The eternal, elusive dream of a third-party president
By
Philip Bump September 24 at 11:05 AM
We are just about at the point in the presidential election cycle when the nation's politically obsessed begin toying with one of their favorite preoccupations.
What if, they say as they lean back in expensive chairs and stare idly at the ceiling,
a third-party candidate were to run for president? Hundreds of miles away on the third floor of 30 Rock, Joe Scarborough's cheeks flush for reasons he can't explain.
This isn't just the domain of people eager to inject a little more color into the standard red-blue presidential cycle. It's ingrained in the American consciousness, the idea that anyone could build up enough support to actually launch a campaign for -- and win -- the presidency, regardless of political persuasion. Most of us remember 1992, when a rather unusual Texan named Ross Perot leased half-hour blocks of the main TV networks to show us charts about the budget. That guy got 19 percent of the vote.
But Ross Perot was a rarity. Since 1856, the first year that the presidential race was largely between a Democrat and a Republican -- a trend that hasn't ended since -- independents and third-partiers have gotten about 4.6 percent of the vote. Since 1972, even in this new era of mass media and independent outreach -- the age of Perot and John Anderson and Ralph Nader -- the ratio is almost exactly the same: 4.6 percent.
That average doesn't tell the whole story, though.. It's at 4.6 percent largely because some candidates do better than the average and drive it up, while in many years all of the third-party candidates do terribly. Here's how the best candidates and all other non-major-party candidates have done each year since 1856. The party of the top vote-getter is listed underneath; the ones in bold are the ones who did unusually well.
Those two spikes at the beginning are when the party system was first getting sorted out. But then the big spike in 1912, which avid PBS viewers will recognize as the third-party bid of one Teddy Roosevelt. In 1924, it was a new iteration of Roosevelt's Bull Moose/Progressive Party, doing well again with Robert La Follette. In 1968, George Wallace, running to scoop up votes from Southern states angry at the national Democrats. In 1980, John Anderson, swept away by Ronald Reagan. Then Perot's two bids. The 2000 race run by Ralph Nader -- the spoiler that ruined Al Gore's dreams -- was relatively small, underneath the long-term average.
At no point in time over the course of the past 38 elections has an independent candidate done better than 27.4 percent of the vote -- and that guy was a former president. And at no point since 1864 has an independent done better than Roosevelt's 88 electoral votes either.
Which is not to say that it can't happen. But for an outside candidate to put together a viable bid -- particularly now and particularly given the myriad ways in which the two parties maneuver to prevent such a thing from happening -- is about as close to impossible as politics has to offer.
Philip Bump writes about politics for The Fix. He previously wrote for The Wire, the news blog of The Atlantic magazine. He has contributed to The Daily Beast, The Atlantic, The Daily, and the Huffington Post. Philip is based in New York City.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...a0d4c2a-86a2-11e2-9d71-f0feafdd1394?tid=sm_fb
@C.Holla
@ this poll closing in 2018
They'd have to basically be willing to get assassinated but
(Them Neo-Cons) He was accused by Newsweek of being a "quitter" in a well-publicized cover-page article (Them Libs
and went around campaigning for Perot by telling people if they didnt really care just vote for Perot. A young VMR liked his charts and knew no one really gave a fukk and wanted to mess with the teachers
...Perot ended up winning the mock vote...the teachers were like
why is this?
elitist