Chuck Todd thinks we will see a major third-party/independent presidential campaign if Rick Perry is the Republican nominee.
Said Todd: “If Perry’s the nominee, I think there’s going to be be a serious effort of some sort of moderate Republican linking up with a conservative Democrat of trying to run in some sort of like, ‘let’s throw all the bums out — let’s crash the party,’ you know, a la Perot.”
He added: “I just continue to believe that’s what’s coming.”
Of course, there are only a few people wealthy and crazy enough to finance a campaign to get on the ballot in all fifty states. It’s possible that someone who is relatively unknown could decide to blow a huge chunk of their fortune on a quixotic quest for the White House. It happened in 1992 and 1996, and it benefited the Democrat both times.
The most obvious candidate for such a mission is Mayor Bloomberg of New York City. But he doesn’t fit Todd’s profile. I could see someone like Joe Lieberman, who is retiring from the Senate, teaming up with similarly hawkish Republican, but that wouldn’t quite be what Todd’s envisioning, either. And, in any case, mere politicians wouldn’t be able to raise the money needed to get ballot access.
If a ticket did emerge that succeeded in getting on the ballot all across the country, and the candidates were a moderate Republican and a Blue Dog Democrat, it would really hurt the Republicans’ chances. Obama would probably be favored to win in Georgia and maybe even Mississippi, as the white vote would be split three ways, while the black vote would remain mostly unified behind the president.
I don’t see Todd’s prediction coming true, but I do think Perry is unacceptable to a big part of the Republican Establishment, which is what Todd is picking up on and reacting to. A lot of Republicans would prefer a second-term for Obama than the prospect of two-terms from Perry. For some, that’s because they’re focused on 2016, and don’t want to deal with a Republican incumbent that they don’t support. For others, it’s because they’re totally uncomfortable with Perry’s wacky anti-science and weird religious views.
There ought to be more room in the middle for a third candidate, but, Republican rhetoric aside, the president does a good job of reflecting the values of most people in the middle. The Bloomberg Poll that came out today shows that the president’s actual policies poll very well, even if people aren’t too optimistic about them. With very few exceptions, the people prefer the administration’s proposals to the Republicans’. They also like the president better than any other political leader in the country, and by a substantial margin. To me, that indicates that Obama has successfully occupied the middle, leaving little space for the kind of third party challenge that Todd is predicting.
Now, I believe H. Ross Perot ran for president for one reason. He was so pissed at Poppy Bush over the Vietnam POW/MIA issue that he wanted to make sure he lost the presidency. If someone on the right hates Perry as much as Perot hated Poppy, then maybe we’ll see a repeat performance.
Just curious – why did Perot go out of his way to endorse GWB on Larry King just before the 2000 election? Did he bury the hatchet with GHWB?
Perhaps lingering bitter feelings over the way Al Gore treated him condescendingly in the 1993 LKL debate over Nafta?
And was that the reason RP decided to run again in 1996?
yeah, his beef was with the father, not the son. And he hated Al Gore.
To me it indicates that the middle is yearning for someone else, but see Obama as the only alternative. A real third party option the way you describe might draw from them. Since Obama needs moderates and sane-conservatives to win, it might hurt him in unexpected ways as well.
But it’s certainly possible that it helps more than it hurts.
The question is: are there enough disaffected Democratic centrists who would abandon Obama to vote for another centrist? I don’t really see it so long as Obama maintains a margin on Perry. The Electoral College vote might be more interesting, since a lot would depend on if and where the independent candidate had concentrated appeal
The question is: are there enough disaffected Democratic centrists who would abandon Obama to vote for another centrist?
When you say “Democratic centrists,” it brings up images of business-friendly DLC types.
But what about more downscale, mid-western, interior-west, and southern Dems? People who aren’t political geeks, and who might abandon Obama not for ideological reasons but because they don’t think he’s doing a good job managing the economy?
There are not a whole lot of Southern white Dems left. What you have to distinguish are Blue Dogs and New Dems. The New Dems are the ones most aligned with Obama. Folks like Price (NC) as opposed to Kissell and McIntyre. And Brad Miller likely would likely support Obama as a progressive hedge against Republicans in power. The African-American Southern Democrats are solidly in Obama’s camp. The Blue Dogs have been abandoning him from the beginning, and Heath Shuler has already undercut the President on the American Jobs Act.
And interesting question is whether the Republican Party has gotten so crazy that former Dem Walter Jones comes home.
And New Dems are different from Blue Dogs, how?
Well, first of all they are members of different Congressional caucuses. Google BlueDog Coalition and New Democrats to see who is who.
The BlueDogs tend to be focused on tax cuts and deregulation and some of the Republican cultural issues. New Democrats are the closest thing to the “progressive” Southern governors of the post civil rights era. They are your Clintonistas, who locally might have the reputation for being progressive because they are progressive on social issues. But they are corporatist in the sense that they want to have the conditions that will encourage corporations to create jobs. The New Dems are the private-public partnership sorts of people. The Blue Dogs find nothing terribly wrong with privatization. The Blue Dogs are more likely to support laws regulating abortion and oppose same sex marriage, but they are also likely to support environmental regulations, which is their major difference from Republicans.
The original Blue Dogs were budget hawks and deficit peacocks. And in the Poppy Bush and Clinton years, that was pretty much all they were.
But they are corporatist in the sense that they want to have the conditions that will encourage corporations to create jobs.
And those “conditions” have been shown to be a major league failure. I’m sorry, I just don’t see much difference between the two. Just look at Heath Shuler now. And lets remember who recruited the SOB. Yes, the present asshole mayor of Chicago.
Obama’s 2008 coalition included the moderate Republicans on a relatively broad scale. He had the support of the actual liberal Republicans, like Lincoln Chafee and the Eisenhower kids. He had the support of William F. Buckley’s son. He had Hagel and Powell from the military side. Those folks might go for an independent bipartisan ticket, but it wouldn’t hurt Obama. As long as they don’t vote for Perry, Obama is in fine shape.
Drum said that according to the Bloomberg poll, 19% of Obama’s supporters have abandoned him.
So take that for what’s it worth.
Maybe it’s not in the Bloomberg poll, but some other poll.
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/09/everybody-hates-everybody-else
There’s the post itself.
Well, there’s this one. 27% of Dems say they want another candidate than Obama.
http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/one-four-democrats-wants-dump-
obama
But to me this is a bullshit sort of a poll. It shows that 27% of Democrats are not happy with the way things are going. But Obama will be the candidate, and I think he’s going to look a lot better to them, for a number of reasons, by November 2012.
I can well understand a put-down of the President coming from that publication if this guy still owns it.
Thanks for that, it seemed pretty rabid from the comments too; but the actual poll was done by CNN and ORC International and was widely reported. I still think it’s a bullshit poll at this point.
My favorite part of that is: a moderate Republican and a conservative Democrat.
My guess is that they’ll call themselves the Party for a New Democracy, pull in Lieberman for VP (as no one will consider him for top of ticket, except himself), and try to co-opt the get jobs message to kneecap Obama because they don’t trust that their party’s candidate will be able to beat him on their own.
If Perry wins the nomination and the election, the GOP is extinct and the Tea Party becomes one of the 2 parties in our 2 party system. GOP politicians then decide whether they want to join the Tea Party or the Democratic Party. To a large extent, this has already happened.
Agree with you although I think a third party candidate hurts Obama more than it helps. In 92, Dems still were able to compete in some southern states- not anymore. So PErry is a lock for huge chunks of red state america, while then Obama would need to fight with the “centrist” candidate for blue state votes.
50% of Blacks live SOUTH of the Mason/Dixon line. Blacks make up 40% of the population in Mississippi and 30% of the voters in Georgia. IF the White vote is Split between Perry and the Independent, I agree with BooMan, a whole lot of the South will be ‘ in play’.
Excellent point. But don’t discount that maybe 10%-20% of the white vote will go to the Democrat, regardless or who it is, or go to Obama because they like and respect him.
I hadn’t thought of that but there are a lot of narrowly-won precincts in the South. And a whole swath of Black Majority counties from central Mississippi and Alabama through south Georgia, the inner coastal plain of the Carolinas, and Tidewater and Southside Virginia.
There ought to be more room in the middle for a third candidate, but, Republican rhetoric aside, the president does a good job of reflecting the values of most people in the middle.
Both those don’t go together. Why should there be room? Despite all the GOP’s bullshit about Kenyan, Muslim Socialism, the President is a middle of the road politician. The space is on the left, but no one is there to occupy it. At any rate, some of the Big Money Boyz may be complaining to Chuckie, but I bet they’ll fall in line behind Perry in the end. Why waste the hundreds of millions it would take just to be viable?
I would agree with this: the center is occupied. Insofar as the centrist Dems don’t like Obama, it’s because he’s been making them take hard votes when they’d rather sit around doing nothing. But a new centrist task master wouldn’t be any better in that respect. And the left–the left’s got nothing as far as representation goes.
The underlying problem is the dissolution of the GOP, its reduction to the Tea Party, which is chasing away the business oriented faction of the GOP. They do not feel comfortable with Dems yet, and I’m not sure this generation ever will, no matter how much the Dems move to accommodate them. This group of people is not used to being politically powerless, they have a choice to make, but they don’t like their options, so we get this silly talk.
In the end, this talk will all disappear if Romney takes control of the nomination, which remains the most likely outcome.
Feh. This is Chuck Todd’s wishful thinking. He’s thinking about what would make the best TV and has convinced himself that what would make the best TV must inevitably happen.
Or it’s possible he’s remembering the 1980 election and is putting Obama in the role of Carter, Perry in the role of Reagan, and has called up central casting to find someone to play John Anderson.
And IMO serious Independent runs hurt the incumbent. Anderson in ’80, Perot in ’92, Nader in ’00 – it doesn’t matter where on the political spectrum they lie. An Independent candidate is someone else who is attacking the incumbent, and they give an outlet for voters who want to lodge a protest against the incumbent but refuse to vote for “the other party”.
Agree this is mostly Todd wishing for some magical third party indy who will somehow manage to solve all our problems in some brilliant but obvious bipartisan ways that the current crowd havent figured out to do.
Very unlikely such a person exists.
But the 1980 analogy isn’t his model — Todd doesn’t want an Indy running to the left of the incumbent as Anderson did. He prefers a center right candidate from what I can tell.
But O has successfully occupied that terrain for three years.
The third party opening would be for a Tea Party type if Romney gets the nom. Otherwise with Perry the MORers from the GOP have Obama and that should be acceptable enough for most of them.
Granted I was young back then, but the scenario Todd is describing is almost exactly the 1980 election. Democrat in office that Democrats are unhappy with (even moreso than Obama, since by this time Ted Kennedy was going to primary Carter). Republicans bound and determined to nominate a man widely-viewed as an extremist who a good-sized chunk of the moderate Republicans in the party elites were afraid of/disturbed by. And Anderson was the moderate Republican who started off running against Reagan in the primary and then teamed up with a Democrat for an independent run.
He ended up running to the left of Carter (kind of, as I recall, the details are fuzzy) but that’s mostly a function of where the Republican and Democratic parties lay ideologically in 1980 than the mechanics that Todd seems to be talking about.
Yes there are some obvious similarities with 1980 but re Anderson he ended up almost taking Ted K’s position as the Great Liberal Hope who would rescue the disaffected anti-Carterite liberals (like me and Jackie Kennedy). And Anderson did run — iirc — mostly espousing what most lib Ds believed in. Todd doesn’t want someone so lefty or associated with specific liberal proposals (eg, a 50 cent/gal gas tax)– he’s looking for some magical bipartisan centrist miracle worker who rides in from outside, untainted by recent political squabbling, who bases his candidacy not on ideology and principles and policies but on competence.
Btw I had to google who Anderson’s running mate was — some guy named Pat Lucey. Trust me, no one back then knew or cared …
Patrick Lucey – Democratic Governor of Wisconsin
Pure bipartisan wishdream.
There are two examples: 1980 is certainly relevent. I worked for Andersen in Vermont during the GOP primary (I was a liberal Republican at time).
Andersen was a sign of the “angry middle”. Andersen did wind up being a candidate of the left.
If you look at the polling, the left supports Obama pretty solidly in a way it never did for Carter. I don’t think 1980 is the best case.
Obviously ’92 is a better example. Had Perot not been such a nutcase, I think he would have won.
Had Perot not been a nutcase, well, he wouldn’t have been Perot.
And IMO serious Independent runs hurt the incumbent. Anderson in ’80, Perot in ’92, Nader in ’00
Researchers have gone back and concluded that Perot in ’92 hurt both candidates pretty much equally.
The other two certainly hurt the incumbent more, but those were both cases in which a candidate ran to an incumbent Democrat’s left, not to the center. Or course a candidate to a Democrat’s left, or to a Republican’s right, is going to draw more votes from one side of the aisle.
I think this easily could break the other direction. If Romney wins the nomination, which is a strong possibility for much the same reason McCain won it last time, I think the Teabaggers will run someone, maybe Palin, as a third party candidate. Where it could get dicey is if this were to break up the Electoral College in such a way that no candidate wins 270 electoral votes. If so, the current, lunatic House would decide the outcome.
Combine that with the scenario in Pennsylvania where the legislature wants to apportion electoral votes based on Congressional districts rather than all-or-nothing.
Imagine a couple of states doing that and the free-for-all that would cause with an independent Tea party run in the mix.
For the record though – won’t happen. The Tea Party activists are working to take over the Republican Party, not create their own. If Mitt wins, they’ll possibly sit out the election in a huff and wait for 2016 to try again – while building up their powerbase for the upcoming Congressional election in ’14. (And having their Senators and Congressmen pushing for pointless investigations of the Obama administration in the meantime).
It’s the strategy they’ve been using since Reagan. And it’s worked for them for 30 years – they’re more powerful now than ever – so I don’t see them giving up on it.
I think this is right. If Romney wins, watch for a Christianist candidate like Bachmann to run. Probably not Bachmann herself, but some other God Botherer. Santorum makes some sense. Maybe that’s what he’s hanging around for.
And headlines all across the country blare: Santorum Runs!
I’d buy a bumpersticker.
OK, now that’s funny. But I really wish I hadn’t read it while eating.
Anyone who wants a third party candidate for President at this late date in the cycle is wanting a spoiler. And is clear that Rick Perry likely would dig his own political grave just like Sarah Palin has.
It show that Todd does not want Obama to win.
Yep, the 50-state thing is a big roadblock for mounting a spur-of-the-moment third-party candidacy.
The big mistake that third parties in the US make over and over is starting with a presidential candidate without building local strength. The second big mistake is not aiming to have active parties in some locality in every one of the fifty states. The last is that one of the two major parties co-opts your issues and takes your supporters by the appeal to electability. Thus did the American Independent Party of George Wallace become the Southern base of the Nixon Southern Strategy.
Something that really clarified my thinking on this issue was when I learned that when the GOP emerged in the 1850s, it was because a lot of the party leaders from the parties that it formed out of united. They brought their infrastructure, connections, and foot soldiers. In many ways it was a rebranding under the banner of the GOP which for many was anti-slavery.
Without that ready-made infrastructure, the GOP would not have been in a position to capitalize on the changes of the times to become the second party.
I have seen many write this before
This is demonstrably wrong on two levels asit pertains to 1992. One, Perot’s re-entrance in the race was accompanied throughout the fall by a decline in Clinton’s margin. Two, the exit poll in 1992 makes very clear that Perot took as many votes from Clinton as he did from Bush. As E J Dionne noted:
As I said, a small point.
National polling is interesting but doesn’t explain why Clinton won Georgia and Montana, for example. The presidential contest is really 56 elections (the fifty states, the District of Columbia, and the five congressional districts in Nebraska and Maine). Overall, Perot voters were split, but they racial polarization of the South and the libertarian streak of the Mountain West both conspired to cost Bush states that he would have otherwise won. Elsewhere it was, as you say, a wash.
in some states in helped Clinton, in some it hurt him. The effect on the electoral college if you look at the state by state exit polling was minimal.
It is dead wrong to “elsewhere it was a wash”.
And often repeated by people who haven’t bothered to look at the data.
I note you ignore the other point. The Entrance of Perot hurt Clinton’s margin almost immediately.
Soooo…. Romney.
I find it immensely disturbing that Perry is a serious candidate for the Republican nomination to be President. Though if he was nominated, I think it would be tremendously damaging for the Republican party (which was already damaged when Palin was chosen to be the Vice Presidential nominee).
This is way before my time, but I wonder if people responded similarly when Barry Goldwater was nominated (or McGovern for that matter). Neither seems as extreme to me as Perry, although maybe that’s just because I don’t know enough about Goldwater.
Goldwater could not win the Republican nomination today. The closest to Goldwater in the Congress is Richard Lugar.
McGovern was in no way extreme. His failing was that he opposed the Vietnam War when geographically a large chunk of the country still supported it. And because of the opening up of the party to minorities and liberal activists, many of the old-line machine politicians (cough, Daley, cough) sandbagged McGovern’s campaign. But the most damaging thing was the selection of Thomas Eagleton as a running mate. Apparently the McGovern campaign had not adequately vetted Eagelton’s history, which included psychiatric counseling; the issue of a “psycho a heartbeat from the Presidency” got legs. Eagleton withdrew, and McGovern replaced him with Edmund Muskie.
But Muskie was already damaged in his primary run:
(Per Wikipedia)
McGovern was in no way extreme.
Which makes people like Nate Silver look less trustworthy because he, among others, basically labels McGovern as almost an extremist.
He’s just being lazy by not actually looking closely at McGovern’s actual record and just relying on the mainstream opinion of the guy.
He is anti-war. That makes anyone an extremist, don’t you know…
Yep. And it still does, doesn’t it Ron Paul?
Whoa. Muskie was on the ticket with Humphrey, not McGovern, and he was regarded as an exemplary VP choice (in glaring contrast to the Republican VP candidate, Spiro Agnew).
After Eagleton withdrew, McGovern picked Sargent Shriver to replace him, which was a good choice, but the damage had already been done.
Also, I think McGovern was perceived as more extreme than he actually was because he got so much of his support from the radical left.
Whoops. Brain failure. You are right. I had forgotten that Shriver was a candidate for anything.
He was perceived as extreme because that’s how the party bosses intended to defeat him.
The “radical left” was pretty broad-based in 1972.
Apparently the McGovern campaign had not adequately vetted Eagelton’s history, which included psychiatric counseling
Even worse it was revealed his treatment for serious depression included electroshock applications to the brain on numerous occasions. That put the story as a huge bold type front page headline. McG compounded the problem by initially saying he backed his pick “1000%”. Soon of course he caved to the building pressure to replace Eagleton.
The election campaign was essentially over at that point which was July. And Sgt Shriver accepted only after about seven other major Dems — it was disclosed at the time — turned down McG.
Later McG made two comments about the events
1) he’d been so busy trying to secure the nom that he had less than 24 hrs to think about a VP, and in any case Eagleton outright lied to him when McG’s vettor directly asked him if he had any skeletons
2). Shriver was actually the first person — not the eighth or ninth — he’d initially wanted but his people were unable to reach Sarge who was traveling in Europe in that pre-cell phone era
who wrote a series of great campaign books (though he personally moved right over time) called McGovern’s “1000%” statement the worst political gaffe in US Political History.
the Civil Rights Act. Goldwater didn’t.
Goldwater was on the far right, though on a very few issues he deviated.
was on the left in ’72. Certainly well to the left of the center of the Party. The McGovern guaranteed income proposal is one example.
I actually practiced law with Ed Muskie in the late 80’s. In the one conversation I had with him about the race he said he thought he was going to get squeezed from both the right (before Wallace was shot, he had a real shot at the ’72 nomination) and from the left. Muskie thought McGovern was dangerously left wing in 1972, btw. In any event he wondered in retrospect if the nomination was winnable.
At the end of the day it didn’t matter, he thought, because Nixon was in the process of ending the Vietnam War and wasn’t going to get beat anyway. I got the impression he was glad in the end he didn’t get the nomination, because he thought he would have been beaten badly.
I have spoken to others about ’72 who thought Muskie wasn’t a very good candidate in the early going and suffered from front-runner disease (ie too cautious).
Thank you for the perspective; that is helpful.
Actually what’s really depressing is that a candidate like Huntsman who wants to lower tax rates and eliminate the capital gains tax is considered too liberal to have a chance.
Agree, Huntsman is a reactionary, just happens to accept science unlike the rest of the get-Obama-party
Just all reminds me of Snake Farm
There is just such an opportunity (for a third candidate), but it would vaporize if Obama was able to convince Bloomberg to run as his VP.
well Bloomberg is the opposite of Obama. nothing to recommend Bloomberg whatsoever.
And the President would pick Bloomberg as his VIP, why?
Obama’s weaknesses:
..and as far as the idea that Bloomberg is ‘opposite’ from Obama.. not sure how, besides perhaps physically.