Just wanted to throw out some of the #’s here because they’re pretty relevant to the point Katy is making and I already did the research.

If you’d like to see a third party candidate have a real shot in a presidential election, here are some #’s you should know.

Approximately 129M people voted in the 2012 Presidential Election (http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/turnout.php), almost 122M for Barry O. or Mr. Romney. Here are a few other years:

2000–105M

2004–122M

2008–131M

So let’s work under the assumption that 130M vote in 2016 (although I don’t think that many will turn out).

This means that a third party candidate needs to get 6.5M votes to receive money from the public funding program for the 2020 cycle http://www.fec.gov/ans/answers_public_funding.shtml#whatispublicfunding

If you look at the 2012 results, and take half the number of voters from the losing party in ONLY STATES WHERE THE MARGIN WAS 10+ POINTS, making them firm states and applied them to a third party candidate, you’d easily have more than the 6.5M threshold. Half of the losing party’s votes from California, Texas, and New York alone would have given the third party candidate 4.8M votes in 2012.

At that point, the candidate’s party would receive funding, proportionate to their % of the popular vote during the next cycle. For example, had Gary Johnson received 5% of the popular vote in 2012, he would have received about $11M from the FEC’s public funding program for the 2016 cycle.

That’s big jumpstart since he’s only raised about $1.4M to date for the 2016 cycle. https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candidate.php?id=N00033226

The idea here is feasible and we’re not far off from seeing something like this happen. The #’s and idea just need to become more mainstream.