Tom Tancredo isn’t running in the primary election that officially ends at 7 p.m. on Tuesday. But as a third-party candidate he certainly could have an impact in the November election by drawing votes from whoever wins the Republican primary.
The obvious Republican concern is that the Tancredo suction effect could turn a potential, maybe even expected, Republican victory into a win for the Democrats.
Tancredo is running for governor under the banner of the American Constitution Party; at the end of June (before Tancredo joined), its official membership of 2,027 represented just six one-hundredths of one percent of the state’s electorate. That’s why they’re called minor parties.
The only minor parties that register as blips on the rolls of Colorado registered voters are at opposite ends of the political spectrum: the righty Libertarians, with 12,507 members, and the lefty Greens, with 6,879. That’s 0.4 and 0.2 percent of all voters. It’s worth noting that the Tea Party is not an official political organization under Colorado election laws. Not yet, anyway.
Minor parties usually don’t have much effect on elections, but Ross Perot may have been responsible for getting Bill Clinton elected in 1992. The irascible Texas billionaire got 18.9 percent of the vote nationally and 23.3 percent in Colorado. If Perot hadn’t been in the race, George H.W. Bush might have done better than his 37.5 percent showing. Clinton won that year with just 43 percent of the national vote; he even took Colorado with a 40 percent plurality.
Perot probably qualifies as further to the right than Bush, but not as far right as Tancredo. But Perot at his most successful was an independent; by the time he and his supporters organized themselves into the official Reform Party in 1996, they had lost their spunk. Perot got just 8.4 percent of the national vote that year and 6.6 percent of Colorado’s.
Ralph Nader, who got nearly 3 million votes in the 2000 national election, has been criticized for helping George W. Bush win that year. But Al Gore won the popular vote by half a million, and Nader didn’t get even one vote where it mattered — in the Electoral College. In fact, no third-party candidate has won a single Electoral College vote since George Wallace got 46 in 1968 — and his share of the popular vote was 6 percentage points lower than Perot’s.
Third-party candidates tend to hold more extreme views than the general population. And they tend to be defined by what they’re against rather than by what they’re for, although that’s increasingly true of the major parties, too. Especially the Republicans; they’ve responded to recent losses to the left by moving further right.
As the two major parties grow further apart — following their most ardent supporters to the fringes — one has to wonder if maybe it’s about time for something exceptional to happen. Such as a third party that forms in the political middle instead of out there in cloud cuckoo country.
A fellow in a group I spoke to recently at the University of Denver had given that some thought. He suggested that maybe Michael Bloomberg could form an independent, centrist movement. Like Perot, Bloomberg has the money to do it, and the New York mayor has been part of all three of the major voting groups in this country — Democrat, Republican and independent.
The problem with trying to form a new party in the ideological center is that centrists don’t have much passion going for them. It’s easier to start a fire at the edge of a piece of paper than it is by holding a match to the middle.
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a political analyst for 9News.
