Last Best Chance for a Third Party in America?

The Progressives would mostly be taking away working-class Northern votes from the Dems, and in an era where Northeastern Republicans or those in their ideological mold are always nominated that means New England topples into the GOP column. In the US (leaving aside parliamentary v. presidential) the ballot system is designed to ensure third parties do not receive electoral votes unless one of the parties collapses (1912) or collapse + regional base (1968). The first scenario seems what's likely to occur here given that WWC voters are the core of the Democratic base alongside white urbanites. Nor would Humphrey leave the Dems, he was far too loyal.

I'm not fully clear here. If the GOP is a liberal party, and the Progressives gain working class white support in the North, are both not then left-leaning? Remember, this is before abortion, amnesty, acid, and debates over LGBT issues and capital punishment.

By 1948, the GOP was moving rightward while the Democrats struggled to be a catch-all party. Here, I am proposing that this happens due to the defection of much of the Left to the new Progressive Party, and each therefore having a real base of support in different parts of the country.

Third parties have fared with some success in EVs when they have put forth credible and persistent candidates with actual bases of support outside of the nation's press rooms.
 
Hmm I guess maybe the free soilers and whigs could survive. Say Whigs, Free soilers, and Nativists united, and say the whigs start to win support in the west. With the rise of republicans, I could see a three way party.. Republicans supported by north, WHigs supported by the west, and Democrats supported by the south;)
Wasn't there a substantial Whig faction known as the Teritum? (Memory fails me, here.:eek:) Could they take a centrist position? Or, if they were more radical, could there be a splitting off of centrists from other parties when they polarize things?
 
I'm not sure if there's any serious point beneath the contentless hard Democratic talking points and liberal slogans, but I'm not willing to take the trouble to find out.

Why don't you save this sort of thing for political chat? Surely there's a Rush Limbaughite who would be happy to exchange angry vapidities with you?

If reading Drew's Fear, Loathing and Gumbo doesn't quite fit the bill, the general idea applies. Put someone so bad in charge of the United States or at least one of the political parties that it collapses.


The Tea Party Movement is interesting in a For All Time sort of way. If a Teabagger somehow made it into the white house, you can kiss the two party status quo goodbye; they would probably cause such a serious realignment. Think of what PotUS Scott Walker would do--he'd be more "polarizing" than George W. Bush.


It's not so implausible to suggest that one or both political parties could simply crash and burn under a terrible leader at the helm.


Now, the question is addressed at a third party. Unfortunately, I strongly doubt that a third party would really survive for long before it either became marginalized or it supplanted or merged with an old political party. It would require a constitutional amendment to change the election process--probably aimed at taking out the electoral college and encouraging third party votes--in order for this to happen.


OTL suggests a possibility of this happening: Gore had the popular vote, Bush won the election. Suppose the outcome was much more one-sided, and the President is winning the vote in spite of only having 45% of the popular vote. If too many people feel that the electoral college is wrong, a constitutional amendment shows up and suddenly third parties become more viable.


So, I'm not at all sure how quite to implement it, but I say throw a monkeywrench into America's political machine and a third party is likely to come out.
 
Immigration and the 'bailouts' are issues where the elites of both parties line up against most of the country. But forming a new party without any elite leadership is really, really hard.

One version I read in an AH novel that I rather liked worked by having an extremely contentious, polarizing issue, where about half the country disagreed with the other half, but both the Democratic and Republican party leaderships were on the same side. In the novel, it was internationalism; for reasons I forget both parties were trying to push the US to integrate into an EU-style version of the UN, and the anti-UN dissidents from both parties broke off to form the Nationalist Party, which split the vote of both the mainstream parties to win.
 
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