Americans Elect announced their intentions with some basic boilerplate:
American voters are tired of politics as usual. They want leaders that will put their country before their party, and American interests before special interests. Leaders who will work together to develop fresh solutions to the serious challenges facing our country.
That they came out of the box sounding exactly like every Democrat and Republican running for office should have been our first warning. Were they really going to be different?
They had three mechanisms that were supposed to assure that their members would nominate a competent truly bipartisan ticket. First they created a “bipartisan” and “independent” committee charged with producing minimum standards of achievement and experience based on the record of prior presidential and vice presidential candidates. Then they made it a requirement that whomever won the nomination would pick a running mate from a different party. And to assure that a Republican didn’t just pick a right-wing Libertarian or a Democrat didn’t pick a Green, each candidate was required to answer an issue survey. The nominee had to pick someone with whom they had significant disagreements on that survey. For example, Arlen Specter and Lincoln Chafee might now be from different parties but they don’t disagree on a whole lot. Their ticket might have been disallowed.
The people who put this together made a lot of assumptions. One was that the primary reason that we have so few viable third party presidential runs is the extremely high barrier to entry. They sought to take care of all of the dirty work of getting ballot access and figuring out how to find delegates. So far, they’ve attained ballot access in 28 states and claim confidence that they’ll win it in all 50 in time for the November election. They also have money. All a candidate has to do is win the nomination and they’ll be off and running.
But almost no one wanted to run, and the few that did either did not meet the minimum standard for experience, didn’t garner enough support, or both. In fact, no one won the minimum amount of support.
There’s are lessons to be learned from this, but it’s easy to learn the wrong ones. Take, for example, the reaction of Dana Milbank:
Faced with this twin disappointment — desirable candidates being uninterested and interested candidates being undesirable — Americans Elect has announced that it is abandoning its online nominating process because no candidate had reached its minimum threshold. This is profoundly depressing, and not just because it dashes the [candidate Kenneth] Domagala plan to admit Cuba to the union. It’s discouraging because it shows politics may be too broken to fix.
