John: A 3rd party will not win a national election in our lifetime:
Listed below are all elections in which a third-party or independent candidate won an electoral vote or won at least 1% of the popular vote. Elections where a third party candidate won electoral votes (excepting faithless electors) are marked with an asterisk (*).
1832 The Anti-Masonic Party, seeking the eradication of the Freemasons and other secret societies from the United States, nominated former U.S. Attorney General William Wirt for President. Wirt, a former Mason, received seven U.S. electoral college votes from the state of Vermont and 8% of the national popular vote.
John Floyd received no popular votes but won 11 electoral votes when the state of South Carolina, where the state legislature cast electoral votes, voted to support Floyd. President Andrew Jackson was unpopular in South Carolina due to the Nullification Crisis. Jackson won re-election while Henry Clay finished second.
1844 James G. Birney, running as the candidate of the anti-slavery Liberty Party, won 2.3% of the national popular vote. Birney’s candidacy may have been decisive in swinging the election to winner James K. Polk. Democrat Polk beat Whig Henry Clay 170-105 in the Electoral College, but in New York, which had 36 electoral votes, Polk edged out Clay by 5,000 votes, 48.90% to 47.85%. Birney won nearly 16,000 votes in New York, a quarter of his national total and good for 3.25% in that state. If Birney had not run, the majority of his votes would have gone to the Whigs rather than the pro-slavery Democrats, but whether or not Clay would have netted five thousand more votes is unknown. Starting with Birney, anti-slavery parties would make strong showings in every election up to the Civil War.
1848 The Free Soil Party, another anti-slavery party and a precursor of the Republicans, nominated former President Martin Van Buren as its presidential candidate. Van Buren won 10% of the nationwide popular vote but did not carry a state. Zachary Taylor, the Whig Party candidate, won the election.
1852 For the third election in a row, an anti-slavery party made a significant showing, as John P. Hale of the Free Soil Party received 5% of the nationwide popular vote. Democrat Franklin Pierce won the election.
1856 In 1856 the original two-party system (Democrat and Whig) collapsed. The Whigs, who had been one-half of the two-party system since 1832 and had won the presidency in 1840 and 1848, disintegrated, fatally split by dissension over slavery. Southern Whigs and a minority of northern Whigs coalesced around the anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic American Party, better known as the “Know Nothing” movement. Their candidate was former President Millard Filmore. Northern, anti-slavery Whigs formed the new Republican Party and nominated explorer John C. Fremont. Which was the “third party”, Republican or American, is a matter of perception. In the Northern, free states, Fillmore ran a distant third. However, in the Southern, slave states, the Republicans received almost no support, not even appearing on the ballot in 13 of the 15 slave states and receiving tiny shares of the vote in the border slave states of Delaware and Maryland. Democrat James Buchanan won the election with 45% of the popular vote and 174 electoral votes, Fremont received 33% and 114 electoral votes, while Fillmore won 22% but carried only one state, Maryland, thus winning 8 electoral votes.
1860 The election featured four candidates, including the breakaway Southern Democratic Party, which nominated Vice President John C. Breckenridge as its candidate, and the Constitutional Union Party, neutral on the slavery issue, which nominated John Bell. Breckenridge, the southern pro-slavery candidate, carried most of the slave states, but had little support in the North outside of Pennsylvania. Bell drew most of his support from former southern Whigs.
Abraham Lincoln won the election with 39.8% of the overall popular vote with 180 electoral votes, his votes being concentrated in the northern free states. Stephen A. Douglas finished second in the popular vote with 29.5%, but his votes were scattered all over the country and as a result he won only 12 electoral votes. Breckenridge, the quasi-third party candidate of southern Democrats, got 18.2% winning 72 electoral votes from several south states. Bell, a true third party candidate, finished with 12.6% but received 39 electoral votes from three states.
Following 1860 a new two-party system coalesced around the Democratic and Republican parties.
1880 James B. Weaver of the Greenback Labor Party won 3.3% of the popular vote.
1884 The Greenback Labor Party changed its name to the Greenback Party. Ben Butler, running as the joint candidate of the Greenback Party and the new Anti-Monopoly Party, won 1.3% of the popular vote. Neither the Greenback nor the Anti-Monopoly parties lasted past the 1884 election, but other progressive and populist parties would succeed them.
Also in 1884, the Prohibition Party made its first significant showing, with John Pierce St. John of Kansas winning 1.5% of the popular vote.
1888 The Prohibition Party, with nominee Clinton B. Fisk, improved on its showing from four years before, increasing to 2.2% of the popular vote. Alson J. Streeter of the short-lived Union Labor Party won 1.3%.
1892 James B. Weaver, the Greenback Labor nominee in 1880, ran as presidential candidate for the Populist Party. The Populist Party won 22 electoral votes and 8.51 percent of the popular vote [4]. Weaver became the first third-party candidate to win a state since John Bell in the transitional election of 1860. The Democratic Party eventually adopted many Populist Party positions after this election, notably the Populist call for the free coinage of silver, making this contest a prominent example of a delayed vote for change.
John Bidwell, running on the Prohibition ticket, won 2.2% of the popular vote.
1896 The Populist Party supported Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan after Bryan and the Democrats came out for support of Free Silver. Democrat/Populist Bryan won 47% of the vote and 171 electoral votes, losing to Republican William McKinley.
1900 John G. Woolley of the Prohibition Party won 1.5% of the popular vote.
1904 Eugene Debs, Socialist Party candidate, won 3% of the popular vote. Debs and the Socialists would be factors in Presidential elections for several more cycles.
Silas C. Swallow of the Prohibition Party received that party’s usual 2% of the popular vote.
1908 Debs, running again for the Socialists, got 2.8% of the vote. Eugene W. Chafin of the Prohibition party got 1.7%.
1912 Republican Theodore Roosevelt ran as the “Bull Moose Party” (Progressive Party) nominee in the 1912 election. Roosevelt won 27.4% of the popular vote and carried six states totaling 88 electoral votes. If the transitional elections of 1856 and 1860, when there was no clear two-party structure, are excluded, Roosevelt’s was the most successful third-party candidacy in American history. It was also the only third-party effort to finish higher than third. Instead incumbent Republican President William Howard Taft finished third, taking only 23% of the popular vote and 8 electoral votes. The split in the Republican vote gave Democrat Woodrow Wilson victory with 42% of the popular vote, but 435 electoral votes.
Debs, running in his fourth consecutive Presidential election as the Socialist Party candidate, won 6% of the vote, an all-time high for the Socialists. The elections of 1860 and 1912 are the only two times that four candidates each cleared 5% of the popular vote in a Presidential election.
Eugene Chafin, running again as the Prohibition candidate, got 1.4% of the popular vote.
1916 Allan L. Benson, taking over as the Socialist Party candidate from Eugene Debs, received 3.2% of the vote. Prohibition candidate J. Franklin Hanly won 1.2%.
1920 Eugene V. Debs went to prison in 1919 for violating the Espionage Act by giving a speech opposing American involvement in World War I. Despite being incarcerated in Federal prison, Debs ran as the Socialist Party candidate again in 1920, his fifth and last campaign. Debs received 3.4% of the vote.
Parley P. Christensen, running as the candidate of the newly formed Farmer-Labor Party, received 265,411 votes for 0.99%[19] of the total vote despite being on the ballot in only 19 states. (The Farmer-Labor Party continues to exist today in the state of Minnesota, where it merged with the Democratic party to form the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.)
1924 Erstwhile Republican Robert M. La Follette ran as a Progressive. After the Democrats nominated conservative John W. Davis, many liberal Democrats turned to La Follette. He received 4,831,706 votes for 16.6% of the popular vote and won his home state of Wisconsin receiving 13 electoral votes. With the Democrats split, incumbent President Calvin Coolidge won election by a wide margin.
1932Norman Thomas running as the Socialist Party candidate received 884,885 for 2.2% of the total vote. Following Eugene Debs’s death in 1926, Thomas became the Socialist standard-bearer and was the party’s Presidential nominee in every election from 1928 to 1948.
1936 William Lemke running for the short-lived Union Party received 892,378 votes for 2.0% of the total vote.
1948 Democrat Strom Thurmond ran on the segregationist States’ Rights (”Dixiecrat”) Party ticket in protest of the Civil Rights Act. Former Vice President and Cabinet Member Henry Wallace also sought Democratic votes by running for the Progressive Party ticket, opposing racial discrimination and calling for closer relations with the Soviet Union. Thus the Democratic vote was split three ways between Thurmond on the right, Wallace on the liberal left, and incumbent President Harry S. Truman in the center. Thurmond received 1,175,930 votes (2.4%) and 39 votes in the electoral college from Southern states. Wallace earned 1,157,328 votes for an identical 2.4% of the popular vote, but no votes in the Electoral College due to his support being mostly concentrated in the more populous states of New York and California. Despite both challenges, Democratic incumbent Truman still defeated Thurmond, Wallace, and Republican Thomas Dewey in what was widely regarded at the time as an upset.
1968 Former Democratic Governor of Alabama George Wallace ran on the American Independent Party line. Wallace received 9,901,118 votes for 13.5% of the popular vote, receiving 45 electoral votes in the South and many votes in the North. Wallace remains the only third party candidate since 1948 to win a state. Republican Richard Nixon won the election with 43% of the popular vote and 301 electoral votes.
1972 John G. Schmitz, the American Independent Party candidate won 1.4% of the vote, or 1.1 million votes.
John Hospers of the newly formed Libertarian Party received only 3,674 popular votes but won an electoral vote when Roger MacBride, an elector pledged to winner Richard Nixon, instead voted for Hospers. Hospers’ vice presidential running mate, Toni Nathan, became the first woman ever to receive an Electoral College vote.
1980 Congressman John B. Anderson received 5,719,850 votes, for 6.6% of the vote, as an independent candidate for President. Libertarian Party candidate Ed Clark won 921,128 votes, or 1.1% of the total. No other Libertarian candidate has ever gotten more than 0.5% in a presidential election.
1992 Ross Perot, an independent, won 18.9% of the popular vote (but no electoral votes). His was the second-best popular vote showing ever for a third-party candidate, trailing only Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. Perot finished second in three states: in Alaska and Utah ahead of election winner Bill Clinton, and in Maine ahead of incumbent President George H. W. Bush.
1996 Ross Perot ran for president again, this time as the candidate of the newly formed Reform Party. He won 8% of the popular vote.
2000 Green Party candidate Ralph Nader received 2,882,955 votes, 2.7%, of the popular vote and tipped the election to Republican nominee George W. Bush. Bush carried New Hampshire by 7,211 votes, a 1.27% margin. while Nader received over 22,000 votes there, 3.90% of the total. In Florida, after a disputed recount that was eventually terminated by order of the United States Supreme Court, Bush was declared the winner by only 537 votes out of 5.96 million cast, a margin of 0.01%. Nader received 97,488 votes in Florida, 1.6% of the total. Bush beat Gore in the Electoral College by a vote of 271 to 266 (with one Gore elector abstaining); if either Florida or New Hampshire had gone for Gore, he would have won the Presidency.
Source: Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_party_%28United_States%29
I wonder if Soros will be funding RINOS
figuring a conservative split-off could put Baraq back in with 42% like Clinton did.
>John: A 3rd party will not win a national election in our lifetime:
So then, since we are being offered a choice for our [political] meal of either fetid, rotting maggot-infested meat OR hot, pliable, corny/nutty feces we should NEEDS BE eat one of these simply because it’s what’s offered?
That is EXACTLY the “at least he’s not George Bush” reasoning that got Obama elected, and you’re ADVOCATING it?
Fine. Then someone point the ever-growing tide of conservatives who DESPERATELY desire an alternative to the GOP, towards a PAC that only supports strong conservatives; whose charter is intentionally written to deny RINOs any support. Either that, or we continue supporting conservative candidates directly with a mind to deliberately starve the GOP of our direct financial support.
The RINO-mill GOP will never, ever see another penny or word of support from us. That sentiment grows with more and more people with every passing day. The only thing the GOP gets from me is their returned mailers (costing them postage) with a nasty-gram inside.
To be clear, I will readily contribute time & money directly for conservative candidates and I encourage other conservatives to do the same. The RNC, NRSC, NRCC - can all pack sand.