Imagine the voters decide that they dislike both Trump and Clinton and elect one of the third-party candidates. Now, the Houses are controlled by the parties, so how would they cope with a third-party President?
Remember when McConnell said, “Our goal is to make this a one term presidency,” and many peoples’ heads exploded?
Well, both parties would be on the same page.
Probably try to top him up with four parts bourbon.
I would think if a 3rd party candidate could get elected, there would also be a major change in both the Senate and the House.
In Minnesota, we once elected an Independent as Governor, Jesse Ventura.
In practice, he largely dropped all his liberal campaign promises (marijuana legalization, same-sex marriage, etc.) and went with republican ideas on taxes & budgeting.
So effectively he was Republican-lite.
THere’s three possible outcomes. The first that you mention is likely if the President has as much disdain for Congress as Congress is likely to have for him.
However, there are two other possibilities. The first is that the President chooses a side, as Ventura did. Ventura didn’t so much abandon campaign promises as recognize that the Republicans were more receptive to him than the Democrats, who consider power in Minnesota to be their due. Likewise, Gary Johnson, the only 3rd party candidate with a remote chance of winning, would simply act as if he was the real GOP nominee all along. 3rd party or independent candidates have tended to do very well simply by picking a side in the past: Angus King, Bernie Sanders are two good examples.
The last possibility is an extremely talented politician who builds ad hoc coalitions for whatever issues he’s focused on at the time, even as one or both parties is focused on defeating him. Arguably, Bill Clinton governed that way even though he was a Democrat, but an independent with Clinton’s skills could pull off the same trick.
For the purposes of the 2016 election, Gary Johnson would just govern as a Republican. It’s just the path of least resistance for him. Jill Stein, however, would probably have serious issues. The Republicans would be running around like their hair was on fire about a Marxist takeover of the White HOuse, and Democrats would be pretty peeved about Jill Stein being a genuine anti-Wall Street, anti-globalization advocate and would work to bring her down more quietly so as not to piss off the base that got her elected. And Stein doesn’t seem like the type to sell out, so she’d have Sanders and a few arch liberals with principles as her allies and pretty much no one else.
I think this is what would happen in a national election. Independents have leaned more republican than democratic over the years, so they’d probably run as independents but govern more like republicans. They would probably start out trying to be more fiscally responsible in earnest but would run into gridlock when they find that most of the cuts have to come from entitlements and the military. The democrats would flip out over cuts to entitlement spending and the republicans would freak out over cuts to the military. The outcome would probably be a bipartisan deal in which parties propose massive automatic cuts two or three years down the road after an initial budget impasse and then those would take effect after a final budget disagreement (a la 2013).