Chances of a 3rd (heck, 4th) party candidate this year?

Great Debates
1

Other than the Socialists and other minor parties who always run and get miniscule numbers of votes of course.

First of all, someone mentioned that Obama might win the overall popular vote but that Hillary might do that voodoo of hers and get enough superdelegates to push her past. At that point Obama decides to run as a 3rd party candidate. Small but significant chance.

The real possibility of course is that the fundy wing of the Repos decides to put forth a candidate of their own to counter McCain, and if the Obama scenario above plays out I fully expect them to take advantage and do just that.

Well the clincher of course is that if nobody gets 270 electoral votes that it goes to the House, which with its current Democratic majority will almost certainly fall in behind Clinton.

Just starting the thread, please further expound on/correct the above suppositions…

2

I see no chance of a significant third-party run this year. I don’t think that Barak Obama would try to torpedo the Democratic Party if Hillary did get the nomination; he’s too intelligent and polite for that. I don’t think the Republicans would try a third party attack on McCain from the right, because they’re too afraid of giving the Democrats complete control in Washington. Further, though right-wing critics of McCain are vocal, they are few in number. Further further, there isn’t a strong right-wing candidate to do the job.

The other possibility is a Ron Paul candinacy. Paul has the advantage of a solid core of supporters entirely dedicated to himself, who truly don’t care who wins in November. However, his four percent showing in the Republican primaries would translate to less than two percent in the general election, so it wouldn’t be a serious concern for McCain.

3

Do (will) the Demorcats have a majority of Congressional delegations was well as a majority of members? Each state only gets one vote (regardless of population).

4

In the highly unlikely case that HRC wins the nomination in a manner widely perceived as unfair (seating FL and MI without new votes, superdelegates overriding the pledged delegate and popular vote tallies out of obligations to the Clinton machine, etc.) then I could see Bloomberg stepping in. And he might even win under those circumstances.

Obama would not, or at least there is no real “significant chance” of it. He would give her lukewarm support, expect her to fail miserably, and run again in four years.

I see no groundswell on the far right of sufficient magnitude to run someone other than McCain there. Nor any one of sufficient stature and/or money to do it even if they wanted to.

5

Republicans have 21 states, 3 are tied, which means Democrats have 26, guaranteeing a majority.

6

There can be no serious third party run. Obama would never run as an independent, because that means he’d have to torpedo his chances of ever running as a Democrat again. A Ron Paul or Ralph Nader type might not mind cutting off all ties to their party, but Obama is young and has a future.

A third party run by Obama or Bloomberg would have no chance of actually winning the presidency, all it would do would be to split the Democratic-leaning voters into to camps, guaranteeing a win for McCain.

If Hillary cheats her way to the nomination Obama will fight, but if at the end of the day he’s not the nominee, he’ll stifle himself and wait for 2012. And the trouble for Hillary is that an unfair nomination would probably sink her in the general election, which means four years of McCain. And if that happens, by 2012 the voters will be even more tired of the republican party.

No one who actually wants to be president should run on a third party ticket, for simple reasons of math. If you want to be president, you pick your party and run on either the Republican or Democratic ticket. Because if you aren’t popular enough to win a nomination by a major party, how in hell are you going to be popular enough to win the general? Sure, if both parties nominate totally unacceptable candidates, then it’s conceiveable that a third party candidate can step in and win. But why didn’t they jump in earlier?

And note that it takes two unacceptable major party candidates to make a third party run viable. If you just one of the candidates is unacceptable, your third party run will simply have the effect of siphoning off some of the votes that the unacceptale candidate would have gotten. All you do in that case is guarantee that the acceptable major party candidate will win.

It HAS happened that a third party candidate has won a governorship, and Joe Lieberman did win on an independent run after losing the primary. But to duplicate Lieberman, you’d have to imagine the party ditching a sitting president, and then the president deciding to run as an independent. That’s not happening this year.

The most likely third party challenge is a religious right challenge to McCain, and all that will do is guarantee that the Democratic nominee will win. The religious right might not care, I suppose, or might prefer a Democrat under the old Marxist doctrine of “the worse the better”.

7

Not that he has any reason to, but if Al Gore really wanted to fuck the Deomcrats, he could, by running.

8

Bloomberg has been unusually vocal the last week or so, with criticisms of Bush’s policies and the way the country’s been run. It LOOKS like he’s either gearing up for a 3rd party run or trying to smooth the way for a Democratic candidate. But he’s kind of opaque, so it may just be that he’s feeling grouchy and the media’s actually listening to him now.

9

Or, my usual view of what Mayor Mike says, he’s saying what he really feels because he feels it and feels like saying it, and not for some deeper or more subtle political purpose.

I don’t think he’s opaque, but that the media tries to read all of the tea leaves under what he’s saying when he’s simply having a cup of tea. Drives them all buggy.

10

Especially in an election year, I guess. People on both sides of the aisle have been waiting (with great trepidation) for him to yell “BOO!” and jump onto a white horse to gallop his way to the White House past the two major parties.

11

Yeah, but it would only make sense for him to run if that were the only way he could prevent a third Bush term.

But Bush isn’t running for a third term, and even if he were, a Bloomberg third party run might be the only thing that would hand him that third term. If he were really concerned about that Bush third term then the thing to do would be to get behind the democratic candidate with all his might.

Unless of course, he were convinced that the Democratic candidate was equally horrific. Except, how did it come to pass that no qualified Democrat emerged as teh nominee? If Bloomberg thought it was that important, shouldn’t he have gotten involved a bit earlier, supported one of the non-horrific candidates as hard as he could, or even run for the Democratic nomination himself?

If Bloomberg thought that McCain would be an epic disaster that had to be prevented at all costs, then a third party run would be just about the most counterproductive way to fight that McCain presidency imaginable. And if he thought that Hillary would be an equal epic disaster, then why in hell isn’t he on the streets getting Obama his money? Or vice versa if Obama’s the disaster?

Or if at this point he’s convinced that McCain, Obama, AND Hillary will all be equal epic disasters, then he needs to face up to the fact that a third party run for president isn’t going to prevent one of those three people from being the next president, the overwhelmingly likely outcome is the perverse Nader effect where the third party candidate hands the presidency to the candidate that has the policies least acceptable to the third party candidate.

I can imagine a theocrat third party run, from some Pat Buchanan type from the troglodyte religious right, on the grounds that all three candidates are in league with Satan, so it doesn’t matter who wins.

But Bloomberg’s not a nut, so if he runs for president one would assume he would do so in order to accomplish something. Only thing is, for the life of me I can’t image what that might be. And therefore, all this talk of a Bloomberg third party run is nonsense. The only reason it’s even brought up is because while Bloomberg might have presidential ambitions, he’s screwed himself with both the Democratic party and the Republican party. So if he did want to run for president it would have to be on an independent ticket. But all that means is that he can’t run for president and have a hope in hell of succeeding. Well, cry me a river, Bloomberg’s never going to be president, him and about 300 million other people. There are thousands of other people who woulda coulda shoulda, but for various reasons fell short.

No serious candidate is going to run on a third party ticket, unless they’re comfortable with a “Beneath the Planet of the Apes” style endgame. So Gore isn’t, Bloomberg isn’t, Obama isn’t, Hillary isn’t.

Huckabee or Ron Paul? Those two are just barely possible. But Huckabee’s got to know that if he runs on a religious right third party ticket, he’s finished forever in the Republican party. It’s not like this will be his only shot, there’s 2012 and 2016 and 2020 coming up in a few short years. If he really thought the country was ready for his message, aren’t we going to be even more ready 4 years from now? Unless he honestly thinks it doesn’t matter, either McCain, Hillary or Obama will literally hand the country over to the Antichrist in the next 4 years. But I don’t think that’s Huck’s style.

12

What? How do you figure?

Who are these “fundies”? The religious voters like McCain; it’s the big-money types & Tancredo’s nazis that have issues with him.

Um, given your assumption that HRC somehow keeps the party behind her, that might make sense. But really, Obama’s got a lot of support in Congress itself. HRC can win among Dem superdelegates including local & state pols; Obama, however, might get a majority of Congressmen by drawing on both Dems & Pubs, unless Pelosi & Stoyer demand a party-line unity.

13

Well, Bloomberg is out.