Presidential races may attract third-party candidate
As S.C. voters prepare to vote for their preferred presidential candidates, “what if” questions come to mind down the 2016 campaign road.
Donald Trump won the New Hampshire Republican primary and Bernie Sanders hugely won over Hillary Clinton in Democratic voting. After S.C. voting on Feb. 20 (Republican) and Feb. 27 (Democratic) a total of four states will have voted for presidential nominees. So we have a long way to go before both major parties nominate their national tickets at conventions in July.
If Trump is the Republican nominee, will he bring together the splintered party? Or might 2016 continue to be unlike any other presidential election year, with one of the “establishment Republicans” (Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Marco Rubio) launching a third party candidacy?
South Carolina played a key role in another unusual presidential election year, 1948.
Former New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg reportedly is considering a run as an independent. “A confluence of unlikely events [in 2016] has given new impetus to his presidential aspirations,” The New York Times reported (Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman, January 24, 2016).
Trump the Republican candidate, likely will be a different candidate leading up to November than he has been in bashing other Republicans. And if elected president, he’ll be a different Donald in the White House than during the campaign. Trump has tapped a mother lode of populist discontent that crosses all sorts of demographic lines – age, gender, political, racial, religious, socio-economic. An illustration of Trump’s appeal: Tom Phillips, publisher of the Pana News-Palladium in Central Illinois, is an acknowledged ( in his columns over the years) lifelong Democrat. Now Phillips is on the Trump bandwagon and often writes about Trump’s candidacy.
Bernie Sanders has the same appeal among many voters. Some of both Sanders’ and Trump’s appeal is among folks who are not going to vote for a woman, including Tina Fey … I mean Sarah Palin. This is not to suggest Hillary Clinton can’t be elected – only that she cannot win over the anti-female wing of the electorate. There is also the anti-Clinton factor.
In 1992, Ross Perot as a third-party candidate won a high (about 19 percent) number of the popular vote. Perot was unhappy with his fellow Texan, President George H.W. Bush. Many voters will remember Perot on television with his poster charts, speaking in a Texas twang. Perot’s impact was to help Bill Clinton unseat the first President Bush in 1992 and win re-election in 1996 when Perot also ran.
John B. Anderson of Illinois ran as an independent in 1980, having first been an announced Republican candidate for the nomination. Ronald Reagan won the 1980 election by a landslide, with 50.8 percent of the popular vote, carrying 44 states with 489 electoral votes. President Jimmy Carter (and Walter Mondale) carried only six states and the District of Columbia. Anderson received over 5 million popular votes but carried no states.
George Wallace, then the “segregation forever” governor of Alabama, received nearly 10 million votes as a third-party candidate in 1968 and he won 46 electoral votes. In 1972, he made a strong run for the Democratic nomination, winning Michigan and Maryland primaries. Wallace was shot and paralyzed the day before those primary victories. Wallace sought forgiveness for his actions as a segregationist and won the Alabama governor’s office again in 1982.
One of the most famous third-party campaigns was that of former President Teddy Roosevelt in 1912. T.R.’s “Bull Moose” campaign cost President William H. Taft re-election. Taft and Roosevelt were friends, Taft having followed T.R. as president.
Other names on third-party tickets include Ralph Nader and the former political cartoonist Pat Buchanan. The socialist Norman Thomas ran six times for president, beginning in 1928 through 1948.
That was also the year of the Dixiecrats. S.C. Gov. Strom Thurmond ran with Mississippi Gov. Fielding L. Wright. Dixiecrats, the States Rights Democratic Party ticket, were Southern Democrats unhappy with Truman’s decision to integrate the military and the civil rights plank of the Democratic platform. The Dixiecrats were the official Democratic ticket in four Southern states, including South Carolina. They won those four states (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina) but did not win any state where they were a third-party ticket.
The Dixiecrats ultimately helped turn the Deep South from Democratic to Republican. In the 1948 election, however, they failed to split the national Democratic party and President Harry Truman won election when most political pundits predicted Truman could not beat Republican Thomas Dewey.
D.G. Schumacher is a member of the Editorial Board of The Sun News. Contact him at dschumacher@thesunnews.com.
This story was originally published February 15, 2016 at 8:43 AM with the headline "Presidential races may attract third-party candidate."