This year’s US presidential election campaign has broken the mould, apparently. Never before have two ‘anti-establishment’ candidates in the shape of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders put up such a challenge, one securing his party’s nomination and the other coming close to doing so. It is all a symptom of the ‘anti-politics’ mood that has swept Western democracies.
There is just one thing wrong with this analysis. If Americans are so fed up with the established parties, why is there no credible third party candidate who is going to come within an ace of challenging the two main candidates? It ought to be a golden opportunity for outsiders. Not only is there apparently an ‘anti-politics’ mood, but Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump constitute possibly the least appealing duo at any election in modern times. Both are deeply disliked within their own parties, not to mention among the US population as a whole.
Yes, I know there are plenty of other candidates to choose from – dozens will be standing here and there across the country. A few will stand nationwide. American is not known for its left wing, yet there is a Socialist Party candidate, one from the Socialist Workers Party one and another from the Socialist Equality Party. There’s an American Freedom Party, a Better for America Party and a Prohibition Party. Slightly more serious candidates are the Green Party’s Jill Stein and the Constitution Party’s Darrell Castle. The overall selection makes our own fringe parties like the Official Monster Raving Loony Party look dull.
And yet none of these candidates stands a realistic chance of securing more than one per cent of the popular vote – the level achieved in 2012 by Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party, who is standing again this year. None, in other words, will come remotely as close as Ross Perot did in 1992, when he won just under 19 per cent of the popular vote, nor in 1996 when he won 8 per cent. None will come anywhere close to matching George Wallace who won 13.5 per cent of the popular vote in 1968, nor even get close to the 2.74 per cent won by Ralph Nader in 2000.
For a time it seemed as if former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg would stand. On his personal wealth along he could have outspent Trump and Clinton and provided a much-needed alternative candidate. But he scotched the possibility early this year. His reasoning is instructive. If he stood, he feared he might hand the presidency to Trump by taking more votes from Clinton than from him. That is the history of third candidates. Ross Perot, a candidate of the right, is credited with winning the Presidency for Bill Clinton. Ralph Nader was accused of handing an extremely close victory to George W Bush, stealing the presidency from his fellow environmentalist Al Gore.
The unpopularity of this year’s candidates is, perversely, one reason why we won’t see a credible third party challenge. No significant figure dare stand for fear of helping the candidate they dislike most. There is certainly logic to this — but what it means, paradoxically, is that for all the anti-establishment sentiment, we will in fact end up with an election more dominated by the two main parties than ever.
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