Americans' desires for a third political party are as high as they have been in seven years. Fifty-eight percent of Americans believe a third major political party is needed because the Republican and Democratic Parties do a poor job of representing the American people. That is a significant increase from 2008 and ties the high Gallup has recorded for this measure since 2003.
For this factoidal hairball to have any substance at all one would need to know that this "majority" of Americans was interested in the same "third political party" (which they certainly are not) and for it to do any good at all one would have to believe that those who take third political parties seriously do so in a way that manifests itself first of all in the federal or state-by-state implementation of instant-runoff-voting to ensure that third party votes do not function primarily as counter-productive spoilers and also addresses the rules that ensure that one has to caucus with one of the two major parties come what may to have a non-negligible impact as a congressional representative in the system as it actually exists (which vanishingly few of them do).
If the Greens or Democratic Socialists managed such feats, I would likely change my registration from the Democrats, too, especially if we are pretending that the purpose of such registration is affiliation on the basis of guiding ideals rather than one's sense of the left wing of the possible. As it is, it seems to me that the Democratic Party remains the best actually-existing tool at hand to facilitate the emergence of sustainable secular social democracy in America (it is to be regretted that the Republican Base appears to believe that of the Democratic Party more than the Democratic Base does), and so we need to be pushing Democrats from the Democratic Wing of the Party, especially to the extent that this pushing strengthens rather than weakens Democratic electoral and policy prospects given the actually-existing constraints at hand.
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