It’s the presidential race of 2016 and look how far we come. From a time in 2012, when even the slightest slip of the tongue would spell disaster for a candidate, to the colourful politics of 2016, where any day without at least one major: blunder, lie or flip-flop is considered a dull affair. Last night’s debate took this to a new level, with highlights such as; Donald Trump admitting to tax avoidance, Donald Trump interrupting by shouting ‘wrong’ like a obnoxious school kid, and Donald Trump in the face of being proven a liar attempting to debate the moderator. Admittedly all of these, and 90% of the major stories of this election cycle, revolve around Donald Trump. A fact he probably views as a positive. But lets not kid ourselves! With the Benghazi scandal, the email scandal, illegally colluding with the DNC to secure her nomination, hiring private investigators to blackmail her husbands rape victims and dubious amount of the donations she receives from special interest groups, Hillary Clinton is packing more baggage than an airport suitcase conveyor belt.

So with both main parties collectively shitting the bed you’d think that now was the perfect chance for a third party candidate to rise up for a landslide victory, but no one has. The reason for this has two components. The first is coverage: news sources just aren’t interested in running a story about a candidate who only polls in single digits. This lack of coverage means the candidates message can’t get out and thus he/she continues to poll low, repeating the cycle. The second problem is that the third party candidates are crap.

Firstly we have the libertarian party’s nominee, Gary Johnson. As a libertarian he generally favours lower taxes, a more isolationist foreign policy, and less government interference with peoples lives. His most controversial stances are to legalise marijuana, defund Obamacare, abolish the NSA, and scrap the minimum wage. Now, if you’re anything like me you’ll probably have a reaction similar to this: Hell yeah, Hell no, Hell yeah, God dam it Gary. His strong ideological positions make him hard to swallow for most voters, as for every policy you love there will be another that makes you want to pull your hair out.

Moving onwards we have Jill Stein. Jill Stein is the candidate for green party, yup that’s right America also has a green party, and like our own green party it’s full of naive optimists with no understanding of how to run a country. Jill Stein promises government funded healthcare, government funded collage and couples this with the abolition of national borders, allowing anyone around the world to access them. In order to obtain the money for her ludicrously expensive policies Jill has the brilliant plan put millions out of work by immediately by doubling the minimum wage and then steadily making 2 more million unemployed attempting to phase out fossil fuels by 2030. Oh, and if that wasn’t enough she also wants to ban GMOs (70% of food) despite every study ever taken ever concluding that they’re safe.

Chris Vickers

(Image courtesy of Sarah Rogers for The Daily Beast)