I am a dedicated two-party presidential election traditionalist.
My tendency is to dismiss third-party candidacies. My thought always has been that they have no chance of winning, therefore I won’t waste my vote, which I value greatly.
I am now about to announce that I am considering following the lead of one of my sons, who declared just the other day that he’s likely to vote for someone other than Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton.
There, I’ve announced it.
Two former moderate Republican governors have teamed up as Libertarians seeking to run for president and vice president.
New Mexico’s Gary Johnson is running for president; he’s tapped Massachusetts’ William Weld as his running mate.
The Libertarian Party must nominate them. My strong hunch is that they will.
This won’t be Gov. Johnson’s first rodeo. He ran four years ago and collected about a million votes. I’ll bet you some serious money he and Gov. Weld will do a lot better than that this year.
The last major alternative to the two parties came in 1992 when Henry Ross Perot challenged President George H.W. Bush and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton. He won 19 million votes, but not a single Electoral College vote.
And, no … he didn’t cost President Bush his bid for re-election. I’ve seen ample polling data that suggest that even without Perot on the ballot that Clinton would have won by roughly the same margin he rolled up in 1992.
Why am I thinking about a third party? I’m not entirely thrilled with Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee. Trump never — in a zillion years — would get my vote.
Don’t misinterpret me here. I haven’t yet committed to a third party candidate. I’m merely thinking about it, which by itself represents a major shift from my normal political thought process.
Johnson’s major claim to political fame was his call for legalization of marijuana. I was working for a newspaper — the Amarillo Globe-News — at the time he issued that call and the paper’s corporate ownership never would support legalization of marijuana; therefore, I wrote editorials criticizing Gov. Johnson’s “wacky” notion. I’m now writing my own blog, under my own name, and my view on that issue is, well, evolving.
Weld is another moderate former GOP governor. No single stands out, but I’ve long perceived him to be far from what’s becoming the Republican “mainstream” that wants to round up illegal immigrants, wants to criminalize abortion and wants to send American troops into battle at the slightest sound of gunfire.
Yes, this is just another example of how wacky this election campaign has become.
