I’m guessing that’s because most third parties have failed spectacularly.

Has it occurred to anyone that this is precisely how the Republican Party got its start, as a third-way alternative to the Democrats and Whigs of the 1850s?

The first Republicans were former Whigs—what we would now call “classical liberals”—disaffected by the Whig Party’s embrace of slavery-friendly policies like the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. A mirror-image reversal of today’s Never Trump Republicans. The result was an enduring political institution that, far from “failing spectacularly,” is now 167 years old and counting.

Speaking as a lifelong liberal Democrat, I believe we desperately need a new, centrist party drawing from both center-right Republicans averse to Trumpism and center-left Democrats repelled by the excesses of “woke” progressivism. I would eagerly join such a movement, alongside the conservative likes of Evan McMullin, Steve Schmidt, Michael Steele, and yes, even Liz Cheney. We need to find a way forward out of the current political morass.