Is a Third Party possible this time?

I have to agree with my esteemed fellow posters that a third party is damn near impossible now.

I do agree with the big dawg that one could be formed, but it would have to start at the grass roots level right now and be worked inexhaustably for the next 20 years and then..... maybe.

These are both great examples of exactly what I am talking about. Sure, Andrew Jackson's Democrats surpassed what you are implying were the two main parties.

And (as I am asserting it must) the very next election was a nice clean two party election.

1856 is a bit of an anomoly since it was in the runup to a sucession movement and the civil war. But even so, by 1864 you had two parties again (pro-Lincoln Republican and anti-Lincoln Republican).

You can talk about the pressures that caused the US to revert to our normal two-party system every single time we have had the occasional upheaval. Then you can explain how these pressures aren't a natural part of the system.

I was not implying anything about what were or were not "the two main parties." In fact, prior to the 1824 election, the Federalists had died out as a viable political party. In 1824, when Jackson won the popular vote, but J. Q. Adams was elected in the House of Representatives, there were four candidates, and all four of them were listed as members of the Democratic-Republican Party. All four of them polled more than 10% of the electoral vote; all four of them polled more than 10% of the popular vote. In the previous election, in 1820, there were four candidates, and three of them represented three different political parties, while DeWitt Clinton received just under 2% of the popular vote although he did not run for the office.



In the election subsequent to Jackson's election in 1828, which is to say the 1832 election, there were four candidates, representing three political parties, and John Floyd representing the nullification faction. Floyd didn't poll any popular votes, but the entire South Carolina electoral delegation voted for him, because they were chosen by the legislature, and not the popular vote. So, basically, you don't know what the hell you're talking about.



How was it an anomaly? There were three political parties represented in the election, the Democrats, the Republicans and the Whigs. The Whigs put up candidates in seven consecutive elections, including 1856 and 1860. They won the White House in 1840 and 1848. It is an absurdity for you to attempt to characterize the 1856 election as an anomaly--it was a very ordinary election, and until the Civil War, the Whigs were a viable and competitive party.

Where did you ever come up with that "pro-Lincoln Republican" and "anti-Lincoln Republican" horseshit? That really cracked me up with that crap. In 1864, George McClellan ran on the Democratic ticket, and he won 45% of the popular vote--although he was crushed in the Electoral College. You really shouldn't make **** up, E_brown.

The Whigs did not survive the Civil War. Immediately after the Civil War, both parties got busy enshrining their respective political power bases in the legislatures of the states. When third parties arose after the Civil War, the deck was already stacked against them, and in it was in the interest of the Democrats and the Republicans to collude to assure that whomever was elected, it was not a third party candidate.



Why should i talk about what is essentially your historical fantasy? There have been several times in our history when there was only a single political party, but several candidates from that party. There have been many times that there were three or more political parties--and they were viable parties which succeeded in local politics, and succeeded in electing members to national government such as the House of Representatives and the Senate. You have to play fast and loose with the historical evidence to ram your goofy thesis down the throat of our national history.



No, it's your thesis, you need to be able to support it, or you need to admit that you don't know what the hell you're talking about.

I should know better than to get into a historical pissing match with you (but it is too late now to back out).

In presidential elections, there are scant few elections where the candidates from the two most popular parties did not get more than 90% of the votes between them. In the vast majority of cases there are nor more than two viable parties going into the general election.

I am also curious about how many of the "third party" candidates of history who got more than a couple of percent of the vote were reviled as "spoilers" the way Nader was.

I also suspect that the Congressional campaigns work the same way, except on a state-wide level (meaning there are two viable parties on a state level may be different than the national parties).

An interesting example of this is the Lieberman-Lamont-Schlesinger race for Connecticuts Senate seat. When Lieberman went third party as the pro-war candidate, he won because vast numbers of Republican voters flocked to him. In this case, the Republican party was the third party (and everyone knew it long before the election took place).

Bi-polar bear.

I am curious.

Did you vote for Ralph Nader in either 2000 or 2004?

How do you feel about the role played by Nader, especially in the 2000 election?

Yes, you should know better. You could easily back out now, however, by just admitting that you were making claims for which you have no basis. A case in point:



In the 1824 election, when, as i've already pointed out, there were four candidates, all running on a Democratic-Republican Party ticket, Jackson got 41% of the vote, Adams got 31% of the vote, Crawford got 11% of the vote, and Henry Clay got 13% of the vote. The rest of the vote went to other candidate, or unpledged electors (in the past, voters often voted for an elector who was understood to be pledged to a particular candidate, or not pledged to any candidate--rather than voting for a particular candidate). So, in fact, not even the top three vote-getters had 90% of the popular vote combined.



Since it has only been in the 20th and 21st centuries that there had been a concept of a "two party" system, and given that often in the past, more than one candidate would run for the same party (c.f. William Jennings Bryan and John Palmer who both ran as Democrats in 1896)--there was no reason to have a concept of a spoiler. Probably the first time this came up was in 1912. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. had become President in 1901 with the death of William McKinley. In 1904, Roosevelt polled the largest plurality of any contested election in U.S. History (in 1820, Monroe ran virtually unopposed, although one single elector voted for John Quincy Adams, who didn't actually run against Monroe). In 1872, Grant won a greater proportion of the Electoral College, but he polled 55% of the popular vote, less than Roosevelt in 1904.

In 1908 Roosevelt stepped down in favor of his political protege, William Howard Taft. Taft trounced William Jennings Bryan, who was running as a Democrat, and this time the only Democrat. Taft easily beat the field of six parties and candidates. But Roosevelt felt that Taft betrayed the principles of the "radical" Republicans, among whom Roosevelt had been numbered all his life. (It is rather difficult to think of Republicans as "radical," no?) So, 1912, Roosevelt ran as the candidate of the Progressive Party--which was popularly known as the "Bull Moose Party," because its supporters supported Roosevelt rather than the nominal platform of the Progressive Party. This was another election with six parties and six candidates. Roosevelt actually managed to beat Taft, but the result was that Woodrow Wilson, running as a Democrat, became yet another minority candidate, with 41% of the vote. There was an assassination attempt against Roosevelt, which did not kill him, but knocked him out of the campaigning for six crucial weeks. Many reputable students of history believe that had Roosevelt been able to conduct an uninterrupted campaign, he was sufficiently popular to have beaten Wilson and Taft. After the election, some, but by no means all, Republicans accused Roosevelt of being a spoiler. No body made a big deal out of it, though, because Roosevelt was too damned popular. Even in defeat, you risked pissing off the electorate to publicly criticize Roosevelt.



The ability to overcome the death grip the two parties have on local and state politics will from now on be the measure of whether a third party is actually viable. No one thought of the Whigs as a fringe party or spoilers in the 19th century, because they routine won local and state elections, twice won the White House, and routinely put people in the House and the Senate. Nowadays, the ability to succeed locally will determine if a party is actually viable. Ross Perot's Reform Party proved not to be a real third party, because it could not survive without his money, and his ability to raise money, and it was not sufficiently well-organized at the grassroots level to elect local and state candidates in any appreciable numbers. Their only visible victory was electing Jesse Ventura to be Governor of Minnesota. They don't truly exist as an organized political party.