The probability of a three-way race for the presidency is increasing.
The third-party candidate could be Donald Trump, if he is rejected after the first ballot in Cleveland, or a prominent Republican endorsed by the GOP establishment in the event that Trump gets the nomination.
So do third-party bids ever have a chance? Given the "winner take all" logic of our Electoral College, not really. But they can sometimes decide who else wins.
The most successful third-party bid of the past century or so, albeit in an ironic way, came in 1912, when a radicalized Teddy Roosevelt went third party after having failed to wrest the Republican nomination from his former protégé William Howard Taft. The "bull moose" thumped the hapless Taft in both the popular (27 percent to 23 percent) and electoral vote (88 to 8) only to hand the presidency to arch-enemy Woodrow Wilson, who carried 40 states worth 435 electoral votes with just 41.8 percent of the votes.
No significant third-party effort occurred after that until 1968, when Alabama Gov. George Wallace bolted from the Democratic Party and carried five Southern states, including Arkansas, with his "segregation forever" message. Had he won a few more (North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee), he could have denied Richard Nixon the 270 votes necessary to win (Nixon ended up with 301, to Hubert Humphrey's 191).
Republican Rep. John B. Anderson, from my home district in Illinois, ran third party in 1980 but got only 7 percent of the vote and no electoral votes. As a member of a now-extinct species (liberal Republicans) Anderson probably pulled at least as many votes from a liberal Jimmy Carter as from a conservative Ronald Reagan, but it didn't really matter in Reagan's 489-49 electoral landslide.
Ross Perot did better than Anderson in both of his third-party bids, winning 19 percent of the vote in 1992 and a bit over 8 percent in 1996, but, like Anderson, not a single electoral vote in either. Political scientists still argue about how much his first campaign hurt incumbent George H.W. Bush and helped elect Bill Clinton.
Of course, the last third-party bid to matter was one that attracted only a minuscule percentage of the vote--Ralph Nader's 2000 campaign. George W. Bush won Florida and thus the presidency that year by 534 disputed votes. But Nader got more than 97,000 in the sunshine state, the vast majority of which would have otherwise gone to fellow liberal Al Gore.
A third-party bid this year by either Trump or a prominent Republican (Paul Ryan?) if Trump wins the nomination will almost certainly be the most consequential since Roosevelt's in 1912, but with likely the same results--a split between Trump/Ryan similar to that between TR/Taft and an electoral landslide for Hillary Clinton, as for Wilson then.
There are, however, two rays of hope for Republicans under a third-party scenario.
First, that there might be enough voters sufficiently disgusted by having to choose between Trump and Hillary that there would be an enthusiastic embrace of an alternative (on the basis of "never Trump or Hillary"). If ever there was a need for a third option, and a genuine chance for that option to win, it might be this year.
Second would be the possibility of making the three-way into a four-way race, by provoking Bernie Sanders into a third-party bid.
There is little evidence that Sanders is considering such a route at this point, but some polls indicate that nearly a third of his supporters won't support Hillary as the Democratic nominee, and he consistently, if somewhat inexplicably, does better than she does in one-to-one poll matchups against Trump, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich. Throw in the resentment that has been building in the Sanders camp over the way the Democratic establishment has rigged the race in Hillary's favor, with a "super-delegate" edge of 469-31 thus far, and the idea suddenly becomes a bit less far-fetched.
So how would a Hillary-Sanders-Trump-Ryan (for the sake of argument) race play out? At the least, one could expect Sanders to siphon off nearly as much of the Democratic vote as a Trump third-party bid would from the GOP, leading to a contest in which each of the contenders could possibly top 20 percent of the vote but none would get much above 30 percent. (In this scenario Sanders would do much better than his ideological predecessor from 1912, Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs, who only got 6 percent.)
If no one could get to 270 electoral votes in such an evenly split four-candidate race (as seems likely), the top three would, per constitutional provisions, be thrown into the House of Representatives for disposition.
That hasn't happened in nearly 200 years, since 1824, when it produced the disputed presidency of John Quincy Adams (who had actually finished behind Andrew Jackson in both popular and electoral votes).
Republicans have, of course, the edge in the lower chamber, and therein might be found a path toward promoting Ryan from speaker of the House to president (and thus avoid a President Donald Trump or a President Hillary Clinton).
Or is such speculation merely a reflection of how pathetic and desperate the Republican predicament has now become?
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 04/11/2016