Three's a Crowd: The Dynamic of Third Parties, Ross Perot, and Republican Resurgence

1. Introduction: The Dynamic of Third Parties

Introduction THE DYNAMIC OF THIRD PARTIFS AMERICANS ARE AMBIVALENT ABOUT political parties. Better than 85 percent ofAmerican citizens identify more or less strongly with one of the two major parties, most vote consistently with their party identification , and most people think the American two-party system is a good thing. At the same time, however, dissatisfaction with the parties' nominees in presidential elections is common, as many wish they had more choice in elections or would like to see a third party elllerge in national politics (mack and Black 1994). Reforms that weaken the parties, such as open primaries and nonpartisan elections, enjoy broad support. Insurgent candidates have sometimes appeared to benefit from this ambivalence about the major parties, at least to a point. When dissatisfaction with the major parties is high, a third-party or independent candidate is more likely to emerge and attract significant electoral support. I The interest in and support for such candidacies can be high, it seems, because they challenge the two-party system and "politics as usual." However, such candidates are also victimized by the attraction most people feel to the major parties. Thus, even though early summer polls showed John Anderson attracting more than 25 percent of prospective I. We follow standard practice and use the C'xpressions third-party candidate, lIliuorparty candidate, and independent candidate interchangeably to mean a candidate who runs as other than a nominee of the Democratic or Republican parties. 3 4 THREE'S A CROWD voters' support in 1980 and Ross Perot ahead of the 1992 Democratic and Republican nominees in trial-heat matchups, the inevitable decline set in quickly as voters' loyalties to the major parties kicked in with the onset of their respective campaigns (Zaller and Hunt 1994, 1995). Indeed , formidable barriers to third parties usually deter potential candidates , some of whom are quite prominent, from running outside the two-party system. In fact, of course, "successful" third-party candidacies are rare, and even they require a redefinition of "success." No third party has emerged to form an enduring national political party capable of electing its candidates to multiple offices in the American system of government since the Republican Party appeared in the pre-Civil War turmoil of the 1850s. So, if we mean by "success" a party's ability regularly to elect its candidates to office, including to the presidency, we have no examples in over 150 years. However, most scholars follow Walter Dean Burnham, who defined "successful" third parties as those that attract at least 5 percent of the vote (Burnham 1970,28). By the Burnham standard, Ross Perot's electoral movement in 1992 and his Reform candidacy in 1996 were extraordinarily successful. As an independent candidate in 1992, Perot attracted 18.9 percent of the popular vote. As the 1996 nominee of the newly created Reform Party, his popular vote was still comfortably above 5 percent, though it dropped from the 1992 mark to 8.4 percent. Perot's popular-vote total in 1992 was second only to ex-president Theodore Roosevelt's 27.5 percent among all twentieth-century third-party candidates. Perot's was the first thirdparty movement to attract more than 5 percent of the vote in two successive presidential elections since the Republican Party emerged to supplant the Whigs as the major-party alternative to the Democrats. As important as the Perot movement is in the history of third parties, this is not a book primarily about Ross Perot as an individual, nor is its principal focus the Perot movement per se. We begin with a simple insight recognized by virtually every close observer of third-party politics in the United States: third parties are creatures of the American twoparty system. A typical third party derives its support because in some way the Democratic and Republican parties have failed, and its most important impact on the two major parties typically occurs after the third party disappears. Our study of the Perot movement is primarily a study Introduction 5 ofa process of major-party change rooted in the emergence, success, and demise of"major" or "successful" third parties of the sort that Burnham discussed. Indeed, Burnham was interested in these parties because he saw them as harbingers ofsignificant m;uor-party change, in the form of a "realignment."While we do not employ a realignment framework for our analysis, we agree with Burnham that enduring shifts in the...