France just rejected its political parties. The US probably isn’t next.

When Americans get fed up with their political system, they elect Donald Trump.

When the French get fed up with their political establishment, they do something even more revolutionary – they throw the political parties out.

Americans aren’t exactly happy with their political parties right now. Elizabeth Warren is very much a Democrat, although in the same progressive vein as independent Bernie Sanders.

She was reacting to a new ABC News / Washington Post Poll recently when she told CNN’s Jake Tapper the whole idea of parties in the US is changing.

The poll released Sunday showed 67% of respondents said the Democratic Party was out of touch, ahead of 62% who said the same for the GOP and 58% for President Donald Trump.

“I think the whole notion of parties and party identification is actually starting to shift,” Warren told Tapper, arguing that the power in politics is shifting to grassroots movements.

“The game is rigged. It’s rigged in favor of those at the top and rigged against the rest of us. And we want some accountability on that. We want to see a government that works for the rest of us.’”

Two things strike me about this statement:

But imagine a presidential ballot here in the US that featured neither Republican nor Democrat, but rather a fire-breathing nationalist from a historically fringe party and a centrist eschewing factions in an effort to bring political parties together. That’s pretty hard to imagine!

That’s largely what happened Sunday when far-right Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron, the leader of a brand new political movement, advanced to a run-off on May 7.

What’s clear is that France’s next president won’t hail from the political parties that have traditionally dominated the country. Le Pen leads a resurgent Front National, while Macron is the leader of a new movement, En Marche!. He has never before held elected office – although until last August the country’s economy minister under current President Francois Hollande.

It’s almost like they have split Trump’s political personality in two, putting the nationalist rhetoric into Marine Le Pen and the business acumen into Macron.

France’s bruised political establishment is rallying behind Macron, whose En Marche! movement seeks to appeal to the country’s political middle.

Europe’s political systems have long been more hospitable to the emergence of new political parties. The rise of the UK Independence Party, for instance, helped usher in Brexit.

In Germany, the far right has found a new voice in the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

When no candidate got more than 50% of the vote in France on Sunday, the race advanced to a two-person runoff.

There are some US states, like California and Louisiana, experimenting with a similar model. They treat the primary like the the first round of the election and Election Day like a two-person runoff. In California, notably, it has led to a lot of Democrat vs. Democrat ballots in recent November contests.

It’s not that Americans don’t want other options; they do.

Let’s not forget that the No. 2 Democrat in 2016 wasn’t a Democrat, but rather the independent Sanders. He recently went on a “unity tour” with the new Democratic National Committee Chairman, Tom Perez, and showed they are far from unified on issues like health care and more. And for the record, Sanders still doesn’t consider himself a Democrat.

The fact is that the obstacles to simply starting up a new political movement, as Macron did a little over the year ago, and riding it to the top of the American political world would be nearly impossible to overcome. Scratch that. They’d be totally impossible to overcome.

There’s the difficulty of getting onto ballots in all 50 states – not even the American Green Party has been able to do that. There’s the issue of the shocking amount of money it would take – assuming you don’t have the ability to command media coverage the way Trump did – to get your name out there nationwide.

If an enterprising youngster wanted to start a political movement and ride it quickly to prominence they’d need these assets:

You’d have to be a billionaire with a lot of deep pocketed friends. You’d have to love the way you sound on TV. You’d have to be ambitious to a fault and have the absolute dedicated knowledge that YOU know better than everyone else.

Ladies and gentlemen, there is such a person. His name is Michael Bloomberg. He’s very rich, he was mayor of New York and he has been a Republican, a Democrat and an Independent. And he owns a media company, so he could get out his message.

But even he wouldn’t try to break out of the party system. Here’s his thinking, as described in a 2016 op-ed for Bloomberg:

In a three-way race, it’s unlikely any candidate would win a majority of electoral votes, and then the power to choose the president would be taken out of the hands of the American people and thrown to Congress. The fact is, even if I were to receive the most popular votes and the most electoral votes, victory would be highly unlikely, because most members of Congress would vote for their party’s nominee. Party loyalists in Congress – not the American people or the Electoral College – would determine the next president.

He ultimately didn’t run because he didn’t want to take the chance that a Republican majority would choose Trump, who he opposed. Whoops.

So the reason a powerful third-party candidate can’t emerge here is that the US Constitution, when paired with the current party system, all but forbids it.