President Donald Trump proposed forming a new “Patriot Party” separate from the Republican Party on Tuesday night. The report from the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday nights cites anonymous Trump aides and associates as its sources. If the soon to be former president were to invest serious resources or time into a party apart from the Republicans as opposed to an intra-party organization like the Tea Party, it could pose doom for them in future elections.
Trump suggesting that he could run as an independent or with a third party is not new. During the 2016 Republican primaries, he infamously threatened to run as an independent if he lost and initially refused to commit to supporting the eventual Republican nominee during the first primary debate. Pollsters even conducted three-way polls of the general election with Trump as an independent candidate, showing that the prospect would be electoral poison for the Republicans.
Saint Leo University conducted two polls with the premise in late October 2015 and then late November to early December 2015, which found that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) would prevail by at least 14 points in a match-up between a Republican nominee and Trump running as an independent. In August 2015, Fox News had Clinton up at least 12 points in such a scenario while PPP had her up 15 points.
All of these polls were conducted before Donald Trump became the Republican nominee and then the President of the United States. Trump may command an even greater share of the Republican vote as a former president.
In a recent poll conducted by NBC News, Republicans answered the question, “Do you consider yourself to be more of a supporter of Donald Trump or more of a supporter of the Republican Party?” 46 percent of the surveyed Republicans and lean Republican voters answered that they are more of a supporter of Trump, while a different 46 percent said they were more of a supporter of the Republican Party.
The historical precedent of a disgruntled former president leading a third political party is well-established. These include former presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, Millard Fillmore in 1856, and Martin Van Buren in 1848. The 1912 presidential election offers the most modern parallel, with two Republican presidents running against one another.
In that election, former President Theodore Roosevelt felt frustrated with the direction that his successor and incumbent President William Howard Taft had taken the Republicans. Roosevelt thus split from the Republicans and contested the election against Taft as a part of the reorganized Progressive Party or “Bull Moose” Party.
The 1912 U.S. presidential election map, with Democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson winning in a landslide against a divided opposition.
The Republicans had won the last five elections in landslides, but the split proved fatal to their fortunes in 1912. Roosevelt won 27 percent of the vote and carried six states as well as 88 electoral votes, while Taft won 23 percent of the vote with a pitiful showing of two states and 8 electoral votes. These Republican presidents won a combined majority of the vote, but President Woodrow Wilson carried the Democrats to a landslide victory with 40 states and 435 electors by winning less than 42 percent of the vote.
Former President Martin Van Buren ran in the 1848 presidential election under the Free Soil Party, who split from the Democrats because of his opposition to slavery in the United States. He won over 10 percent of vote, helping to split the Democratic vote and allowing then Gen. Zachary Taylor and his running mate Millard Fillmore to win under banner of the now defunct Whig Party.
Millard Fillmore would go onto serve most of Taylor’s term after the latter’s death shortly after taking office, before going onto lead his own minor party. Fillmore, a one-termer like Trump, led the anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic third party known popularly as the “Know Nothings” in the 1856 presidential election. Fillmore carried 21.5 percent of the vote, placing third in the election and winning just one state for 8 electoral votes out of a total of 296, as his original Whig Party disintegrated into nothing and the Democratic candidate James Buchanan ultimately prevailed.
There is no election in which a party won with a former president from the same party running to oppose them. If Trump were to run as a third-party candidate in the 2024 presidential election, the electoral implications are clear from both the data and the historical precedent. Trump would doom the Republicans and give the Democrats four more years in the White House.
(This article is by Victoria Bedell, the founder of the election forecasting publication Congress Compass. The 2018 House forecast from Congress Compass called nearly 97 percent of the races correctly, while the Senate forecast predicted all but two seats correctly. The 2020 presidential forecast had the lowest average error of any polling forecast including FiveThirtyEight and The Economist, especially in swing states.)
