Third-party effort aims to transform 2012 race

NOTE: I became a California delegate for Americans Elect a month ago.

Are you fed up with stale, two-party electoral warfare? How about a do-it-yourself presidential nominee?

A group called Americans Elect aims to put its candidate on the ballot in 2012, but it’s a movement apparently without any economic, foreign policy or social agenda and with no charismatic contenders so far.

Americans Elect’s sole principle is that the two-party system is flawed and that voters ought to “have an open competition that is untethered from the Republican or Democratic parties,” as Elliot Ackerman, the group’s chief operating officer put it.

He said the group’s nominating process is “not tethered to the ideology of the far right or the far left, so we can try to get past some of the gridlock that exists right now in Washington, D.C.”

The presidential candidate whom the group will nominate or draft through its Internet-based selection process could be Texas Rep. Ron Paul, or President Barack Obama, or New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg or perhaps someone further outside the mainstream.

Any registered voter can be a delegate and can vote in the group’s multistage balloting process, starting next April, and take part in its convention. Because it is using a web-based “convention” the delegates won’t be crowding into hotel rooms in Denver or Miami Beach.

Although the group’s bylaws say no quorum is required to hold its convention, Ackerman said Americans Elect has already signed up 110,000 delegates.

To promote bipartisan community, the group will require that its presidential nominee run with a vice presidential candidate of a different party, which conjures up thoughts of unlikely Obama-Boehner 2012 bumper stickers.

Bipartisan array of backers
The people who are running and advising Americans Elect include Peter Ackerman, head of Rockport Capital, a private investment firm and chairman of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, Doug Schoen, former pollster for Bloomberg and for President Bill Clinton, and Mark McKinnon, the media guru for Sen. John McCain’s 2008 Republican primary campaign and for President George W. Bush in the 2000 and 2004 campaigns.

One of the advisors to the group, investor Lynn Forrester de Rothschild, has donated $5,000 to Republican presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman’s political action committee. The group’s legal counsel, Daniel Winslow, a Republican state legislator from Massachusetts, has given $1,500 to Mitt Romney’s campaign.

Some observers speculate that the group could be a Trojan horse, as was the Reform Party in 1996 for Ross Perot. But the group denies this.

“One thing I can tell you is that there is no Perot on the horizon here. I’m enough on the inside to know that this is not wired for any individual,” said one of Americans Elect’s advisors, Larry Diamond, a fellow at the Hoover Institution and director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University.

Diamond, who supported Obama in 2008, said he’s not close to the discussions that Americans Elect’s leadership has been having with potential candidates, but “I can tell you without naming names that there have been very prominent people whose names would be instantly  recognizable who at least have had conversations.”

He added, “You can’t spend 20 seconds talking about an independent and depolarizing entry into the 2012 presidential race without considering the name of Michael Bloomberg. But Bloomberg does keep saying that he’s not going to run and I take him at his word ... It’s unlikely this ticket is going to win — let’s face it — and I don’t think he wants to spend a billion dollars of his own money in a losing cause.”

Potential kingmaker role
The group disdains the current two-party duopoly, but its rules spell out a way it could play the kingmaker by giving any electoral votes its candidate wins to either the Democratic or Republican candidate. This strategy is what maverick candidate George Wallace hoped for in 1968, but couldn’t achieve.

If Americans Elect succeeds in getting a candidate on the ballot in all or most states — it’s on in six so far — it will defy the tradition that a third party must have an ideology and a charismatic leader. A few examples prove the point:

• Wisconsin Sen. Robert LaFollette ran in 1924 as a reformer who wanted to curb corporate power.
• Former vice president Henry Wallace broke from the Democratic Party in 1948, running as a leftist candidate in favor of making peace with the Soviet Union.
• Former Illinois Rep. John Anderson, having lost in Republican primaries to Ronald Reagan in 1980, ran as a middle-of-the road alternative to Reagan and Democratic President Jimmy Carter.

The most successful third-party candidate in recent decades, Perot, ran in 1992 and again in 1996 as a problem solver who promised to reduce the federal deficit and to use “electronic town hall meetings,” a kind of precursor of the Internet, to gauge public opinion.

With Americans Elect, the candidate remains to be seen and the funding for the group, about $20 million so far, is something of a mystery since it has organized itself as a 501(c) (4) tax-exempt organization which isn’t required to disclose its donors.

Will voters rally to the cause?
Apart from questions about its funding, the group faces more basic challenges.

Will voters flock to a movement that at its start is purely process-oriented, rather than an ideological or populist crusade?

Will the group be able to get its candidates on the ballot in all 50 states? Richard Winger, the editor of Ballot Access News, said six in particular have ballot laws that make it daunting: California, Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia, Indiana and North Carolina.

In California the group needs 1,030,040 signatures; California counties have so far verified about 345,000.

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