The window for a third party is wide open.

Every election cycle, some pundits, voters, and activists inevitably end up musing about whether this is the moment a third party could wrest some control back from the duopoly.

Depending on the year and cycle, the idea will gain enough momentum to really take over election narratives. In 2024, while Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was putting up impressive polling numbers as an independent, the third-party hype was so real that many election watchers thought they’d have a meaningful impact on the results. 

Tangle’s senior editor Will Kaback even wrote a compelling article back in June 2024 exploring the question of whether Kennedy was the “most important factor” in the upcoming presidential election. At the time, Kennedy was polling consistently at around 10%, and his popularity seemed to be rising. In a way, Will’s take aged poorly, but that’s no criticism of my colleague; we never got to find out if his thesis was legitimate because Kennedy jumped on Trump’s bandwagon and Harris supplanted Biden, effectively detonating a stick of dynamite in the entire election framework.

Still, it’s surprising that this year, compared to others, has had so little chatter about third-party candidates. After all, this upcoming election might be the biggest opportunity for third parties in a generation.