
Only 50 percent of Americans currently identify as either a Democrat or a Republican. America needs more than two parties to give voice to the other half of the country.
Historically, third parties have acted as critical agents of change in our society. Sometimes the political establishment doesn’t want to tackle a particularly difficult or controversial issue for fear of the criticism it would provoke. Third parties “are the ones that raise the issues that no one wants to raise, and, in the process, they change the political debate and even policy,” says Sean Wilentz, a professor of American history at Princeton University.
There have been many examples of this. In the 1840s, the Liberty Party