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I hadn't known this, but apparently in when the Reform Party was formed in 1996 around Ross Perot's candidacy, there was a real expectation that the party would be able to cement itself as a legitimate major party, the viable third party everyone was hoping for.

Of course, that didn't happen. Perot under-performed in 1996 (compared to his 1992 run), Pat Buchanan won the nomination in 2000 and squandered their automatic ballot access in all fifty states they won in 1996, and in 2008 their nominee won only a couple hundred votes in the general election. They haven't even managed to make themselves one of the "major" third parties, like the Libertarians or Greens or Constituitonalists. They did win something when Jesse Ventura won the 1998 Minnesota gubernatorial race, but that's about it.

So. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to make the Reform Party "stick" in American politics. With a POD no earlier than the 1996 election, make the party win some congressional and gubernatorial elections, have a candidate that matches or betters Perot's performance in 1996, and generally become like the Independence Party of Minnesota is, except on a national scale.

(Yes, I know MaskedPickle's excellent "A Giant Sucking Sound" timeline has a Reform Party analogue, the Freedom Party, form during Ross Perot's presidency in time for the 1994 midterms, but that's not what this is about.)

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