New in PJ Media:
When President Donald Trump was asked on Monday about what he thought of Elon Musk’s new plan to launch a third party, he was characteristically forthright: “I think it’s ridiculous to start a third party,” Trump said. “We have a tremendous success with the Republican Party. The Democrats have lost their way, but it’s always been a two-party system, and I think starting a third party just adds to confusion. It really seems to have been developed for two parties. Third parties have never worked. So he can have fun with it, but I think it’s ridiculous.”
Trump is right: Third parties have never worked if the objective was to elect a president. No president has ever been elected who wasn’t from one of the two major parties at the time. The Republican Party, however, started out in 1854 as a third party, although it quickly became the second party in the two-party system as the Whig Party, which had been the Democrats’ rival in the two-party system since 1833, disintegrated.
Third-party candidates have also played a significant role in several presidential elections. In 1848, former President Martin Van Buren wanted the Democrat Party’s presidential nomination again; when he didn’t get it, he became the candidate of the abolitionist Free-Soil Party and split the Democrats’ vote in his native New York, throwing the state, and the election, to the Whig Zachary Taylor.
A third-party run also gave us one of the worst presidents the American people have ever had to endure: Woodrow Wilson. In 1908, Theodore Roosevelt decided not to run for president again, but by 1912, he wanted to get back into the White House. Denied the Republican nomination, Roosevelt and his supporters bolted the Republican Party and created the Progressive Party, splitting the Republican vote and virtually ensuring the election of Wilson.
Wilson won in an electoral landslide that was illusory, since the popular votes that Roosevelt and his former friend and anointed successor, President William Howard Taft, received would have won them enough states to result in a fifth straight comfortable victory for the Republicans if there had been just one candidate. Wilson actually received fewer popular votes than three-time loser William Jennings Bryan had in 1908, but Bryan was facing a united opposition. And so we got restrictions on the freedom of speech, interventionism, a needless war, and much more besides.
The same kind of thing happened in both 1992 and 1996. We owe the frivolous and irresponsible presidency of Bill Clinton to the billionaire H. Ross Perot, who, like Elon Musk, was disgusted with politics as usual and thought that he could do it all better. In the end, all he really accomplished was to split the opposition to the Democrats and ensure that Slick Willie was a two-term president. America is still suffering the consequences.
There is more. Read the rest here.
truth says
Elon has also updated X and it’s turned into a left wing playground of nonsense and lies.Ifs a completely different site then it was 2 months ago. He really is a spoiled little child who has temper tantrums. It’s very weird.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
I actually support Elon and everyone else who’s come out in history supporting parties other than the Dems or the GOP. As Mark Steyn once pointed out, this is a country that has 72 genders but only 2 political parties. I’m not exactly rooting for the numbers to be flipped, but it can have something like 3-5 major parties, and give people more political choices that way
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Another thing: Ross Perot, imo, would have won in 1992 had he not dropped out of the race in b/w. When he did drop out, he was leading the polls – both Bush & Clinton. Had he stayed, he could have done what Jesse Ventura did in Minnesota years later from the party he later founded. It’s not a given that any third party candidate would have no chance of winning
OLD GUY says
We live in America the land of the FREE. So anyone or group who wants to participate in the political system should have the right and be welcomed to do so by the system and media.
There is nothing wrong with the freedom of choice.