Because he can't win and people don't like throwing away their votes on ideology. First-past-the-post voting systems all but guarantee that when you vote for a third-party candidate, you're only really helping the first-party candidate most unlike the one you voted for (which is how we got Bush over Gore in 2000).
I just learned about him and find his campaign platform to be agreeable.
Unfortunately, in a two-party system one is compelled to vote for the official party candidate if they want their party to win. So voting for a challenger during primaries is great in that it helps send a message to the party, but in the general one must hold their nose and vote for the party's nominee.
If he runs in the general election it will be as a spoiler candidate
He easily could but would end up taking votes from the Democrats, thus helping his opponent in the process. The American system doesn’t work well with third-party candidates and mostly incentivizes against them; see the 1992 election for a recent example.
Sanders and Clinton are competing for the chance to run as the Democratic candidate. Similarly Cruz, Trump and 10 others are running for the chance to run as the Republican candidate. Its customary that the losing candidates will get behind the winner and endorse them, uniting their party behind a single person after a divisive primary campaign.
However, Trump doesn't see it that way. He feels that if he doesn't get the nomination, he will run as an Independent candidate. He doesn't stand any actual chance of winning but he would claim some of the Republican votes (say 5-10%) on election day, making it a cake-walk for the Democratic candidate.
Why would he do this? Its blackmail. There's a good chance the heads of the Republican party would sabotage his campaign because of how unsuitable he is. This threat keeps them from doing that, because they would bury their party's chances in 2016.
And he's just somebody new. Parties seem to have a tendency to wheel out old candidates who have tried and failed to get past the primaries multiple times already (thinking of Biden, in particular here, but that's just one example). Not sure why that is.
This is the nature of the primary system. Right now, Democrat candidates must appeal to registered Democrats only. That changes in the general election.
Same for there simply not being another candidate most of the time. If you have a 70% conservative / republican county or state, running democrat doesn't make much sense, and is an especially bad investment for any donors.
I think it has a lot to do with the two-party system. Many (most?) congressional districts are essentially locked to one party. Unless the incumbent did something egregious enough for their supporters to turn on them, why would their party not support them as their candidate? If they won by decent margin last time, they'll probably win again unless something major changed. Why make all the necessary investments to support a new candidate when it's cheaper and easier to support the incumbent? They would much rather put their money and time into the districts that might flip.
It's because the right benefits from low turnout. The left, representing the interests of the proletarian majority, benefits from large turnout. The Democratic party, a center left or center right party depending on who you talk to, has co-opted the left voter base and thereby depends on higher turnout during general elections. As a centrist party, they intentionally suppress turnout during primary elections (e.g. by not advertising the date in my community) to restrict ideological choices.
Right, intra-party politics seems to put way too much value in party loyalty--running against an incumbent is a way to get yourself blacklisted by the party, which leads to an unhealthy pattern of unthinking support for declining leaders. It seems like Democrats are making this mistake in 2024 by not running a candidate to replace the obviously declining Joe Biden; it could well lead to a catastrophic re-election of Donald Trump.
Just the fact that he's an incumbent virtually guarantees that he'd get a lot of #1 slots. Unless there was a mass exodus of his base or a major Republican challenger, which I don't see.
> I like him much, much better than any other candidate (and I'm not a political kind of guy).
I think that might be what relegates him to second place. The people who like him might go out and vote during the primary but that's it. You need to attract a lot more than votes or bodies at rallies to win the primary. You need to attract supporters willing to volunteer and get out on their streets all over the country.
That question was asked in the first comment of the article and the author posted a screenshot of stats from his latest campaign if you want to check that out.
Same reason the GOP live the Green party.
Getting
Republicans
Elected
Every
November
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