Frank Cannon is president of the American Principles Project and a respected conservative political strategist with over 30 years of experience.

[A serious conservative third-party candidate never materialized] because parties tend to galvanize around their nominees, especially when their nominees are popular at the grassroots level. The elites sometimes think that they can come up with an alternative, but the alternative has to have popular backing. And in this race, Donald Trump was the nominee of the Republican Party, and once he secured that nomination, most of the party galvanized behind him.