Third parties don’t win. It is perhaps the last of the old rules that still holds. As President Donald Trump put it in response to Elon Musk’s launch of the America Party, “I am saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely ‘off the rails,’ essentially becoming a TRAIN WRECK over the past five weeks. He even wants to start a Third Political Party, despite the fact that they have never succeeded in the United States.”

The Donald has a point. The last third party to break through was the Republican Party in 1854, coalescing out of abolitionist fervor. Every subsequent attempt — Greenback Party, Socialist Party, States’ Rights, Reform, Unity08, Libertarian Party, No Labels, Americans Elect, Bloomberg 2016 — has had, at best, a brief, firefly glow.

People often point to the first-past-the-post electoral method as a guarantor of two-party politics, and it is true that that system encourages the creation of two competing coalitions. Just as important though is that unique feature of U.S. democracy, the primary, which forces both parties to move with........

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