Whatever you're smoking, pass it over here, dude.
They are close to a third of the electorate and in this system a plurality wins...not a majority. They are only 6 points away from a third as it stands....
That's a third of the electorate taken almost entirely from the Republicans, thus giving a Democrat the presidency. Assuming that the third-party candidate gets that many votes, which he won't; people always love the abstract idea of a third party much more than they love a flesh-and-blood third-party candidate. The last third-party candidate to get a single electoral vote was George Wallace.
Since it would actually be the conservative Republicans involved in it, I’d call it the Conservative Republican Party and let all the disenchanted conservatives and Republicans know that in this is our chance to stand up against the rockefeller, elitist, anti-life, pro-gay, anti-gun new york liberal RINOs.
And then all you have to do is, in the next nine months or so, build the kind of fundraising, campaigning and volunteer network that the two major parties have had for a century and a half, in every county of every state. Assemble a slate of candidates from top to bottom, from local school boards to state legislatures to the presidency. No problem, right?
Yes, but it is STILL more than Giuliani polls. Therefore, Giuliani must need some of that smoking stuff you were talking about, IF the argument is that polling 27% of Republicans should cause an idea to go by the wayside.
The other point remains - a plurality wins an American election and not a majority.
And one doesn’t really need a third party to run a third candidate.
One can just run a conservative Republican in a write-in campaign. That overcomes all the obstacles to 3rd party formation. Easier to get citizens trained to write in names than to spend millions fighting 3rd party obstacles to getting on a ballot.