Many Americans are looking to see if third parties candidates can do more than just spoil the elections.The two major party nominees, Trump and Clinton, are disliked by many Americans and are the least popular presidential nominees in history. Polls showed that Clinton among registered voters was 42 percent favorable and 56 percent unfavorable. On the other hand,Trump was favorable at 37 percent and unfavorable at 62 percent . This means that voter turnout matters more than any other presidential election.
In John Oliver ‘s video about third parties in the election, he examines closely and showed that there isn’t a perfect third party candidate either. John Oliver discusses the third party nominees’ policies and views on important issues like student debt and climate change. I agreed with what John Oliver is saying because the nominees were just spouting simplistic views that are hard to implement. And when you look deeper into them, most of them doesn’t make sense.
From the Green party, Jill Stein plans to cancel student’s debt by making the government pay for it like they did banks. While this may sound like a great plan, John Oliver points out that her plan is unachievable and cracks when analyzed deeper. Another candidate is Gary Johnson. His plan is to make the federal government as small as possible. His answer, regarding to having a smaller government, is to shut down important federal agencies like education, housing and urban development, and commerce. He also opposes establishing a minimum wage which is harmful to Americans in the middle and lower class. Their plans are going to hurt the American government more than before. An important point to make is that the video is disliked by at least 20k people because people commented that he is just spreading propaganda and misrepresenting Jill Stein’s plans. It is also interesting to see that the media plays an essential role in the presidential election.
We can conclude that there is no perfect candidate in this race. John Oliver says “When people say that we have to choose lesser of two evils, they are right because we have to choose the lesser of 4”. Now, I realized that these third party candidates are not any better than Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton.
I think that this presidential election has been both very scary and interesting for this very reason. I did not know much about third parties prior to this year, and only learned it because of my Politics class. It’s particularly interesting that not one candidate is really THAT favorable. In fact, it is almost as if this election is really just about who the American’s dislike the least.
The whole point of third parties is to provide an alternative to the two major parties (democratic and republican). One would think, that especially with the alarming poll results (regarding who how favorable/unfavorable a candidate is), the third parties might actually have a shot. However, as John Oliver explains, they are just as bad.