This is Hear Me Out. I'm Celeste Hedley. A few months ago we had an expert on third-party

candidacy join us on this show. He echoed what a lot of Americans probably suspect,

that we need more than two parties for a healthy democracy, but also

that third parties can only ever be spoilers in presidential campaigns.

That is, they can't win.

The most impactful thing they can do is tip the scales one way or the other.

The last time a third party candidate won any electoral college votes

was in 1968 before I was born when George Wallace exploited

some very racist sentiments that were lurking in the South. All of this is to say

that in a high stakesstakes election like this one, many of us

resent that there are only two choices, but we're going to fall in line behind one of

them anyway. But what if there's not really a lesser of two evils?

The honeymoon is over rather quickly.

And the people who are there to defend

the deficiency of the Democratic Party, the deficiency of the Democratic Party, the

deficiency of the Republican Party, come out and say,

well, they can't do it because X and Y,

then we need to ask ourselves,

is it really that they can't do it

or that for them is a policy choice to continue to ignore us.

Claudia de la Cruz of the Party for Socialism and Liberation joins Hear Me Out in just a moment.

Stay with us.

...