Clay Shirky thinks 2016 could very well be the first year we see a third party candidate reach the White House.

That’s not to say that Gary Johnson or Jill Stein has a realistic shot at winning. In fact, when Shirky talks about a third party candidate, he’s referring to Donald Trump. Shirky says that Trump - and Bernie Sanders - ran campaigns that essentially amounted to insurgencies within their own parties.

“Trump is not a Republican in the classic mold,” he notes. “Sanders was actually a socialist, not really a Democrat until recently... Yet they ran these third party candidacies inside the two major parties, and they were able to do that in part because they could use their own media to generate interest.”

According to Shirky, author of the book Here Comes Everyone: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations and a professor at New York University , the main obstacle for non-mainstream candidates in past elections has been cooperation from elites in both parties. Without the big backers, it was difficult to get a message out to the voters. However, with the advent of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, candidates can now reach the public easily and directly, and those same people can help spread the message to their own friends and followers.

“If you wanted to reach 130 million voters with a message, there were only two organizations in the whole country who could do that,” Shirky says of the world before social media. “What both Trump and Sanders demonstrated at a level that we’ve never seen before is if you have individual citizens who care about your message, you can bypass all of that with very little penalty.”

When it comes to the general election, the candidates’ approaches to social messaging are as different as their policy positions. And Shirky says they will play a significant role in determining the outcome in November. Trump has focused on making highly controversial - and shareable - statements that have kept his base excited and the media focused on him.

“Trump is wildly more successful at generating excited public speech around his positions and his appearances than [Hillary] Clinton,” he says.

Clinton’s focus has been on the personal over the sensational. Much like Obama’s campaign in 2012, she has relied on highly-targeted efforts to make sure groups of likely Democratic voters show up on election day.

“In a way we have seen, like an iceberg, very, very little of Clinton’s campaign,” says Shirky. “Because almost all of it is around turnout. Trump wins or loses depending on public excitement, Clinton wins or loses depending on turnout of reliable democratic voters. If her get-out-the-vote effort works the way that Obama’s did in ‘12, then she wins.”