“This may surprise you to hear, but I’m ready to defend the proposition that Gov. Johnson can win,” Republican Congressman Scott Rigell of Virginia told CNN Wednesday.
Rep. Scott is backing Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson over his own party’s nominee, Donald Trump. He’s not the only Republican to do so.
But why does Scott think Johnson can win? Does anyone really think supporting a third party candidate could amount to anything more than a protest vote?
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“No one saw Trump winning the nomination, at least early on,” Scott said. “And I believe the same type of unusual, real anomalies and the forces that are coming against our country are present now in this election, the general election.”
Scott has a point. Crazy things have certainly happened in this election.
Virtually no one predicted Donald Trump would become the Republican nominee early on. Different prognosticators even explained how he never could.
Then he did.
Trump crushed his Republican competition.
We learned this week that the presidential debate stage might include a third podium, with organizers anticipating Johnson’s potential success.
There hasn’t been a three-way debate in a presidential election since Ross Perot in 1992, after which the political establishment created higher thresholds for third party candidates, such as having to garner 15 percent in multiple national polls to qualify.
Johnson isn’t too far from doing that, hitting 12 percent in some polls.
On Monday Reason’s Nick Gillespie explored what a potential President Johnson looked like on paper:
But what goes into the “commander-in-chief” role exactly? Johnson has more executive experience than Barack Obama had when he took over the U.S. military. He has more of that experience, too, than Hillary Clinton, whose “We came, we saw, he died” comments and laughter about Muammar Qaddafi are kind of, well, fucked up (as is her insistence that Libya remains an example of “smart power” at its most effective) […] There is no reason to believe that Gary Johnson, who is the most popular candidate among active-duty troops, wouldn’t command respect on the national and world stage as president. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that he will follow through consistently and clearly on the foreign policy that he’s articulated so far, which is likely to earn the respect and relief of the planet far more than either George Bush or Barack Obama did.
“And yes, Johnson doesn’t fit the mold cast for presidents in the 20th century,” notes Gillespie. “Which might actually be the point, given that the 20th century is history, and it’s not coming back.”
Good point. In an election like nothing we’ve seen before, maybe who ends up being president could also be something we’ve never seen before.
And maybe not. The New York Times Emma Roller explained the historical quandary for third party candidates:
The idea of having a strong third party in American politics is popular in theory. Last year, roughly 60 percent of respondents said in a Gallup poll that a third party was needed because the Republican and Democratic parties do a poor job of representing them. But our system of government is not built to sustain a viable third-party option, at least not at a national level.
Deciding between two less-than-ideal presidential options isn’t just common; it’s in our heritage. First-past-the-post systems, in which multiple candidates vie for one seat, tend to produce two-party democracies, while parliamentary systems allow for a more diverse slate of political parties. So barring a constitutional amendment that fundamentally restructured the executive branch, America’s two-party system is unlikely to change soon.
Still, as Professor Masket pointed out, “That doesn’t mean they have to be these two parties.”
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“The level of dissatisfaction with the two nominees is so wide, and it’s so intense,” Rep. Rigell said Wednesday. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
And we still have three months to go in what has to be called the most unique election in modern American political history.
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