So a question we seem to get every day follows some formula of "Would/Could Bernie/Trump/Cruz run as a third-party/Independent in case they don't win the nomination?" There are lots of little things that can be discussed, and oftentimes the threads are just different enough while still eliciting the same general discussion. So, I thought I'd write a post here that will hopefully aggregate all these different threads and stem the tide of these questions. So let's discuss the would, could, and should of running as third-party candidates.

So the first thing to talk about is whether they would run as third party/independent candidates in November. Most of the candidates have said they wouldn't. Bernie says it here, and his wife recently reaffirmed it here. We have no idea about Trump. He's played the "will he? won't he?" game with it for months.

The deeper question is whether they could run. There are a couple factors to consider here:

• Sore loser laws. Many states have sore-loser laws that prevent people who lose primary elections from running in different parties. Multiple states apply these sore-loser laws to presidential elections. These states possess a large number of Electoral votes, so sore-loser laws already make a third party challenge that much harder. Even just Texas and Ohio could cripple a candidate.

• Registration deadlines. If any of these candidates wants to run as a third-party candidate, they'd have to meet deadlines to register as third-party candidates. There are signatures to collect as well, and if these candidates wait until after the primary, they may not have time to meet all these requirements.

The last question is the easiest. Should they? No. America uses first past the post elections with no proportional representation. This means whoever gets the most votes wins. This provides no incentive for people to run as third party candidates, and in fact means doing so may harm major party changes.

Consider a three-way election between Clinton, Trump, and Sanders. In a state (say, Florida), Clinton gets 40%, Trump 45%, and Sanders 15%. Trump wins this election, even though more people voted against him than for him. If Sanders hadn't run, 40% 15%>45%, so Clinton most likely would have won. This is part of the mechanism through which Duverger's Law tends to produce two-party systems. A third party on either ideological side would only split the vote on that side and act as a spoiler. (See Nader in 2000). (This particular part of the answer also answers the question "Why don't we have third parties in America?" which we also get pretty often.) There are some simple spatial models that can explain the two-party dominance in this electoral system, but essentially it boils down to the aforementioned spoiler effect and the splitting of votes on one side of the median voter.

I don't think I've missed anything here, but feel free to contribute/clarify if I did. Thanks for reading!