Perhaps an American Gulag is in order?
They’ve cost us Senate seats from coast to coast for over a decade and are creating more havoc as we speak.
Yes, of course, because votes are not earned. The Republican and Democrat party deserve them as a matter of right.
A third party candidate CANNOT win the presidency unless one of the two now-major parties is displaced or the "third party" candidate effectively merges with one of the two now-major parties.
This reality is the result of the working together of three basically immutable aspects of our system of government:
(1) the winner-take-all system at the national level,
(2) the fact that candidates must win a majority of Electoral College votes to win the election,
(3) and the fact that, if no candidate receives a majority of the Electoral College vote, the Constitution requires the House of Representatives to decide the Election (and no third party—even Teddy Roosevelt’s-—has fielded more than a handful of candidates for Congress).
The ONLY way a third party candidate can win is for one or more of the above particulars to be radically eliminated. However, the wisdom of our founders is elegantly obvious in the way those three prongs work together to prevent the death spiral of extra-major-party factionalism (as well as regionalism and sectarianism).
These three prongs work together to keep factionalism something that is:
(1) sorted out primarily WITHIN parties (indeed, the function of primaries is to allow essentially mini-parties within the party to compete for the party's nomination),
and
(2) WITHOUT it being given unchecked and unbalanced capacity to throw a presidential election into chaos. (The European vision of coalition governments is rejected.)
Our system of electing our president is one that allows for protest (both in the primaries and in the general election), but which limits the possibility for chaos in the transition of power in our highest office. IOW, you can use your vote as a protest if you want, but the system is set up so that your protest is highly unlikely to throw the election outside the two major parties.
In this system, anyone who did not vote against Obama by voting for the only candidate with a chance to defeat him (McCain) helped Obama get elected. And vice versa for McCain.
Even if, say, 40% of eligible voters all voted for the same "third party" candidate (besides being highly remote), that still would not guarantee that the "third party" candidate would receive any, much less sufficient, electoral college votes to win. And that's with winning 40% of the popular vote!
For example, in 1860, in a four-way race, Stephen Douglas came in second with about 30% of the national popular vote, but he carried only two states and won just 12 electoral votes.
And most third party candidates in history have won well under 5% of the national popular vote and, usually, ZERO states.
Yet in 1992, Bill Clinton won the presidency with 43% of the popular vote because third party candidate Ross Perot received 19% of the popular vote. This left George H.W. Bush with about 38% of the popular vote and a loss that ushered in 8 years of the 'Toons. Another example of how, to win, a third party candidate must be more popular than BOTH the Republican and Democrat candidates and then must STILL win the EC.
If a third party candidate ever gets that much traction, we'll all know about it. And we'll know either a new MAJOR party is emerging or one of the old parties is being taken over/displaced. It will be a visable, attention-attracting, "wow" movement, not a bunch of Refusniks who can't even coalesce around any one conservative in the primaries, much less truly emerge a new party.
In sum:
For a third party candidate to win, he would have to be more popular than both the Republican and the Rat nominees.
At that point, he either uses one of the now-major parties as his vehicle or one of the now-major parties is displaced completely and the election becomes a binary operation between the old, remaining major party and the new major party.
IOW, although the two parties can change radically, even transforming to "new" parties, functionally it is still a two-party system and it is unlikely to ever be otherwise.
Therefore, refusal to vote for one major party candidate does indeed facilitate the election of the other major party candidate because, if someone wins the election, the winner will be one of the major party candidates.
If no one wins the election, Congress will choose the President. Since Congress will be composed primarily of members from the two major parties (even as it was during the Bull Moose movement, which had a presidential candidate but few or no members in Congress), it would be very remote for Congress to choose a president from outside either party. (If Perot had garnered enough votes to keep either Clinton or Bush from winning the EC, but not enough to win it himself, does anyone seriously believe Congress would have chosen Perot as President?)
This is why voting "third party"---by definition, for a candidate not from one of the two major parties---is Loserville and always will be. If a "third party" candidate's party is strong enough for him to be a viable candidate, then that party is no longer "third." Again, the important point to take from that is a "third party" candidate cannot win unless he is more popular than the candidates fielded by the two major parties combined. This is NOT someone who could barely get out of single digits in his own party's primaries.