Americans were dissatisfied with both major-party options for president. The incumbent was viewed as prioritizing foreign affairs while failing to address voter dissatisfaction with the economy back home. The challenger was dogged by scandal. There was a palpable yearning for someone else. So a third-party contender entered the race — and was received with raucous enthusiasm, shooting to first place in the polls.
The year was 1992, and the third-party candidate was billionaire businessman Ross Perot. Obviously, Perot didn’t end up winning. But he had what now stands as the strongest performance for a third-party presidential candidate in the past century — he got nearly 19 percent of the vote nationally.
Now dissatisfaction with the two likely major party nominees is mounting again — a recent Monmouth poll found that 69 percent of registered voters said they were “not too enthusiastic” or “not enthusiastic at all” about a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Some third-party candidates are already in the race; others may follow. And some polls have shown Robert F. Kennedy Jr. around Perot’s level of support.
So why did Perot catch on in 1992? And could something like his semi-success — or even beyond it — happen again next year?
Unlike ideological fringe third-party candidates, Perot ran as a populist centrist challenging the two parties. But he ran in a very different political environment — one of less polarization between the parties, where voters felt less terrified about the horrors that the “other side” winning might bring about.
We can think of the prospects for an independent candidate to have an unlikely success as depending on two conditions. First, have lots of people become disillusioned with the major parties? Second, have they lost their fear of the party they most dislike winning — concluding, essentially, that it doesn’t even matter which of the two parties wins? If both sentiments are widespread, as they…
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