Green party exists to diffuse the left vote just as much as the DNC (I say this as a Nader 2000 supporter and voter). We need an American Labor party.

Third party candidates are rarely voted into office and certainly not at the presidential level. The Rs and D's have made it so 3rd party candidates are essentially non-viable outside small population areas. The voting system itself needs to change to something like ranked choice for a 3rd party to have a chance.

Don't be an idiot

The last time a 3rd party had a chance was Ross Perot, he did not win a single state.