Which is it?
6 October 2004 - National Review Online

Two statements from Gary Gregg's article seemed dreadfully inconsistent:

What will really happen is that a vital state like Colorado that has traditionally voted Republican but has an increasingly large minority of Hispanic voters who help put the state in play, will become irrelevant on the national scene. If the proposal passes, as polls currently predict it will, the Centennial State will decrease in value and be worth exactly one electoral vote, making it the most unimportant electoral state in the union below even Wyoming and Washington D.C. It will be worth only one vote because in almost every election the Republican and Democrat will finish in a fairly tight race with one getting five electoral votes and the other party receiving four. Never again will Colorado be a battleground for presidential candidates. Never again will any major candidate care about winning the state and its one little electoral vote that would come with victory.

and

If Colorado does accept this proportional vote counting, we could easily imagine a Ralph Nader or other fringe candidate deciding to run a campaign only in the state of Colorado, bringing national money and activists to the state in an effort to attract the backing of the 11.11 percent of the vote needed to get one electoral vote. In an election as close as the 2000 election, can you imagine the power wielded by a third-party candidate who would control the winning electoral-college vote? At best, having no candidate achieving a majority of the electoral-college votes, the election would be thrown into the House of Representatives. At worst, we can imagine a corrupt bargain whereby the third-party candidate with just one electoral vote, could extract some mighty favor from whichever candidate he chose to have his elector vote.

Which is it? Is that one electoral vote so meaningless as to cause Democrats and Republicans to never enter Colorado again, or is that one electoral vote so important to both Republicans and Democrats that they would barter "mighty favors" to what you call a "radical" third party to keep it out of the hands of their competition?

Why are the two major parties so afraid of other parties gaining popular support and influence? What dire national disaster would result from a third party gaining an electoral vote or three? Can you at least admit that the only thing that scares the two major parties about a third party gaining an electoral vote is that the other major party might win as a result? Not that it would make too big a difference in the policy set by the Executive branch - the problem with two broadly based and moderate political parties (your words) is that "moderation" means different things to different people, and the more moderate and broadly based the major parties get, the more they morph into one party, both promoting big government and promising goodies to the biggest voting blocks and ushering in socialism - even if it's Republican-style National Socialism.

Penn Jillette said it best when he wrote, "Two parties is only one more than totalitarianism."