So when the topic of third party candidates come up, I feel like I have some strange kinship with politicians. And from my perspective, third party candidates like Gary Johnson and Jill Stein are line jumpers. They are distractions. Because they show up every four years like a heckler at a comedy show, demanding attention from the crowd when they haven’t put in the time and work that the people on the actual stage, holding the actual mic, have.

The experience of President Obama over the last eight years should be instructive here. Because even though he was elected by clear majorities of the population, twice, his policy proposals were met with simply historic amounts of obstructionism from the GOP. And that was someone who actually held majorities in both houses of Congress early in his first term. Someone who had a governing mandate from the people he was elected to represent was still stonewalled by a minority party bent on his destruction. Now imagine for a moment a President Gary Johnson, or a President Jill Stein sitting in the Oval Office, without any base of support in Congress from either party. Are you seeing the problem yet?

If you want to be a comic, you have to write jokes, go to open mics, eat a bunch of crap, get better, embrace the grind, build a reputation, start getting bookers attention, get paid for some bar shows, host a mic, get attention from audiences, earn the respect of your peers, emcee your first weekend, emcee a bunch of weekends at different clubs, get rejected from a shit ton of festivals, lose a bunch of contests, land your first feature spot, earn the respect of touring comics, go on a tour, record a shitty album to sell after your shows, get an agent, finally land a big festival gig or TV credit, and on and on and on.

If you want to be a legitimate political party, you have to organize at the local level, recruit potential candidates, build a grassroots organization of volunteers, win local elections, build up a donor base, win state elections, start to build a national apparatus, land a governorship, groom your candidates for national office, get your ticket into the conversation, win a House seat, win a Senate seat, build a database of your voters, hold your seats against challenges in the next term, add more seats, and on and on and on until you have the base of legislative support necessary to actually draft and pass your agenda.
Then you are a comic who should be taken seriously at the national level.
Then you are a political party that has any business running a candidate for President.