Independent Presidential Candidate Ross Perot Could Have Won. Kennedy Has a Better Chance.

by V. N. Alexander, The Kennedy Beacon

The United States has not always been locked into voting for only a Democrat or Republican presidential candidate. Our presidents have been independent, Federalist, Democrat, Whig, Democrat-Republican, National Republican, and Republican. Not until the polarization of the U.S. Civil War did the Democrat and Republican parties begin to cement into the only major party choices.

It’s time for the U.S. to cure itself of its bi-polarism.

Independent presidential candidate Ross Perot, in 1992, was the last independent/minor party candidate to get on the ballot in all 50 states. Kennedy is poised to be the next, having gathered over a million signatures for ballot access, far surpassing Perot’s record of 300,000. The fact that Perot ended up with only 19% of the popular vote and did not earn a single electoral college vote is often hung out as proof that an independent cannot win. This is a self-defeating notion that has doomed voters to choose between two major party candidates that they don’t like. 

The truth is that Perot could have won the 1992 election, if voters had not listened to the media saying he was just a “spoiler” candidate. A Voter Research and Surveys exit poll conducted on election day found that 36% of voters said they would have voted for Perot if they thought he could win, and 4% polled said they did vote for him. Perot could have gotten 40% of the vote. In a three-way race, he needed 34% to win a state’s electoral votes. The pollsters acknowledge that poor polling procedures prior to the election may have led to Perot’s defeat. 

When Perot debated Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush, millions of voters were impressed with the populist candidate. The Perot campaign looked very promising. Then, as now, many people were disgusted with the major party choices. 

My father, a PR and newspaper man in Dallas, worked hard on Perot’s campaign. Then the unthinkable happened. Perot suddenly quit the race without explanation. My father was so depressed that he sat the election out. He didn’t know that Perot had received threats against his daughter, and later, satisfied that the threats were not credible, Perot reversed his hasty decision. By then his polls were falling, and the more the media reported this bad news, the more they made it true. The damage had been done.

Why You Should Vote for your First Choice

There is a solution to the problem of the “spoiler” candidate, which the two parties don’t want you to know about, called Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). RCV allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference, as Kennedy Beacon reported in depth earlier this year. Think of it as a form of instant run-off voting. If voters’ first choices lose in the first round of counting (and no candidate has gotten 51% yet), their votes go to their second choices instead. This method allows people to vote for the candidates whom they really want to win, even if they fear their preferred candidates can’t win.

My father’s experience with the Perot campaign inspired me to find a solution to the spoiler problem, and I’ve been an advocate for RCV since 2018, helping to found a group in New York, where RCV is now used for NYC primaries. RCV was also a main plank of my bid for Congress in 2020 as a Libertarian. 

I was happy to hear when Kennedy publicly endorsed RCV recently as an important tool for democracy to bypass party politics. This election, Maine and Alaska will use RCV for the first time in a presidential election, and consequently, Kennedy has a decent chance of winning those states.

Kennedy has a good chance of winning swing states too, if voters choose their preferred candidate.

What the Numbers Say about the “Kennedy Is a Spoiler” Myth

In a recent survey, Rasmussen reports that 33% of the public believe that the COVID-19 vaccine “is killing large numbers of people.” How many people think some number of people were somewhat harmed by the vaccine that Trump fast-tracked and Biden mandated? If those 33+% fill in the bubble for Kennedy on election day, he could win, not in spite of all the goofy anti-vaxxer, conspiracy-theorist hit pieces against him, but because of them. And there have been plenty of hit pieces, as reported here and here in The Kennedy Beacon.

According to the 270toWin.com tally, 77-108 electoral college votes are currently up-for-grabs. Add Maine and Alaska and that’s seven more Kennedy might get. Add more states where Kennedy has a strong following, especially among young people and Hispanics, and Kennedy could get 110-120 electoral votes. Currently, the Democrats only have 140 sure-thing electoral votes and the Republicans only have 122, according to polling. 

But how sure are these polls?

A recent Economist/You Gov poll reports that 43% of people who say they are voting for Harris are merely voting against Trump; so these are potential Kennedy supporters. 22% of Trump voters are voting against Harris, rather than for Trump. So, there is a thinner, but still significant slice that Kennedy could peel off from Trump. 

If Kennedy gets on the debate stage, he could expect to get a good portion of the 43% tepid Harris vote and that 22% tepid Trump vote.

Kennedy has a path to victory.

This election, your vote for your first choice candidate could make a difference. The unhappy duopoly can’t go on forever. Let’s vote for our first choices, as though we already had RCV. Just ignore the mainstream media when they tell you that your vote is meaningless. If Perot voters had voted with their consciences, they might have changed the course of history. 

More from V. N. Alexander can be found here: https://substack.com/@posthumousstyle