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OPINIONS
William A. Patton Jr.: Third parties have had little success throughout history
Third parties are possible, but not very likely, within the frame work of our American two-party political system. The best example of third party politics was in the election of 1912. Theodore Roosevelt, upset with the conservatism of his handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, bolted from the Republican Party and formed his own Progressive Party, better known as the Bull Moose Party. TR won 27 percent of the popular vote and a total of 88 electoral votes. This allowed the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, to capture the White House.
American history is rife with third parties, from the Free-Soil Party (1848) to the American (popularly known as the Know-Nothing) Party (1856) to the People's Party (1892) to even yet another Progressive Party (1924).
The year 1948 saw Strom Thurmond, leading southern Democrats opposed to Harry S. Truman's strong civil rights stance, receive 2 percent of the popular vote for his States Rights (Dixiecrats) Party. In 1968, George C. Wallace, another Southerner opposed to the civil rights movement within his own Democratic Party, ran as an American Independent and picked up 14 percent of the vote.
John Anderson in 1980 running as an independent received 7 percent of the vote, and Ross Perot received 19 percent of the vote in 1992, but only 9 percent in 1996.
In 2000, Ralph Nader won almost 3 percent of the vote. In two states -- New Hampshire and Florida -- the number of popular votes cast for Nader exceeded the number of votes that gave those states Electoral College delegates to George Bush.
As a rule, third parties do not do well in national elections. They are most successful in forcing certain issues into the national spotlight, which gets those issues adopted by one or the other major party. The major parties realize that this is the best way to make a third party go away.
William A. Patton Jr. is a Huntington resident.
