Glenn Harlan Reynolds

From Kremlin connections and vulnerabilities, to public gaffes, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have given voters plenty of reasons to look elsewhere. Which raises the question: Could this be a golden moment for third party candidates? And the answer is: Maybe.

One new poll by McClatchy has Trump in fourth place among millennials, behind Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein. What this bodes for election results this year is unclear, as young voters are less likely to turn out, and the poll’s margin of error is significant. Plus, people are historically more likely to tell a pollster that they’ll vote third party than they are to actually do so.

But these are strange times, so who knows? The Democratic Party has angered many of its voters with its treatment of Bernie Sanders — treatment bad enough that, when Wikileaks released internal Democratic National Committee emails, DNC Chair Deborah Wasserman Schultz, and several of her deputies, had to leave. The GOP, meanwhile, is riven by the Donald Trump candidacy. Plenty of GOP voters can’t bring themselves to vote for Trump, but don’t want to vote for Hillary either, as they see her as corrupt and incompetent.

That makes a third-party vote look more appealing. Sure, there’s little to no chance that either Stein or Johnson will win (or even carry a single state) but a double-digit showing by either would be a big wake-up call. The last time a third party became a major party was when Abraham Lincoln’s election extinguished the Whigs, but powerful third-party candidacies, like Eugene Debs’ Socialist runs, Teddy Roosevelt’s Bullmoose Party, or Ross Perot’s abortive 1992 challenge have often presaged major shifts in politics, as the two established parties move to co-opt third-party voters.

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Already Bernie Sanders’ run has moved the Democrats to the left, and Sanders could be seen as a third-party candidate within the Democratic Party, since he called himself a socialist and an independent both before and immediately after his attempt at the Democratic nomination. Were Jill Stein to get 10% of the vote, it would pull the Democrats further left.

Gary Johnson probably has a better chance of breaking double digits than Stein — at least, he’s polling better than she is now — but his candidacy may have less of an impact if he does. That’s because Johnson has chosen to soft-pedal his libertarianism, in an effort to attract dissatisfied GOP voters. His running mate, former Massachusetts governor William Weld, never ran as a libertarian at all prior to his nomination; he was a moderate, northeastern Republican.

Breaking the 10% threshold would still be a very big deal for the Libertarian Party, but with its message muddled by moderation, it might have less of an impact on other parties than it would were the nominee running a more ideological campaign.

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Meanwhile, the question of the moment is whether Johnson and Stein should be allowed to share a debate stage with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. A lawsuit filed by Johnson and Stein was dismissed, but The Chicago Tribune has editorialized in favor of letting Johnson on the stage, and if he’s there, it seems only fair to allow Jill Stein, too.

Both major parties have done a pretty lousy job of delivering top-quality nominees to the American people. That being the case, it seems only fair to allow the “minor” parties — who at least haven’t served up candidates with records of evidence destruction and shady Kremlin ties — to have their moment in the sun. They could hardly do worse.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter @instapundit

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