I guess the way it looks now, Barack Obama will probably be the Democratic nominee. Although truthfully, Hillary Clinton still has a chance, albeit a slim one now. But I recently heard something interesting on tv (sorry, I forget exactly where). During the nominating convention, the Democrats might nominate a third candidate, i.e., neither Hillary or Obama.
My question(s) is/are simply this: Is this possible? And how likely is this?
Thank you in advance to all who reply 
Unless major skeletons emerge from the closets of both Clinton and Obama, I can’t imagine your scenario coming to pass.
It’s been mentioned before, mainly by those who have a persistent woodie for Al Gore. It is theoretically possible. Just slightly more likely than Bush serving a third term but theoretically possible.
Technically, a delegate can’t legally be forced to vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged, so if Clinton and Obama appeared to be deadlocked (especially after the first or second ballot) a knight in shining armor could be put forward as a compromise candidate.
Only problem is that if that candidate peeled off enough votes from Clinton and Obama supporters to actually be nominated, the loyal supporters of both Clinton and Obama would walk out in protest, sit out the election and ensure the election of John McCain.
In other words: possible but highly unliely.
I hate to interject a non-vituperative post into a Clinton/Obama thread in Great Debates, but if you want to read up on a case of a candidate rising up out of nowhere at a presidential nominating convention check out Dark Horse about the 1880 Republican convention. Garfield slowly emerged (over 36 ballots) as the compromise candidate after Grant and Blaine kept deadlocking.
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The way the process goes these days, any true dark horse would still have to exhibit massive name recognition and extremely broad Dem support. I don’t think Edwards would suffice, so it could pretty much only be Gore. I just don’t see it.
Mind you, I’d vote for Jon Snow as a compromise. But then, I feel the Starks have always been strong supporters of the Watch.
Why do people keep bringing up a scenario that is as likely as dinosaurs once again walking the earth?
Seriously people! The “John McCain is really old jokes” are getting out of hand!
ETA: (more seriously, McCain kicking it before the convention is probably the most likely scenario for a non-primary runner to get a presidential nomination, though even then it would probably go to Romney.)
The Democrats are already having problems with two candidates. The last thing they need is a third one.
Seriously, how could any new candidate get the backing of the public? Say what you will about them, Clinton and Obama have both been out there campaigning for the job all along. If Al Gore or anyone else jumped in it would look like a open steal from two people who’ve been doing the heavy lifting. He would alienate all of the Clinton supporters and all of the Obama supporters and there wouldn’t be a lot of voters left after that.
I’ve heard more than a few people say, however, that if Al Gore were indeed in the race, they would support him INSTEAD of pretty much every other candidate the Dems have fielded thus far - including Clinton and Obama. I’ve been hearing this since basically early last year, when it was still unclear whether Gore would formally enter the primary race or not, despite his protestations that he was not going to run for office again. At the time, it seemed as if Gore could have steamrolled the other candidates in the primaries had he entered the race, since the campaign machines for the other Dems had not ramped up yet and Gore was already basking in a lot of positive press, from An Inconvenient Truth to his Nobel Prize. But he didn’t enter, hope for a Gore nomination started to fade, and the Dems who had supported him started to support other candidates.
Not to say that Obama and Clinton didn’t have supporters from the beginning, but I don’t think so many of the people supporting them NOW would be entirely unhappy with a Gore nomination (my mother, for one, would be ecstatic, even though she’s ostensibly a fervent Clinton supporter right now).
I would vote for Obama or Gore, but I wouldn’t vote for Clinton. I’m sure a lot of her supporters would vote for Gore but not Obama, too.
People can say whatever they want. But the reality is that millions of people have voted for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and nobody has been voting for Al Gore. Arbitrarily throwing out the candidates who’ve been on the ballot and handing the nomination to somebody else would a hundred times worse than arbitrarily counting the Florida and Michigan delegates.
…because he’s not on the ballot (and write-ins don’t count, because who honestly thinks that writing in a candidate would actually work, besides maybe Lyndon LaRouche?).
I think it’s easy to say that Clinton and Obama have built enormous support bases just looking at all the people who are very keyed up at their rallies and speeches, but this represents a very small part of the voting population. Beyond that, I have this suspicion that a fair number of people are more or less defaulting to whoever they think the strongest candidate in the official running is. Certainly this must be happening with the former supporters of Edwards, Richardson, etc., candidates who WERE in the running initially. While it WOULD be enormously unfair of the Democratic party to give the nomination to Al Gore after a Obama/Clinton victory, that’s different from saying that nobody would support Al Gore if he were nominated. I don’t think everyone who has voted for Clinton or Obama is necessarily a diehard heart-on-my-sleeve Clinton or Obama fan, and it’s just possible that if Gore HAD been on the ballot, he would have put up considerable competition for support. This is all speculation, of course, but not too far-fetched IMO.
Don’t get me wrong, I have long held the opinion of “if Gore runs I might consider supporting him, but I’m not going to sit here and secretly hope he does”. But DSeid is not inaccurate when referring to the “persistent woodie” that some Democrats hold for him. Judging from the many people I’ve talked to, it almost seems as if they want to have a do-over of 2000, this time with a much more venerable candidate (Nobel Peace Prize winner and all that) and a happier ending.
Gore tended to rouse strong feelings both ways. He’s the only potential candidate who could have gotten me out from behind my keyboard and gotten me to ring doorbells and canvass the neighborhood for him. But even when the pollsters were including him in the Dem nomination polls last spring and summer, he was, at best, competing with Edwards for third place. Maybe he would have done better if he’d actually declared, but this was true even when a lot of people believed he was going to jump in.
And his favorability/unfavorability ratings with the public at large were barely positive, kinda like Hillary.
In short, there’s really no evidence that a majority of the Democratic portion of the electorate was ready to get behind Gore in a contest with Hillary, Obama, Edwards and the others.
But even if it were true, it doesn’t matter. I agree with Little Nemo 100% on this: Obama and Hillary have run, have gotten the supporters and their votes, and one of them should be the nominee.
Believe it or not, on that point I agree 
Aside from being unfair, giving any candidate aside from Clinton or Obama the nomination would show an extreme lack of confidence on the part of the Democratic party in their two most popular candidates. If anything, I think this would alienate the apparently major number of “undecided” voters, as in, “the Dems seem to not be able to properly decide who they want to run, why should I vote for their nominee?”
Let me use a sports analogy here. Suppose it was the Super Bowl and the Giants and the Patriots were playing to decide the 2007 championship. Then half way through the fourth quarter, the blimp crashed into the middle of the field and forced them to stop the game. So now they’d have to decide who would have won.
The New England fans would say “We were undefeated all season and we deserve to be the champions.” And the New York fans would say “We were ahead 10-7 when the game stopped so we deserve to be the champions.” And then Commissioner Goodell comes out and announces “Both teams have presented strong cases and we can’t decide who’s right. So we’re giving the championship to Green Bay.”
Just so long as it isn’t Dallas. 