Crossposting this from SLP as there's a greater number of folks interested in American politics over here.
I just finished reading Oregon governor Tom McCall's TOM McCALL: MAVERICK, a bombastically titled memoir in which he touches on his Watergate-era plans for a "Third Force" in American politics.
By the time he made headlines as the first Republican governor to call for Nixon's resignation, McCall had already alienated himself from the national party through personal spats with Ronald Reagan, Spiro Agnew and Oregon's senior senator Mark Hatfield as well as through his habit of cheerfully leaking party information to the press. (He said that as a former newsman he wanted to help them justify their travel expenses to their editors.) In 1973, he'd publicly mulled switching parties to challenge Senator Bob Packwood as a Democrat.
In the book, McCall claims that before the 1974 midterms he was approached separately by Clare Booth Luce and George Romney, who encouraged him to start a new political party and run for President. Eugene McCarthy apparently offered to be his number two on an independent ticket in 1976. (Whether or not any of these conversations really happened, he was being talked up as a potential candidate by some commentators at the time.) Apparently, in the summer of 1974, 60 Minutes filmed an episode on McCall's concept of a nonpartisan "Third Force" in politics, featuring interviews with the governor himself, former HEW Secretary John Gardner, Ralph Nader, and Elliot Richardson. The show was never aired because it had been set for broadcast on August 14th and was rendered old news by Nixon's resignation.
McCall spins the CBS special's cancellation as a bit of a POD. He says in the next chapter that he wouldn't have wanted to run against an incumbent President and especially not a fellow Republican, but also goes on about his fear in the summer of '75 of a Reagan-Wallace election and how it would leave left "65-70 percent of the country unrepresented and looking for a rational progressive." It's all very vague and faffy, but you can get an impression that he might really have gone for it had circumstances been different. A worst-case Watergate, maybe, with Nixon in prison or a scandal-tarnished John Connally holding the Presidency?
What would an independent McCall campaign in 1976 have looked like? Apparently, the Third Force "eludes definition" but its "commandments" include "protecting the environment, stressing energy conservation, developing a new openness in government, creating a national presidential primary and national initiatives [ed: that is, referenda], eliminating the seniority system in Congress and protecting consumers." A Third Force campaign might involve national versions of programs McCall pushed in his home state such as a Bottle Bill, comprehensive land-use planning, and an expansive interpretation of free speech. He'd probably be rather pragmatic and centrist on economic issues - he'd tried to institute sales duties in Oregon in order to cut property tax, a right-wing suburbanite's dream, but he also advocated wage and price controls in response to stagflation. It's also worth mentioning that he was a proponent of legal euthanasia. Conversely, the platform might be thinner on issues where he had less expertise or interest, such as civil rights, labor, and foreign policy.
The overall picture captures a certain 70s zeitgeist and there would be a constituency for it - but I'm not sure the majority of Americans would be in that constituency.
It's difficult to imagine a path to victory for any independent candidate, but McCall's charisma and list of actual accomplishments as Governor would put him in a better starting position than the comparable OTL campaigns of McCarthy and John Anderson. A lot would depend on the other candidates in the race. If Carter still won the Democratic nod, their outsider messages might overlap too much. The stigma of Nixon had begun to fade by this point IOTL and the Third Force would have had less appeal than it did in 1974 - you might need a really heinous end to the Watergate saga to give McCall a chance.
What do you all think?