Word: perots
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Wallace's slogan was "There's not a dime's worth of difference between the Democrat and Republican parties," which is pretty much what Ross Perot said in 1992. And on the issues Perot took up?the budget deficit and NAFTA?he had a point. With Americans angry about the economy and angry at Washington, Perot made NAFTA?which both George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton supported?a symbol of the public's discontent. Perot won 19% of the vote, mostly among downscale Republicans and independents who had backed Reagan during the cold war but by then feared Mexico...
...third-party candidate with the best chance in 2008 would be a saner Perot. As in 1992, the GOP coalition is cracking along class lines. Many working-class Republicans and independents who backed George W. Bush because he was tough on al-Qaeda now want a President who is tough on globalization. Illegal immigration has supplanted terrorism on the list of concerns for the American right. And at the party's grass roots, voters are turning hard against free trade. Last fall a Wall Street Journal poll found that nearly twice as many Republicans think trade deals hurt as think...
John McCain is too pro-immigration for these latter-day Perotistas. And Mitt Romney is too hedge fund. If either of them won the Republican nomination, a souped-up Perot could win over downscale Republicans who like Mike Huckabee's anti-corporate populism. And he might pick up a few John Edwards supporters as well?white male union types who think Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are too pro-immigration...
There's a name for this new-model Perot: Lou Dobbs, CNN's red-faced, loudmouthed scourge of lawbreaking immigrants and job-shipping CEOs. Bloomberg, by contrast, would be the most pro-immigration, pro--free trade, pro--Wall Street candidate in the race. The third-party candidate he would most resemble is John Anderson, the fiscally responsible, culturally liberal Republican who ran as an Independent in 1980. Anderson won 7% of the vote, mostly among the young, educated and secular. But today those people are partisan Democrats. After Ralph Nader, there's simply no way that liberals are going...
...major parties to incorporate elements of that platform into their own.There is a strong historical precedent for exactly this scenario. Most recently, Ross Perot’s popularity in 1992 (he won 18.9 percent of the popular vote) forced both parties to seriously address the ballooning national debt. For Perot, who had structured his campaign around its potential to “send a message” to incumbent parties rather than to win the presidency outright, this was a significant victory. A hundred years earlier, the Populist Party—which was the first to advocate a graduated income...