The 2028 US election is shaping up as a three-horse race
The 2028 US presidential election will be the 60th anniversary, give or take, of the last time that a single state was won by anybody other than a Republican or a Democrat. In 1968, rambunctious Alabama governor George Wallace, though a Democrat himself, ran for president on his own segregationist American Independent Party ticket. His running mate was the equally bellicose former US Air Force general Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay. They won five states. A clue: California and Vermont were not among them.
Since then, only one third-party candidate has piled up votes in really significant numbers, though without winning a single electoral college vote. Eccentric Texan businessman Ross Perot won 18.9 per cent of the national vote against Bill Clinton and George HW Bush in 1992 and 8.4 per cent against Clinton and Bob Dole in 1996. Another third-party run in the desperately tight election of 2000 might have diverted the entire course of 21st-century history. The Green Party’s Ralph Nader won nearly three million votes nationwide, 97,488 of them in Florida, where vice-president Al Gore only needed another 538 votes to take the state, and thereby beat Texas governor George W Bush to the White House.
Nevertheless, there are now suggestions that the 2028 presidential election might be graced by a third party. Meetings have reportedly been held among disillusioned and/or discarded former acolytes of president Donald Trump, with a view to standing on a platform which appears to be the Maga equivalent of those zealously puritan communist parties that insist that everything would have been dandy if only the plan had been correctly implemented. The names at the centre of this scheming – and perhaps, who knows, the 2028 presidential ticket of Continuity Maga – are former Fox News blowhard Tucker Carlson and former Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. If this notion seems ridiculous, it can only be wearily noted that so does no end of stuff that has actually happened in the US in recent years.
The potentially intriguing aspect of this story is that both Carlson and Greene are former Trump cheerleaders who have recently deserted him. It would probably be naïve to credit either of them with having taken a noble stand on principle. Much more likely is that this is positioning ahead of the coming scramble for power in the post-Trump Republican party.
Trump cannot – at least not legally – run for a third term, though it is not difficult to imagine him having a go anyway and defying anyone to stop him. He cannot live forever. More urgently, he might, on the other side of November’s mid-term elections, be reduced to the ineffectual quacking and waddling that is the unhappy lot of the lame duck president. The cratering of Trump’s personal approval rating notwithstanding – he is down to a wretched 33 per cent – there is still an electorally formidable cult that could shortly be needing new leadership.
Greene has denied that either Carlson or herself aspire to the presidency: this is, of course, what everybody says at around this point in the electoral cycle. Both are plausible candidates. Carlson, though a glib cynic, is a capable communicator. Greene, though a genuine dingbat, retains support from the online fever swamps (the difference is essentially that while both traffic and amplify deranged conspiracy theories, Greene actually believes them). Both can credibly position themselves as old-school Trumpists, while neither is tarnished by association with Trump’s unpopular war with Iran or its baneful economic effects at home. The line will be: the old man was stabbed in the back by the deep state or whoever, we will deliver on a promise betrayed.
Andrew Mueller is a contributing editor at Monocle and host of ‘The Foreign Desk’ on Monocle Radio. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.
