Republicans risking a third-party presidential run?

Could we end up with a third-party or independent challenger in the 2012 presidential race?  Matthew Dowd warns that Republicans run that risk if they nominate a candidate who either doesn’t attract independents or doesn’t fire up the conservative base:

Today, President Obama’s Gallup approval ratings are at an all-time low (38 percent). For the last two weeks, his approval rating has basically been stuck around 40 percent. For the last 60 years, an incumbent president running for reelection has basically received in national vote share the same percentage as his Gallup rating going into Election Day. If a president’s approval was 50 percent or more, it didn’t matter who his opponent was, he won. And if a president’s approval was below 45 percent, it didn’t matter who his opponent was — he lost.

We have not had a president in the inbetween numbers in the modern era, so we don’t know that territory. If the election were held today in a two-person race, Obama would lose his reelection bid. In addition, if his approval rating drops much further, he could easily face opposition within his own party.

If Republicans nominate an extremely polarizing figure who has a difficult time getting independent votes (especially in the crucial Midwest states) or one who instills no passion at all in the conservative base, and if Obama’s approval numbers stay low, then we basically would have two unelectable candidates facing each other in the general election.

Dowd makes an intriguing argument, but color me skeptical.  First, conservatives will be “fired up” to take on Obama even if the candidate doesn’t necessarily come from their ranks.  The only problem will be nominating a candidate who specifically douses conservative enthusiasm (which Dowd also notes), a possibility with more than one of the candidates in the race, especially those who like to insist in media appearances that conservatives are just too darned radical and extreme.  One can make the case that both Mitt Romney and Rick Perry can attract both conservatives and independents in a general election while holding onto the base.

Even if a third-party candidate decided to run, it’s an open question as to how well they could run.  In order to compete, such a candidate would have to get listed on 50 state ballots and raise enough money to compete successfully against both political parties.  Actually, the term “third party” is a huge misnomer; we already have a number of lower-tier parties that routinely run presidential candidates, such as the Libertarians, the Greens, and several others.  The most well-funded of those campaigns was the 2000 candidacy of Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, which managed to eat far enough into Al Gore’s base to flip Florida and cost him the election.  Otherwise, even with the funding that the Greens attract, they have almost no impact at all on national elections, or even state elections.

In the case of independent candidates who may or may not come out of the two major parties, that has an interesting if uninspiring track record, too.  Ross Perot had the most impact, likely costing George H. W. Bush a second term in 1992, but Perot had his own massive fortune on which to run and organize — and still didn’t win a single state.  Bob Barr ran as a Libertarian in 2008 but had been a Republican for years before, and turned into a trivia question.

The best parallel is probably John Anderson in 1980.  The political environments were quite similar; we had a massively failed Democratic incumbent running against a Republican considered too extreme to attract independents — and this was just six years after Richard Nixon’s resignation and Gerald Ford’s pardon.  John Anderson made an impressive run in the Republican primaries for a House member, coming just shy of beating Reagan in Vermont and George H. W. Bush in Massachusetts.  Insisting that Reagan was too far to the Right, Anderson launched a high-profile independent bid for the presidency, which attracted a lot of media attention, most of which was predictably fawning.  Analysts predicted that the GOP had blown their chance against Carter by picking Reagan instead of Anderson or even Bush and that Carter would win the independents while Anderson split the Right.

Anderson actually did pretty well; he got 6.6% of the popular vote while winning zero Electoral College votes.  Reagan crushed Carter 50.7% to 41% in the popular vote and took 44 states.  The election was not a referendum on the relative political positioning of the challenger, but on the performance of the incumbent.  This is a pattern across all of these examples.  Perot’s appearance in the 1992 race negatively impacted the incumbent Bush and split the vote against the challenger (his 1996 bid didn’t damage the incumbent, Bill Clinton, who would have easily beat Bob Dole anyway).  Nader’s impact on the race damaged the incumbent-by-proxy sitting VP, Al Gore.

If the nomination process ends up alienating a moderate Republican enough to launch an independent bid without Ross Perot’s hundreds of millions of dollars, don’t expect that to save Barack Obama.  Only Romney might be in position to do that, and he didn’t do it in 2008 when there would have been a better argument for it.

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