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WHAT ABOUT A THIRD-PARTY PRESIDENT?
By Lisa Desjardins, @LisaDNews
Correspondent
 
The majority of Americans don’t love the leading options for president. 
 
President Joe Biden, the incumbent Democrat, has a meager 39 percent average approval rating, per Five Thirty Eight. And the frontrunner on the Republican side is in nearly the same hole. Donald Trump’s favorability rating is averaging 40 percent.
 
For perspective, those numbers are close to the levels for President Richard Nixon after news broke that his own counsel had named him in the Watergate cover-up(!). 
 
So, really not good. 
 
(Note: We are exactly 50 years since the Watergate tapes were revealed. Here is our “Huh!” segment on why that matters now.)
 
As we reported ourselves, so much can happen between today and Election Day, but it’s no small wonder that a conversation around a third-party president is again bubbling up. And volunteers are leaning in. Scholar and progressive activist Cornel West is running, and Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia may be flirting with the idea.
 
No better time to look at the third-party landscape, starting with some historical context. We will cut to the chase: Americans, historically, stick to major parties. 
 
Past presidents

• The only independent candidate to become U.S. president. The nation has had just one president who was unaffiliated with any political party. And that was the man who started it all: George Washington.
• The last president who was neither a D nor an R. Technically, that could be President Andrew Johnson, elected in 1864 on the National Union Party ticket. However, the National Union Party was a temporary name for the Republican Party. Before him, it was President Millard Fillmore, a Whig, who served from 1850 to 1853. However, the Whigs were one of two major political parties at the time. So neither was a third-party president.

• Teddy Roosevelt was the most successful. The Rough Rider won 27 percent of the popular vote running with his Progressive Party (nicknamed the Bull Moose Party) in 1912.
• But Ross Perot perhaps deserves more credit. Perot, a billionaire and king of charts, captured some 19 percent of the popular vote running as an independent in 1992. Let me do something rare for me, and express an opinion. I argue Perot’s achievement should rank higher in impressiveness than Roosevelt’s. The latter was an incumbent president and long known to the Americans. Perot had neither of those advantages. Come at me with your best counterarguments via email. (Editor’s note: 😳)
• Ralph Nader. It does not take double-digit vote percentages to matter. In 2000, consumer advocate Ralph Nader ran as the nominee of the Green Party. He won 3 percent of the popular vote, well down the list of all third-party showings. But Republican George W. Bush won the election by the narrowest of margins — just five electoral votes. Gore won the popular vote. Ever since, debate has raged and studies have launched over whether Nader cost Gore and Democrats the election. 

• Cornel West, progressive scholar, is running for the Green Party nomination.
• Joe Manchin, Democrat and senator from West Virginia, has said he won’t rule out a run but would only do it “to win.” (We have covered Manchin for a long time, and are skeptical that he will run for president, but admit we can see him chewing on the idea.)
• Tulsi Gabbard, former congresswoman from Hawaii, has said recently that she will “consider all options.” Gabbard is hard to categorize. Last year, she left the Democratic Party and has not joined another. Thus, that is her most recent affiliation. But she regularly has media appearances with conservative outlets. We are keeping her in the middle of our spectrum but want to note that her position is more individual.
• Larry Hogan, Republican and former Maryland governor, has been thinking about the possibility of a run with the group “No Labels,” (more on that below) though he also says his primary goal is to keep Trump from becoming the Republican nominee. 
• Jon Huntsman, Republican and former Utah governor. He is also considering a run, with the group No Labels. 
• Liz Cheney, Republican and former congresswoman from Wyoming, said this month she is not ruling it out.
• Libertarian TBD. The Libertarian Party will also nominate its own candidate. Like Gabbard, they do not necessarily fit in a right-to-left spectrum. But libertarians in Congress are generally conservative Republicans, with their own independent views.

• The nonpartisan group No Labels has generated a waterfall of headlines with its plan to put a third-party candidate on the ballot across the country.  
• No Labels has said they are launching a $70 million effort, aiming to change the American political map by uniting dissatisfied voters across the spectrum.
• But some have warned that the effort will instead simply benefit Trump. That includes former House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt, who spoke to the PBS NewsHour about this.
• What’s ahead? The attention on this will only rise. But the major tests will come next year, when independent and third-party candidates need to meet the requirements to get on the ballot in each state and the District of Columbia.