The Green Party’s national meeting is in Salem in July. The Libertarian Party meets in alternate years and will convene in Texas in May of 2020.

How many people will care? If history holds up, not enough for these alternative parties to win electoral votes in the 2020 election, but possibly enough to affect the outcome.

At a time millions of Americans seem frustrated and dissatisfied with routine politics, so-called “third parties” are practically begging for a respected place at the table. So far, most voters have chosen only to commit to non-traditional candidates such as Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, rather than non-traditional parties looking to upset the two-party norm.

No third-party presidential candidate has won a state’s vote, and thereby its electoral vote, since George Wallace captured 46 Southern electoral votes in 1968. And Wallace was less a “third party” choice than a renegade with a national profile.

With perhaps the exception of Theodore Roosevelt’s failed comeback as a Progressive “Bull Moose” candidate in 1912 a - year the former president won 88 electoral votes but still lost a landslide to Democrat Woodrow Wilson - no candidate unaffiliated with either major party has had a serious chance of actually winning since the Republicans and Democrats became dominant in the 1850s.

Third parties can have an impact, though, and if the 2020 election is as close as it’s shaping up, they very well may. Analysts and many Democrats insist Jill Stein’s Green Party campaign in 2016 had no chance of winning, but might have siphoned off enough votes in key swing states to cost Hillary Clinton the election. Libertarian Gary Johnson’s impact is less easily gauged, but his place on the ballot probably didn’t hurt Trump and might have helped him.

Johnson received 4.5 million votes and made the biggest third-party impact since Ross Perot in the 1990s. Stein’s 1.5 million votes were more than the three previous Green Party candidacies combined. So, there is interest in alternative choices - yet only a tiny percentage of voters, and no media analyst of stature, takes their winning chances seriously.

Alternative candidates say the problem lies largely in media, which refuses to treat them seriously. It’s version of the old chicken-versus-egg debate: if the vast majority of Americans don’t care about smaller parties, is it the media’s responsibility to use time and resources as if they did, or is it the media’s role to parcel out coverage based on sheer existence, not interest level?

Political parties were never mentioned in the Constitution, and George Washington warned the country to avoid them. If a viable third party candidate were to emerge, a potential Electoral College crisis could easily develop with three candidates splitting the electoral vote, denying any of them a majority and sending the decision to the House of Representatives - where political reality says the third party choice would have no chance.

As hard-left and hard-right extremists drive so much of the narrative in the two major parties, millions of Americans feel abandoned and many say they would welcome another options. Those do exist, but the reality is that voters know they won’t win - which implies that a vote in that direction would be wasted.

Only a unique, already famous (and probably wealthy) third party candidate might change that. More likely, third-party entries will continue to be viewed as sincere but quixotic endeavors, and the two-party system will rule American politics, for better and for worse.