Comments:Reform Party of the United States nominates fitness model Andre Barnett for president

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What a great job our third parties are doing. I'm sure they'll be relevant one day!

I mean FFS...

This party will have ballot access in multiple states and there will also be a write in campaign. Darcy Richardson dropped when he realized he was not in the same league as Mr. Barnett. He also did not have any sort of cohesive message. Mr. Barnett also vowed to help grow the party and has already made a great deal of headway as various organizations have already expressed their desire to have him speak. Belittling Mr. Barnett's achievement in attaining this nomination is in poor taste. Buddy Romer entered the race with millions of dollars and still could not dispel the robustness of the solutions and inspiring message of Andre Barnett. One spectator in PA stated "This guy is the only third party candidate I can picture successfully out debating Obama and Romney". That pretty much sums it up for me too.

Belittling or being pragmatic? Barnett has as much chance in winning as Mickey Mouse.

Precisely. Nothing against Barnett himself, as I honestly know nothing about him; but the fact remains: the "third party" vote being split between multiple other small, insignificant 'parties' means electoral impotence for third parties.

What they need to do, is organize a third 'supra-party', dedicated to pushing for voting reform (and only concerned with voting reform, to maximize appeal). All participating third parties would fund and endorse candidates from this supra-party. In U.S. politics, there is no 'strength in numbers', and the plethora of separate competing third parties is actually a weakness; there is only strength in mass in U.S. Politics.

The only viable way that third parties can compete in America is to band together. The fact that they have failed to do so yet shows an astonishing stupidity. It may sound like a bad joke to imagine the Communist Party USA cooperating with the Libertarian Party, but honestly it's the only way that any of the third parties can have any influence over affairs.

And don't ever count on any of the two major parties pushing for voting reform, for obvious reasons.

The saddest truth is that, unless you can pull votes equally from both parties, the current system will reward the party with greater loyalty. That's why we're in a two-party system to begin with. EVERY time in US history a third party had a significant candidate, th party without the split-vote won (Bull Moose party anyone?).

The US is in a two-party system because its congressional elections are winner-takes-all. In a proportional representation system, where each party gets a number of representatives proportional to how many votes it got, smaller parties can exist, with a small but non-zero number of representatives. In a winner-take-all system, the only party that gets any representation at all in any given area is the one that gets the most votes, and in the long run that leads to just two parties.

Am I the only one who thinks this almost seems like a joke?

One could ask the same about much of current US two-party politics.