OPINION:
The conventional wisdom is that an independent presidential bid by New York billionaire Donald Trump would harm the Republican candidate in 2016. That’s probably incorrect. Most often, significant independent general-election candidacies harm the incumbent or incumbent party more than they do the challenging party.
As Alan J. Lichtman and Ken DeCell note in their book, “The 13 Keys to the Presidency,” of the 33 elections preceding and including the 1988 election, the incumbent party won 18 of 26 in which there was no significant third-party candidate. Of the seven in which a third-party candidate emerged with serious vote-getting chops, the incumbent party lost five contests.
There is an explanation for this. Significant third-party candidates emerge in times of turmoil, with a generalized dissatisfaction in the land. Conversely, independent candidacies don’t become significant unless there is serious anger directed against the status quo, for which the incumbent party is responsible. Thus, independent candidacies most often undermine the incumbent or incumbent party.
Consider 1968, when George Wallace ran against Democrat Hubert Humphrey, vice president at the time, and Republican Richard Nixon. Many thought Wallace would collect most of his votes from Nixon, since both were social-issue conservatives at a time of intense social-issue passion. But Nixon won — by a very thin margin. Thus, Wallace must have taken most of his votes from Humphrey because of the perceived poor performance of incumbent President Lyndon Johnson. Wallace ran forcefully against the establishment of both parties, declaring famously that “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference’’ between them. In the process, he essentially split off the last remaining Democratic white vote in the South, which eventually — through Nixon’s controversial “Southern strategy’’ — was pulled into the Republican Party. Thus do we see how feisty third-party candidates can scramble up political fault lines and harm the incumbent even when they seem most likely to pull votes from the challenging party.
A similar phenomenon occurred in 1980, when Republican John Anderson, after failing to capture his party’s presidential nomination, ran as an independent, polling just under 7 percent of the popular vote. Here we had a classic split within the GOP between the party’s traditional liberal and conservative wings. Conventional wisdom posited that this would seriously harm the Republicans, much as former President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 bid against GOP incumbent William Howard Taft split the party and gave the election to Democrat Woodrow Wilson. But the 1980 loser turned out to be incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter.
This suggests that the damage done by third-party candidates doesn’t necessarily accrue to the party to which they nominally belong. As Mr. Lichtman and Mr. DeCell point out, leaving aside the Populist campaign of 1892, since the 1850s every serious third-party challenge came from “a charismatic leader [who] galvanized discontent either within the incumbent party or among groups without clear allegiance to either major party.’’ Either way, the incumbent party usually turned out to pay the heaviest price.
The authors posit that a third-party candidate must collect at least 5 percent of the vote to have this kind of impact on the outcome. The only exception, in their view, was the combined insurgencies of Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond in 1948, who together “carved separate constituencies out of the left and right wings of the Democratic Party.’’ Together they drew 4.8 percent, not enough to upend incumbent Democrat Harry Truman.
On the other hand, consumer activist Ralph Nader’s 2000 candidacy under the Green Party imprimatur (and aligned with two splinter parties in Vermont and South Carolina) pulled in just 2.74 percent of the vote in an election in which he was on the ballot in 43 states and the District of Columbia. But one of those states was Florida, where the incumbent-party candidate, Democrat Al Gore of Tennessee, lost to Republican George W. Bush by just 537 votes. Mr. Nader polled 97,421 votes, and, as he himself has pointed out, exit polls indicated that, had he not been on the Florida ballot, 38 percent of his vote would have gone to Mr. Gore, while 25 percent would have gone to Mr. Bush (with the rest not voting). Those 13 percentage points, if the exit polls were accurate, would have translated into nearly 13,000 votes for Mr. Gore, enough to give him the election.
It’s pretty easy to see how a man of the left such as Mr. Nader would pull most of his votes from the Democratic Party, just as it could be predicted that a Teddy Roosevelt insurgency in 1912 would do in his fellow Republican, Taft. But, even when it isn’t so clear, incumbents tend to get hurt most by third-party candidates.
Which brings us to 2016 and Mr. Trump. As a political phenomenon, he clearly is a product of a generalized discontent within the electorate of the kind that spawned most other third-party candidacies. That discontent, if it holds through the election, will accrue to the detriment of the incumbent Democrats and help the Republican candidate. But, to the extent that a third-party Trump candidacy draws votes, it will draw more votes from the White House party than the challenging party.
Will Mr. Trump run? Probably, as he will fizzle as a GOP candidate at some point and he doesn’t seem inclined to fade away. Will he draw many votes? Given the political climate and his bank account, perhaps somewhat north of 5 percent. Will that harm the Republican candidate? Probably not.
• Robert W. Merry, longtime Washington journalist and publishing executive, is the author of books on American history and foreign policy.
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