(Monday, November 13, 2000) I wrote the first draft of this article on November 2nd, five days before the presidential election. The first sentence read: “By the time you read this, the November 7 election will be past and the United States will have a new president-elect.” So much for confident assumptions, right? Historians who write about the 2000 election will naturally remark on the difficulty Americans had in selecting their 43rd president. They should also note what didn't happen during this election season. Colin Powell didn't run. Ross Perot didn't run. Jesse Ventura didn't run. The electorate didn't really expect them to run. But with so many people dissatisfied about the two candidates produced by the two political parties, where were the alternatives? Pat Buchanan triumphed at the Reform Party convention and proved that the young party was not strong enough to handle his renegade candidacy. The party split and destroyed itself. The Libertarian Party fields a candidate every four years, but the group is destined to be a fringe party in our system, that's certain. The Green Party under Ralph Nader did pretty well, but its base is pretty narrow.

People who call themselves independents outnumber Democrats and the Republicans by quite a margin. Most estimates put the figure at about forty percent of the electorate. That leaves about thirty percent each for Republicans and Democrats. Yet no party or individual speaks for independents in national elections. Jesse Ventura’s success in Minnesota shows what occurs when a political candidate captures the interest of voters who are disenchanted with the major parties. The Democratic Party is strong and well-organized in Minnesota, and Republican candidates have had some success there, too. Yet Ventura won a plurality of votes in his first run for the governor’s office. Strong or weak, in state after state many voters don’t feel well served by the two mainstream parties. The poor quality of the presidential candidates offered by the Democrats and Republicans this time around confirms their anxiety that the two parties don’t function the way they are supposed to.

As a Democrat-turned-Republican, Ronald Reagan had some characteristics of an independent candidate. A large number of Democrats and independents voted for him. As politicians, both Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and Jesse Ventura in the 1990s have had these things in common: They appealed to young voters. They spoke honestly about their political beliefs. And they had backgrounds in entertainment. I don’t want to say that political candidates have to be entertainers, but they do need to feel comfortable with publicity, and lots of it. The pollsters say over and over that voters want candidness from their candidates. They don’t want political leaders to tell them what the leader thinks they want to hear. They want a political leader to tell them where the candidate intends to go, and to talk to them intelligently about why they should go there, too. Then they can decide whether to follow.

An honest idealism is critical in a politician’s ability to win support from people under thirty. In this political environment, young people form a large group of unaffiliated voters. Their loyalty to the two traditional parties is very weak. They want to be involved, but the two parties have given them no good reasons to participate. Reagan won large majorities because he appealed to dissatisfied Democrats, but he also won a large share of people who were voting for president for the first or second or third time. Many of those voters weren't loyal to either party to begin with. In Minnesota in 1998, Ventura won election with votes from people who learned about him on the Internet. The reporters and politicians who said he didn’t have a chance likely didn’t know about the underground movement building up on the web. All of a sudden Minnesota had an independent governor, and no one, except the people who voted for him, could figure out how it happened.

The story of Ross Perot and the Reform Party during the 1990s is a story of institutional failure. With just under twenty percent of the vote in 1992, Mr. Perot and his supporters could have built a lasting third party in the United States. Like the newly founded Republican Party in the mid-1800s, the Reform Party had an opportunity to affect the American political system because it spoke for people who had no voice elsewhere. But, Perot was not the person to do it. Maybe his ego was too big, maybe he was too rich. Maybe his instincts didn't go in that direction. Whatever the reason, the Reform Party didn’t have the leadership it needed to become an enduring institution. Its force is spent now, and the 2000 election is the last we’ll hear of it.

That doesn't mean, though, that politics outside of the two major parties is dead. The election isn’t far off when Ventura or someone else not affiliated with the Democrats or Republicans will run for president and do very well. Ventura, like Reagan and unlike Perot, is shrewd about what’s required to have a lasting effect in the national political arena. Reagan knew that his personality and his speaking skills helped him get elected, but he also knew that a strong Republican Party was just as important if he wanted to get his proposals enacted into law. The next candidate who runs on a third-party ticket must understand what Perot did not: institution-building is indispensable. Political change takes a long time. A new party, built from scratch, must have leadership that unites people behind goals that matter to them. It must give them energy and hope to overcome a multitude of obstacles. Without that sort of leadership, most independents will vote without enthusiasm for one of the major party candidates. Without good leadership, infant political movements like Perot’s Reform Party are headed for painful oblivion. With good leadership, with the perseverance and focus of a Lincoln or a Reagan, a new political movement can accomplish a great deal.

How long will it take to find new leadership for a third-party movement? That's hard to say. Lincoln’s election and the sectional conflict over slavery made the Republicans a second major party very quickly, but by 1860 the Whigs had been in decline for quite a while. Reagan spoke about small government and individual freedom for almost twenty-five years before he went to the White House. Since Reagan left the White House, the passing of the Cold War has reduced the need for party unity. In the ten years since the Soviet Union disintegrated, American politics has become more and more inchoate. Partisan polarization in the Congress does not mirror untapped restlessness and resentment in the electorate. Something interesting and indiscernible is going to form itself out of this potent political mix, but it won’t happen during this election season. Twenty or thirty years from now, we’ll be able to consider the early years of the twenty-first century and say, “So that’s what was going on then!”