Here’s a story from my real life to put it into the proper perspective for you.
I am a liberal…not a Democrat. I believe in strongly liberal values. The first time I was able to vote was 1990 in the Gubenatorial election. I supported the Republican candiate because for whatever reason, he actually more closely mirrored my values. In 1992, I was of the opinion that Reagan/Bush were the worst thing to have happened to the country in some time, and Clinton was a breath of fresh air. I liked him. Perot ran too, as did many others. I heard about Perot, I didn’t hear about the others. We had televised debates and newspapers and magazines, but they all talked about 3 candidates…any others were not even treated like they were in the race. This is essentially a combination of the media reporting what people are interested in, and the two major parties doing everything they can do to block any third parties from entering the fray. But Perot got in on the game, he captured the imagination of the media, and he succeeded in getting included in the debates, which at the time were sponsored by the League of Women Voters, who could not be bought off. Of course, the two major parties had enough sway that never again was a 3rd party candidate allowed in the national debates (after the debates were taken away from the LWV of course, let that be a lesson to the new sponsors). To my way of thinking, Perot was “colorful”, but his ideas were half baked, he was half cocked, and playing with half a deck. I actually liked what Clinton had to offer. I tuned out Perot after at least hearing him out, because I would have voted for ANYONE running against Bush, and I liked what Clinton had to say, so I didn’t even HAVE to consider at the time the implications of voting for a 3rd party candidate.
In 1994, I’d had enough of the Republican governor and voted for the Democrat, and in 1996, I strongly preferred Clinton to Dole, even though some of the shine was gone from Clinton for me by that time, he was still of all the candidates I knew about (and I was starting to see more interest in 3rd parties, but I didn’t think any was a better choice than Clinton). Now, go to 1998.
I live in Minnesota, and that year we had a Democrat, “Skip” Humphrey, I forget if he was the son or grandson of our former VP, but he was just your run of the mill life long politician gambling on name recognition, and of course he easily won the nomination as MN Dems really wanted to get someone with the greatest possible name recognition out there, because he would be running against a very popular Republican…Norm Coleman. You may recognize his name as that of the former US Senator who lost to comedian Al Franken after a 7 month recount, but at the time I recongized him as the former Mayor of St. Paul, the city where I live. Now, normally I prefer the Dem to the Republican, and I would have given Coleman a second look if I didn’t already know what I needed to know about him.
First off, as Mayor of St. Paul, he was elected as a Democrat, and even took a pro choice position. Then one day he was seen meeting with some bigwigs in the RNC (right around the time Gingrich was the big player), and seemingly overnight, he became not just a Republican, but an ultra conservative pro life Republican. So, first off, I can’t trust anyone who shifts their opinions to gain favor (which he did in 2002 when he won the Senate seat and became the member of Congress who voted MOST lock step with Bush for the first couple years…something like 99%). Second, as Mayor of St. Paul, he brought in a ton of new businesses with nice tax incentives. However, within a couple years, many of the new St. Paul marquis businesses moved elsewhere (including overseas) to save tax dollars and what not, and Coleman didn’t do a thing about it to say hey, you guys need to pay this back, you didn’t hold up your end of the bargain. He was clearly in the pocket of big business.
So, I had no choice but to support Humphrey. Then former Professional Wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura said HE was going to run. He pointed out that Democrats and Republicans were almost one in the same with the exception of a few hot button issues (pretty much the same point ultra liberal Michael Moore made in his books). And he basically talked a great deal of sense. He even went as far as to take on the sacred cows of politics, saying that maybe we should at least STUDY how some countries can successfully do away with a lot of crime by legalizing, regulating and taxing things like drugs and prostitution just TRY to imagine a Dem or Repulbican in this country even saying anything remotely like that.
But here was my quandry, and this is what is important in answering your question. Even though I hadn’t been a pro wrestling fan, what Ventura was saying was by far the closest to my ideals. Now I had an actual moral dillemma. Basically, I could vote my conscience. But if I did that, mine could be the one vote that caused Coleman to beat Humphrey. See my assumption was that a 3rd party candidate couldn’t win, and indeed the polls were showing very little support for Ventura at first, and basically it was neck and neck. And all the pundits were saying that Jesse was more “libertarian” and would probably take support from Coleman, so his presence was probably a good thing for Dems. What the pundits didn’t consider was that Jesse was basically socially liberal and economincially centrist, which in tandem looked somewhat like liberatrianism, but was really closer to liberalism.
So, I had people saying, maybe you should vote for Jesse, and my answer was that he didn’t stand a chance, and I couldn’t bear to see an outcome where Coleman won because Jesse was in the race. And what started to happen? Well, the pundits were proven wrong. Though Jesse was taking support from both sides, more was coming from the Democrats, and being that I knew Humphrey excited NO one, and they were misreading Jesse’s politics, I saw that coming. And Coleman was formidable. He managed to get St. Paul a professional hockey team, and you HAVE to realize that in Minnesota, hockey is BIG (up north sits the US Hockey Hall of Fame after all), and a LOT of people were still sore from losing the North Stars to Dallas. So, Coleman essentially made his political fortunes on that one accomplishment, which he talked about from day one and actually eventually accomplished.
So, a week before election day, I was scared. I thought, OK, most of these people when we get closer to election day are going to come to their senses and not actually vote for Ventura, because at the time he had between 10 and 20% of the support in polls, not far from Humphrey, but double digits behind Coleman. Funny thing was, as we got closer to election day, Humprheys numbers dropped more, Venturas went up. And even though Ventura was a longshot in polling the day before the election, what I saw was real momentum..fast upward momentum for Ventura, fast downward momentum for Humphrey and even slow downard momentum for Coleman. So even though Coleman was heavily favored to win, my thoughts were, well, Ventura has a BETTER chance now of beating Coleman than does Humphrey, so I can actually vote my conscience. And vola, when the votes were tabuated, we had 3rd party Governer Jesse Ventura! Now he turned out to be an insurfferably whiny baby, but he was still better than the other two would ahve been.
So in that you’ll find my answer. If a third party candidate COULD gain the attention of enough people that the press started paying a ton of attention to this person, and this person could be shown to have a reasonable shot in a 3 person race well, we saw that on a state level, it can happen…it just takes enough people to see the evidence of the candidate’s viability. And we see that folks like Perot, if they actually made sense to a broad swath of the nation and not just 10 to 15% outliers, they certainly COULD break the back fo the two party system.
But if I, a nobody can realize that, you have to imagine that the 2 major political parties who effectively control our entire government ALSO realize that and would pull out all the stops in a way that would make the health insurance industry’s efforts to kill reform seem like child’s play. Basically I think it would take someone like Obama running on a 3rd party ticket, but he ran as a Dem, so it will probably be a long time before we see anything resembling a national 3rd party in this country.
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