OCTOBER TERM, 1975 Per Curiam 424 U. S. things that are different as though they were exactly alike, a truism well illustrated in Williams v. Rhodes, supra." 403 U. S., at 441-442. Since the Presidential elections of 1856 and 1860, when the Whigs were replaced as a major party by the Republicans, no third party has posed a credible threat to the two major parties in Presidential elections." 2 Third parties have been completely incapable of matching the major parties' ability to raise money and win elections. Congress was, of course, aware of this fact of American life, and thus was justified in providing both major parties full funding and all other parties only a percentage of the major-party entitlement.' Identical treatment of all parties, on the other hand, "would not only make it easy to raid the United States Treasury, it would also artificially foster the proliferation of splinter parties." 171 U. S. App. D. C., at 231, 519 F. 2d, at 881. The Constitution does not require the Government to "finance the efforts of every nascent political group," American Party of Texas v. White, 415 U. S., at 794, merely because Congress chose to finance the efforts of the major parties. Furthermore, appellants have made no showing that 182 In 1912 Theodore Roosevelt ran as the candidate of the Progressive Party, which had split off from the Republican Party, and he received more votes than William H. Taft, the Republican candidate. But this third-party "threat" was short-lived; in 1916 the Progressives came back into the Republican Party when the party nominated Charles Evans Hughes as its candidate for the Presidency. With the exception of 1912, the major-party candidates have outpolled all others in every Presidential election since 1856. 138Appellants suggest that a less discriminatory formula would be to grant full funding to the candidate of the party getting the most votes in the last election and then give money to candidates of other parties based on their showing in the last election relative to the "leading" party. That formula, however, might unfairly favor incumbents, since their major-party challengers would receive less financial assistance. See S. Rep. No. 93-689, p. 10 (1974).