Spattered throughout the bowels of Twitter, people are, as always, embroiled in a heated argument. Unlike much of the back-and-forth on social media, however, the weight of the presidential race is becoming a serious concern. Between #NeverTrump and #HillaryForPrison, many Americans feel that they are stuck between two uninspiring choices. The unconventional Republican candidate, Donald Trump, is making questionable comments, while the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, is tarnished with numerous scandals and political intrigue – with disapproval for both reaching record-breaking highs.

In our country’s current political reality, we have bifurcated choices: Republican or Democratic, Clinton or Trump. Of any presidential cycle, this would be the year where a third choice – a third party, perhaps – could act as a real option, an alternate to the “lesser of two evils” feeling that now plagues many Americans.

Enter the Libertarian and Green parties, third parties with presidential nominees Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, respectively. But for either Johnson or Stein to gain traction or credibility amongst the larger electorate, they would need to be in the presidential debates, which some analysts estimate will have higher viewership than the Super Bowl this year. But to be granted a spot in the debates each candidate would have to garner 15 percent in select presidential election polls.

More specifically, the Commission on Presidential Debates announced in August the five nationwide polls that will be averaged to determine whether a candidate meets its threshold to be offered a seat on stage in the debates, the first of which is scheduled for September 26. The five polls the commission will average are ABC-Washington Post, CBS-New York Times, CNN-Opinion Research Corporation, Fox News and NBC-Wall Street Journal.

Both Johnson and Stein are well below the 15 percent threshold. Johnson is polling somewhere around the 8 percent mark – just past the halfway point to the 15 percent that would allow him to be recognized as a legitimate candidate by the Commission on Presidential Debates.

Jill Stein lags further still behind Johnson, at around 4 percent, according to both the Washington Post and Fox News polls. Both are a far cry from seeing themselves on stage against Trump and Clinton.

As of now, the best a third-party candidate can do is play spoiler. And, according to Fox News, “the third-party candidates take more from Clinton than Trump,” a fact Gov. Johnson shared with the Southern California News Group Editorial Board during an August meeting.

The question then becomes: Is that what we want out of our third parties? Do we want them to be an afterthought, someone thrown into the mix to potentially have a slight disruption that leads to the election of a major party president? Do we want Libertarians and Green Party members to be content hearing that their candidate – a candidate whose views they closely align with – mentioned casually in the news for a few months before fading back into obscurity?

These questions are especially relevant today when the two top contenders for the presidency are two of the most disliked figures in American politics. A new poll released August 31 conducted by ABC News and the Washington Post found that 59 percent of registered voters view Clinton unfavorably, while 60 percent view Trump unfavorably. As the Wall Street Journal noted, that “affirms this election season as the one with the least popular candidates in over 30 years of polling.”

It’s ironic that, even in this peculiar election cycle, a third-party candidate has little chance to win the presidency. America’s first president, George Washington, even issued concerns about the country’s political party system.

Writing for the Washington Post, Dennis Jamison analyzed President Washington’s words on the party system and then offered his own sobering synopsis our country’s state of affairs. “America is at the mercy of two powerful political parties. If a strong candidate wants to get elected to office in this country, one usually needs some affiliation to the major parties,” he wrote. “We see from history that third-party forays are limited in strength and often serve only to undermine one or another of the major parties in the capacity of a ‘spoiler.’”

An independent candidate has little to no chance to gain debate access, and thus little chance to affect the electorate. Without the national spotlight of a debate, a third-party candidate is not only entirely unlikely to ever win an election, he or she is unlikely to even carry a single state. To find the last time a third-party candidate won a state you’d have to flip your history book open to 1968, when George Wallace won five states.

Beyond the obvious goal of being elected president, candidates like Johnson and Stein continue to run year after year in hopes of spreading their message. They are simply message candidates, espousing tangible principles that transcend mainstream ego-driven politics.

Year after year, Americans are being asked to choose not the candidate that they believe will best run this country, but the one that they believe will ruin it the least. Perhaps 2016 is the ultimate lesser-of-two-evils election. It doesn’t have to be that way, and maybe this election will be the catalyst for a broader change in how we view the election of presidents.

Brian Calle is the opinion editor for the Southern California News Group. Yuri Vanetik is a private investor and philanthropist.