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Ross Perot wasn't that long ago and he would have won if he stayed in the race and didn't dismantle his own campaign. He was leading by a lot, but he just wanted to start a third party and not really win, IMHO.
I think we will see an independent win at some point. I think if Romney would have acted fast he might have had a real chance of making a good run this time around. Too late now of course.
The problem is our system was designed to be balanced between only 2 parties. In a parliamentary system you can have more than 2 parties to move legislation. In US, it's one way or the other way. There's a few laggards that are holding things up that maybe the 3rd party but it's not relevant enough to move the pendulum when there's not enough power for a swing party to exist.
I think most voters vote for the candidate who either speaks to them, or they vote to stop another candidate from winning the election. We know that a vote for a third party candidate can throw an election to the candidate we least want. Sometimes we hold our noses and vote for the least objectionable candidate.
We know a third part candidate can affect the outcome of an election in the “wrong” direction, because we’ve seen it happen.
So, it would take a giant change in attitudes for a third party to have a chance at winning a national election. I do see movement towards a Progressive party, and it is conceivable that this movement could continue to grow. But I also think it would weaken the Democratic party, and would likely be counter productive.
I also sense that there is some movement away from old style Republican politics toward a more aggressive, regressive culture and set of beliefs. It seems to me that the party has become a refuge for very extreme partisans who do not seem to understand constitutional principles. But the Senators Republicans elect seem rich and out of touch with the people who vote for them.
I think there might be a splinter group of extremely conservatives who either try to transform the Republican party, or who try to establish a different, more extreme party.
But ultimately, the only way I can see a third party gaining power is if we splinter into several parties. I don’t know if that will happen.
There kind of already was one in the form of the 'Tea Party', which wikipedia tells me '...was launched following a February 19, 2009, call by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for a "tea party",[14][15] several conservative activists agreed by conference call to coalesce against President Barack Obama's agenda and scheduled a series of protests'. One thing with regards to the Tea Party of which I was never quite sure was whether or not the 'endgame' was to establish an entirely new party or merely to move the GOP in a more conservative direction--or perhaps it was destination unknown?
As for the 'giant change in attitudes' it would take for a third party candidate to have a chance...I don't think that's necessarily true. What it would take would be a celebrity-ish figure, probably a moderate but not necessarily, who could steal votes from both sides. Bloomberg had he run this year as a non-Dem would've probably gotten a Perot-in-1992-like vote total (a guess on my part, but 18.9% of the vote seems like it could've been doable for Bloomberg if not for Kanye West). If negative attitudes towards both parties increase, then a true 'outsider' candidate would stand a chance. Howard Schultz of Starbucks fame initially planned an independent candidacy this time around and likely would've outperformed the Green or Libertarian vote totals we're accustomed to seeing, although my guess is he probably would've barely eclipsed what Gary Johnson got in '16.
Last edited by Matt Marcinkiewicz; 09-22-2020 at 02:08 PM..
As a moderate, I would love to have another REAL choice, and I agree with the views of silibran and thinkalot.
The way I see it now, is that the Republicans are comprised of two factions (moderate conservatives and Trump supporters), and the Democrats are also comprised of two factions (Progressives/Extremists and those that are moderate liberals).
I think that until the moderates can get together and form their own party with a non-extremist stand involving some kind of compromise on every major issue, we are going to be stuck with candidates that about 50% of the population will strongly dislike.
The odd thing to me, last election, was that nearly all my 'Republican friends' (or Republican-leaning friends) expressed at least some degree of admiration for Bernie, while they universally disliked Hillary. Probably all these people ended up voting for Trump, but at least a couple would've seriously considered voting for Bernie had he won the nomination. My point here is that coalitions are not always obvious. Hillary was a moderate and yet she was disliked, even hated, by people who ideologically were closer to her than they were to Bernie, who may have been dismissed by some as impractical or even crazy but clearly did not inspire the strong negative reactions that bland, moderate Hillary did. Ironic in that she should've, on paper, inspired way less such reactions. Takeaway: politics isn't anywhere close to rational.
Maybe not in my lifetime, but in the next generation we might see it. NPA (No Party Affiliation) is now represents close to a third of registered voters.
I agree with USMC1984 and ThinkALot—Trump is neither a strong Democrat or Republican (just look at his voter history, as he’s been registered with both parties and has donated to candidates from both parties—Hillary and Kamala as a couple of examples). His takeover of the Republican Party was, and is, nothing short of remarkable. The Bush family really thought they had a dynastic path set up for power for decades and now they are considered irrelevant.
The Democrats are (slightly) smarter as they swerved their ship away from the Bernie Sanders wing twice and nominated two old horses. Wait until AOC is old enough to run. IMHO, she could very well be unstoppable. Depending on who the Republicans nominate, will we see a strong Independent emerge? Perhaps. Howard Shultz of Starbucks tried to enter this year’s race when Sanders was a threat to the Democrats. But Biden’s nomination gave him a chance to quietly slink away.
However it works, a third party will need money, and lots of it.
Schultz was out of the race long before that. Google tells me he officially dropped out of the race on September 6th of 2019. He did express support for Biden at that time, but if you recall, Biden was initially considered the frontrunner along with Elizabeth Warren...then Bernie did as Bernie does and was looking the part of the favorite until Bloomberg/Buttigieg/Klobuchar/probably someone I'm forgetting all dropped out around Super Tuesday (early March of this year) and threw their support behind Biden, at which time Biden became a lock.
Yes indeed, there is a Constitution Party, and their Presidential candidate for this year is Don Blankenship. You can draw your own conclusions about this political party from the person chosen to represent them in this year's elections.
The existence of the Constitution Party is news to me, also. I see Blankenship did a year of time for conspiring to violate mine safety and health standards, those standards being examples of other things which I did not know to exist...heh. I see that the party was actually formed in 1990 and thus precedes the Tea Party movement, although I'm sure the crossover is massive.
While Ross Perot was not the perfect storm of change I believe his popular vote in the presidential election was close to 18%. While not earth shattering, one could wonder what might have happened if his supporters could have grown over the last 20 plus years into a legitimate third party. After the election he faded away garnishing only 8% of the popular vote in 1996.
18.97% in 1992, yeah. I was age six in 1992 so I'm uncertain about the answer to the question I'm about to ask: would Clinton have lost had it not been for Perot's presence in the race? Back to Google!
The odd thing to me, last election, was that nearly all my 'Republican friends' (or Republican-leaning friends) expressed at least some degree of admiration for Bernie, while they universally disliked Hillary. Probably all these people ended up voting for Trump, but at least a couple would've seriously considered voting for Bernie had he won the nomination. My point here is that coalitions are not always obvious. Hillary was a moderate and yet she was disliked, even hated, by people who ideologically were closer to her than they were to Bernie, who may have been dismissed by some as impractical or even crazy but clearly did not inspire the strong negative reactions that bland, moderate Hillary did. Ironic in that she should've, on paper, inspired way less such reactions. Takeaway: politics isn't anywhere close to rational.
Interesting. To me, Bernie was a left-populist, while Trump was a right-populist. Both promised their target electorate specific improvement and reforms.
A "true" conservative, by my reckoning, would promise no reforms at all. On the contrary, such a candidate would regard public authority's attempt to improve life, as being pernicious, corrupt or bullheaded... or maybe all three.
Normally there is a tension between a party that promises aggressive reform, and one that shirks from it. This was demonstrably the case in the 1920s and 1930s, when the then-Republicans were the party of hands-off and don't meddle, while the Democrats had an ambitious agenda of reform - most notably, of course, the New Deal. But today it seems that both major parties are clamoring to reform something. For one party, is it primarily to elevate persons who have presumably been downtrodden. For the other, it's to re-elevate persons who in living memory have sustained a decline. No serious party or candidate today has as platform, "We applaud the trends of the late 20th century, and if elected, we promise to propitiate and augment them".
Something replacing Dems is possible, but I wonder how much time is left for the party system. Parties are expensive obstructions in local government. I don't see them lasting another century.
The names of the parties make no difference. There have nearly* always been two parties in the United States.
Per Duverger's Law, the structural basis of the American government produces two highly dominant parties and relegates all others to the inconsequential fringe. The Electoral College is a major component of this effect, as is the lack of proportional representation. Note to the obtuse: I am describing, not criticizing.
One of these two major parties will dominate the left and one will dominate the right. You can fantasize about a new Liberal Party replacing the Democratic Party and/or a new Conservative Party replacing the Republican Party, but those would just be rebranding. People on the left who fantasize about the Green Party coming to dominate that side of the political spectrum, or on the right who imagine that the Libertarian Party could take over for the Republicans, fail to understand that if such things happened, in order to remain competitive those parties would need to seek out a governing majority and those would need to move to the center and in the end would have to make electoral compromises which would simply render them the equivalent of the Democrats and the Republicans, respectively, but under new names.
*And when there haven't been - the Era of Good Feelings, which saw the Federalist Party wither; and the 1850s, when the Whigs collapsed into oblivion - a vacuum was created and new replacement parties soon emerged to restore the binary system which, at its ideological core, was the same old yin-yang system as before. In the first case, the one remaining party fractured as it sought to expand to cover the entire electorate (not sustainable) and in the second case a new party rose up to replace the Whigs (the Republicans).
The idea of 'new' parties solving anything is wishful thinking that ignores the fundamental structural issues which have made and sustained the American system as it exists today and has existed for most of 2+ centuries.
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