If Dean Loses, Will He Quit?The Dean third party threat.By Mickey KausPosted Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2003, at 4:43 PM PT Several eminent emailers have suggested that Everett Ehrlich's prediction of party decline ignores the major U.S. deterrent to splinter-party formation--the combination of the Electoral College and the rule, in all but two states, that the candidate winning the most votes gets all that state's electors. It doesn't pay to be a third party, in this scheme, unless you can actually win a few states. (The tendency of such winner-take-all systems to produce two-party politics is sometimes called Duverger's Law.) ...The...