When people hear that I am a professor of political science, the first question I get isn’t about whether I am a Democrat or a Republican, or a conservative, moderate or liberal. Instead, the person often asks me “So why don’t we have a third party?”
As I finished up my first fictional novel, Branded, a thriller about a killer product placement scheme in marketing, I turned my attention to this subject, to write a novel about a third-party challenge to the political system. In the story Independent Thought, the two political parties have been hijacked by extremists. The current president (who bears no resemblance to Trump) is highly unpopular. An eclectic cast of characters join the campaign for a popular retired general, who throws his hat in the ring.
What could go wrong?
Plenty, as it turns out. Weaving fact into my fiction, I note the incredible hurdles the new party faces, just to try and get on the ballot. Novels about independent candidates tend to gloss over this part. Then there are attempts to get disaffected Democrats and Republicans to work together. Just when the party gets its footing and challenges the established order, strange things happen to those who join the new campaign: a series of accidents and incidents. And while most election novels end with ballot box results, mine has the election occurring about ¾ of the way through. The chaos of the Electoral College and the fallout bring the country to its knees.
Even though I wrote the novel years ago, people ask if I just finished it; it was only published by Huntsville Independent Press in September. Even before the last vote was counted in the 2026 election, The New York Times was already writing about the prospects of a third-party challenge in 2028. As with my book, ballot access is the biggest challenge. As Jarrett Renshaw with Reuters documents, “For third-party U.S. presidential candidates, getting on state ballots is challenging and expensive, thanks to a patchwork of U.S. laws designed by Republicans and Democrats, the dominant parties which control statehouses nationwide.”
Citing from Richard Winger, co-editor of Ballot Access News, Renshaw reports that candidates much gather tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of signatures, often in a very narrow time frame. They have to be registered in every state county. Signatures sometimes have to be on paper, in this digital age. And in some cases, the signatories have to abandon their current party registration and are informed by the state of this. Such signatures are tightly evaluated, and not always by an avowed nonpartisan entity.
Existing parties, by virtue of prior success, don’t have to jump through such hoops, a variation on the old “make it take it” half court basketball game which unfairly rewards the early scorers.
And while both parties may not agree on much, they do seem to have come together to make it tough on the Libertarian Party, Green Party and Constitution Party, and any other independent candidate. A chi-square test that I ran shows that among states with good ballot access for third parties and poor ballot access, both parties are equally likely to work against new political parties (χ2 = 1.6, p > .10).
The biggest changes striking down such unfair laws have not come from the legislatures or chief executives, but rather the court system in landmark rulings like that of my state of Georgia, by Judge Richard Story, a LaGrange College graduate. According to the electionlawblog, his ruling cut the number of required third party signatures from 50,000 to 7,500 in 2016.
Unless we change the rules on ballot access for other political parties, we’ll always have the same two parties hanging around. And that’s not a fictional claim.
John A. Tures is Professor of Political Science and Coordinator of the Political Science Program at LaGrange College, in LaGrange, Georgia. His first book, “Branded”, is available on Amazon. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu.