What if the Reform Party had ended up being a viable third party in the United States, sort of like how the LibDems have been in the UK.
I'm thinking there'd need to be a number of wins other than Ventura in 1998.
1) Ross Perot runs for Senate and wins as an independent in 1993. In 1994 Perot wins reelection. When the Reform Party is founded in 1995, Perot is its Senator.
2) Ross Perot wins Maine in 1992 (it was 38-30-30 historically). Angus King gets elected Governor in 1994 as an independent and in 1995 joins the Reform Party.
3) Sanders joins the Reform Party as an at-large congressman for Vermont. Perot supported Medicare for All and was anti-NAFTA, so a Reform Party Sanders isn't that whacky a concept.
4) Jim Trafficant had an iffy relationship with the Democratic Party. I could see him joining the Reform Party.
5) Tim Penny doesn't retire from Congress in 1994 and in 1995 changes parties to join the Reform Party, giving the party a sitting Senator.
6) The 1996 Reform Party ticket is Dick Lamm (Colorado Democrat Governor) and Ed Zschau (California Republican Congressman) instead of Perot. Perot focuses instead on financing other candidates and recruiting candidates.
7) Ron Paul runs as a Reform Party candidate for Congress in 1996 rather than as a Republican.
8) Dean Barkley wins either as an independent house candidate in 1992 or as a Senate Candidate in 1994 or 1996.
Thoughts?
(a) The Lib Dems in the UK were the descendant of a party--the Liberals--that had been around for a long time, and had always gotten a significant number of votes even when it had very few MP's.
In any event, the parliamentary system in the UK is much more favorable to third parties than the presidential system in the US. In the UK, a party with no chance of winning can still hold the balance of power in the House of Commons and can thus help to decide which party forms the Government. In the US, if a party doesn't have a real chance to win the presidency, it becomes thought of as "minor" and people are reluctant to vote for it even in non-presidential elections.
(b) It's really hard to think of a third party ever succeeding in the US unless one of the old parties was dead or willing to merge in a newer one. The Whigs were really a combination of already existing parties (the National Republicans and the Antimasons) with previously pro-Jackson elements that had turned against him (including Nullifiers). The Republicans were never really a third party; by the time they held their first national convention in 1856 the Whig Party was dead and the only real question was which party--the Republicans or the Americans (Know Nothings) would replace it as the main opposition to the Democrats. In 1992, the Republicans, though they had lost the election, were far from hopeless and quite unwilling to merge with Perot's supporters except on Republican terms.
(c) During the 1912 election, many of Teddy Roosevelt's supporters hoped that his new Progressive Party would become one of America's two major parties, as the Republicans had become in 1856. At first sight, the fact that TR slightly outpolled Taft in that election might have seemed to vindicate that hope. But TR knew better. As the late William E. Gienapp summarized it (in *The Origins of the Republican Party 1952-1856*, p. 3):
"...Roosevelt dismissed the idea that the two parties' situations were analogous. He observed pointedly that after its first national campaign the Republican party, unlike the Progressive, controlled a number of states, had elected a sizable contingent of congressmen, and most important, was 'overwhelmingly the second party in the nation.' Because a disaffected voter's support for another party was usually only temporary, third parties that did not quickly become the second party had no long-term prospects, the defeated Progressive leader argued. 'When we failed to establish ourselves at the very outset as the second party,' he continued, 'it became overwhelmingly probable that politics would soon sink back...into a two-party system, the Republicans and Democrats alternating in the first and second place.' As Roosevelt well understood, any new party had to confront the reality that the two-party system was a fundamental fact of American politics."
The Reform Party like the 1912 Progressives were basically centered on one man (their presidential candidate) and much weaker in non-presidential races. So unless that one man actually won--which was even less likely for Perot than for TR--they were unlikely to become a major party.
(d) Perot actually gets a few electoral votes? Plausible, but so what? TR in 1912, La Follette in 1924, Thurmond in 1948, and George Wallace in 1968 all got substantial numbers of electoral votes. That didn't save the 1912 Progressives, the 1924 Progressives, the Dixiecrats or the American Independent Party.
(e) Perot gets elected to the Senate as an independent? Hardly likely. Texas was not even one of his strongest states in 1992--he got 22 percent of the vote there, hardly above his national average.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1992 He could get 33 percent of the vote in 1993--and even if it all came out of Kay Bailey Hutchinson's vote, she would still win!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1992
(f) Sanders on Perot: "Although I agree with his critique of American trade policy and his opposition to NAFTA, I am no great fan of Ross Perot. There's no way he would be a major political leader if he weren't a billionaire. .."
https://books.google.com/books?id=_2YjBm2_JGUC&pg=PA168 (He does go on to defend Perot's lengthy speeches, but he certainly does not seem to view him as a political ally.)
