After Donald Trump decisively won the Indiana primary, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, along with others, started referring to the victor as the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.
Some joined in the call to rally behind Trump. His last two standing rivals — Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich — suspended their campaigns, legal spin used to quit running but still get funding.
{mosads}That declaration by Priebus added a new level of fretting to many grand old members of the Grand Old Party, as well as scads of others already agitating in the vacuous “anyone but Trump” movement. Trump’s win and Priebus’s anointment intensified the clarion call to find and run a third-party candidate who would save the party, if not the republic.
Let me cease to bury the lead any longer. To paraphrase Pogo, we have met the third-party candidate, and he is Trump.
There is a macabre delight in seeing regular party folks tout the needs of a strong third-party candidate, after all the efforts by the two major parties to thwart third-party and independent candidates all this century and much of the last.
Just as some have blamed the Republicans and their pact of steel with right-wing preachers, commentators and Tea Partyers for causing upheaval in their party, they — along with Democrats — are also to blame for the dearth of options for others to run competitive candidates.
They have voraciously worked together to deny independent and third-party candidates’ access to debates. They cross party lines in state legislatures to ensure ballot access laws are virtually impregnable, thwarting outsiders from challenging their fiefdoms.
So now, they look at third parties as the ambulance for their wounded party. Not likely.
The delusion that a newly minted third-party candidate can surge to be competitive ignores U.S. political history, most notably that Trump is the heir to the burning bush of populism that often singes and sometimes gives third-degree burns to the electoral system.
Trump has metastasized the perceived paternalism, paranoia and patriotism of the disenfranchised that has been ignited, stoked and flamed by iconic populists as former Republican President Teddy Roosevelt as the Bull Moose nominee in 1912, Wisconsin Republican Sen. Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette in 1924 as the Progressive nominee, Alabama Gov. George Wallace in 1968 and 1972, Pat Buchanan’s “peasants with pitchforks” in 1992, Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996, the Reform Party’s Jesse Ventura shocking the world in Minnesota in 1998 (elected governor), and Ralph Nader in 2000. They tapped into elements of discontent among Americans who felt disenfranchised and diminished, turning venom into virtue and scaring the big parties.
Those candidacies were fueled by those who felt exploited by and outcast from the political haves. History shows their potential punch.
In 1968, Wallace ran as a true third-party candidate, helping Republican Richard Nixon win and setting the stage for the South to become a GOP bastion. But what happened in 1972 was more of a zinger. Wallace sought the 1972 Democratic nomination and was doing very well in the primaries, winning some and coming in second in others before he was shot. Before the assassination attempt, Democrats panicked he would win — much as Republicans panic now when they realized Trump was winning.
Perot is also a role model for Trump. He had never held public office, largely financed his own campaign, relied on marketing and wide grassroots support, and touched the core of the issues bothering Americans. He received close to 19 percent of the popular vote, the most by a third-party presidential candidate since Roosevelt in 1912. Ross was right.
Granted, it is a long way from the Bull Moose to the Mad Tea Party that Trump is leading in his own Pied Piper way. Yet that is the political path we are on today.
Today, not only are ballot access laws and disarray working against third parties; it is also unlikely that either of two substantive existing third parties — the Libertarians and Greens — would give up their ballot lines to the GOP diehards, even if it would mean perhaps a significant share of the final vote in November.
Today’s Republican Party was seeded by the demise of the Whig Party (which had the National Republican Party as a precursor), which self-destructed because of the internal tension over the expansion of slavery to the territories. With deep fissures in the party on this question, the anti-slavery faction prevented the nomination to a full term of its own Whig incumbent, President Millard Fillmore, in the 1852 presidential election; he ran as a third-party nominee in 1856, the first year the Republicans had a presidential nominee.
Neither Fillmore nor the Republicans won in 1856, but four years later, Abraham Lincoln won in a four-way contest and set the stage for GOP dominance in presidential elections. The party won 20 of the 36 presidential contents between 1860 and 2008. It is even more impressive when you toss out Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s four wins and the fact that Democrat Woodrow Wilson won in 1912 because of Teddy Roosevelt’s third-party run (giving Wilson the win in 1912 and then an easy reelection in 1916).
After those outliers, only two other Democrats won two terms during that stretch. Their names? Cleveland and Clinton, two names also likely to impact the Republicans this year. History has a way of being very funny, although the GOP may think otherwise.
Squitieri is an award-winning reporter and communications veteran and an adjunct professor at American University and Washington and Jefferson College.