Donald Trump and his supporters have stoked rumors that he may run as a third-party candidate for president in 2024 if he fails to win the Republican nomination. However, because of the way the Democratic and Republican Parties have rigged state election laws, this was an empty threat.

sore-loser laws in 28 states do indeed apply to presidential candidates and that if a candidate fails to win the Republican nomination, sore-loser laws will prevent access to the general election ballot in those states. This includes 20 states that Trump won in either 2016 or 2020 which total 225 electoral votes—more than 83% of the electoral votes needed for a majority.

Republicans like to talk about freedom. Democrats like to talk about democracy. Neither of them walk the walk.
For the first time since the 1940's New Yorkers will only have two choices for governor.

The paucity of options is largely due to former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who championed changes in election law two years ago that made it far more difficult for third parties to get on the ballot. The changes to ballot access law tripled the number of voter signatures required for groups to get on the November ballot and forced political parties to qualify every two years instead of four. The steep climb to get on the ballot has prompted legal challenges, including one being heard this week in State Supreme Court in Albany, in a lawsuit filed by the Libertarian Party. The party’s nominee for governor, Larry Sharpe, argued that the rules are so tough that only the entrenched and connected can earn the right to appear on a ballot in New York.

Both parties have worked hard at keeping third parties off the ballot, and it's not just true for Blue States.
The Texas Republican Party sued to get 40 Libertarians kicked off the ballot in 2020 and sued again to get another 23 Libertarian candidates off the ballot in 2022.

However, it's the Democrats that have been the most hostile to democracy.
The Green Party already doesn't exist in nine states, and is not on the ballot in 19 states, but that's not enough.

In 2018 the Democrats managed to get the Greens kicked off the ballot in Montana. So the Democrats doubled-down in 2020 starting in Wisconsin.

A Democratic Party spokesperson filed a challenge against the Green Party petitions, claiming the change of address by Walker invalidated some of the petitions. The hearing on the challenge before the state Elections Commission had all the trappings of a kangaroo court. The attorney for the Democratic challenger huddled with the Democratic chair of the Elections Commission to restrict the testimony of Green Party attorneys.
The Democratic challenge was upheld by the Commission and the signatures on those petitions were invalidated — conveniently enough to keep the Greens off the ballot.
...
In Pennsylvania, the Democrats went to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to remove Hawkins/Walker from the ballot. They were victorious on the flimsy technicality that the Greens did not submit signed filing papers in person but mailed them in.

You might be aware of the dirty tricks the Democratic Party in North Carolina has been using to get the Green Party off the ballot this year, but the Dems have been waging war on democracy for longer than that.
People are upset that the North Carolina Dems got copies of the Green Party petitions and went to signers and encouraged people to remove their signatures. But in fact that is exactly what the Dems did in 2020 to get the Green Party kicked off the ballot in Montana again!

So far the Libertarian Party has been most successful third party at surviving this onslaught, but they have their own self-inflicted problem. While Libertarians have long been in perfect agreement with the GOP on economic issues, they have at least separated themselves from the GOP on the culture war issues.

Libertarians have a long history of describing themselves as fiscal conservatives who are social liberals and arguing that the War on Drugs and the evangelical Christian Right have been terrible for the Republican Party and terrible for the conservative movement.

At least that was until recently. Now the Libertarian Party has become the MAGA wing of the GOP.

In July 28, 2017, Jeff Deist, the president of the Mises Institute, named for libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises, published a blog post arguing that “blood and soil and God and nation still matter to people. Libertarians ignore this at the risk of irrelevance.” The phrase “blood and soil” already had an unmistakable fascist overtone—but it took on an even more gruesome connotation two weeks after the post during the infamous Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally of 2017, where an anti-racist protester was killed. The white supremacists who tried to dominate the streets of Charlottesville chanted “blood and soil.” Several of the organizers of the Charlottesville rally identified as libertarians. In the wake of that event, Nicholas Sarwark, chair of the Libertarian Party, signed an open letter warning of the dangers of fascism. Arvin Vohra, vice chair of the Libertarian Party, wrote a post arguing that the “Mises Institute has been turned into a sales funnel for the White Nationalist branch of the Alt Right.” The ensuing arguments over “blood and soil” lead to the creation of a Mises Caucus, which aimed to overthrow the pragmatic Gary Johnson wing of the party and adopt the incendiary culture war politics of the hard right.
...
On May 29, at the Libertarian Party Convention in Reno, McArdle won the title of chair of the party’s national committee. This was a decisive victory for the Mises Caucus, which received the vote of 69 percent of delegates. The Mises Caucus is now the undisputed ruling faction of the party.

"Taking the Libertarian Party out as a competitive force will help consolidate the right-wing vote around the Republican Party."
- Jeet Heer

The party establishment has sensed it's weakness and now is looking to give the coup de grâce to the upstarts.
It seems fitting that this killing blow will be delivered by the leadership of the progressive wing of the party.

A pack of progressive candidates have crashed this year’s Democratic primaries, hoping to unseat incumbents and push the party to the left. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the fifth-ranking Democrat in the House, has other plans. Jeffries and two of his House Democrat allies on Wednesday rolled out the first slate of endorsements from Team Blue PAC, a political action committee intended to protect incumbents from intraparty attacks.

A PAC to protect incumbents during primaries is always controversial, but this one has compromised ethics far beyond that.

The lawmakers united in an effort to provide resources to the increasing number of House Democrats who face primary challenges — in particular, from the left. That circumstance faces the five incumbents who received endorsements on Wednesday: Reps. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio), Danny Davis (D-Ill.), Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), Donald Payne Jr. (D-N.J.), and Dina Titus (D-Nev.). Davis and Maloney face opponents backed by Justice Democrats; Brown faces a rematch from Bernie Sanders ally Nina Turner, who had the support of the left-wing group during a special election to fill the seat last year...
he insists the PAC’s efforts are not strictly a matter of ideology: Maloney is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, just like he is. Its purpose, Jeffries says, is to protect incumbents’ records from “being distorted” by “the hard-left.” He uses the term to separate himself from his detractors, who see actions like these endorsements as evidence he’s not on their side. “Why are members of the hard-left targeting progressive members of Congress, and then trying to act as though they’re engaging in some ideological contest against the rest of us?” Jeffries says. (It’s worth noting, of course, that Team Blue PAC isn’t defending any incumbents from challenges from the right.)

Once again the Dems have proven that they would rather lose to the right, than win with the left. The only difference this time is that the Progressive Caucus is proving it.
This is clearly entrenched corruption protecting itself from left-wing reform efforts, but just in case this was clear enough to see just follow the money.

There’s also the matter of corporate campaign funding, which all of the Team Blue PAC-endorsed candidates accept. The PAC itself is primarily financed through corporate PAC money, and I asked Jeffries whether that fact proves his detractors’ point.