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Is there an independent alternative to Trump?
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Filing deadlines and signature requirements for independent presidential candidates, 2016
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 Date: November 8, 2016 |
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May 9, 2016
Now that Donald Trump is all but certain to be the 2016 Republican standard bearer in the fall campaign, some GOP operatives and house intellectuals are promoting the idea of an independent candidacy as an alternative to the billionaire celebrity who has marched to the party’s nomination disregarding some of its cherished principles and shibboleths alike.
As GOP elected officials continue to hesitate to endorse Trump, these advocates for an independent candidate still hope that a white knight will show up to rescue the party. The Weekly Standard editor William Kristol told CNN on May 9 that he put the odds at “50-50” that a credible independent presidential candidate would yet emerge that conservatives could be proud off.
But given the late hour and the challenge of generating much enthusiasm for such an effort beyond Republican seraglios of Washington, D.C., this would be an uphill task for the Trump dissidents.
The last significant independent presidential candidacy came in 1992, when Texas businessman H. Ross Perot captured 19 percent of the popular vote. He carried no states and tallied more than 25 percent of the vote in only eight: Maine, Alaska, Utah, Idaho, Kansas, Nevada, Montana, and Wyoming. Arguably, Perot’s most remarkable accomplishment that year was navigating the maze of ballot access rules in the states and getting on the ballot on all 50 of them. How did he do it?
First, he started earlier than this would-be GOP insurrection. Just three days after the 1992 New Hampshire presidential primary (February 18), Perot appeared on the popular CNN cable television talk show, Larry King Live and said he would consider a White House run if volunteers would get his name on all 50 state ballots. According to veteran political reporters Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover authors of Mad As Hell: Revolt at the Ballot Box, 1992 the CNN switchboard lit up as soon as King’s show was over. The response was so great that within days, Perot had to set up an 800 toll-free number in his Dallas office to handle the surge of incoming calls. In two weeks time, more than a million individuals called wanting to know how they could help.
That effort has at least a three-month head start on any 2016 independent White House hopeful. Kristol maintained in his CNN interview that such a candidacy this year could wait until June 1 to get up and running and only miss a couple of state deadlines for filing petitions in order for an independent to gain access to the general election ballot.
Coincidentally, the ballot access deadline for Texas, with one of the toughest petition requirements in the country—79,939 signatures from Texas who hadn’t voted in the presidential primary—was on May 9. June 9 is the ballot access deadline for North Carolina, which requires 89,366 petition signatures. By mid-July, deadlines pass for six other states: Delaware, Florida—119,316 signatures—Georgia, Nevada, Oklahoma and South Carolina.
Kristol suggested that legal challenges could be pressed in states with onerous access laws to secure a ballot line for an independent candidate. That’s true, but there’s no way of knowing how such lawsuits might turn out.
- See also: Anderson v. Celebrezze
Notwithstanding the legal hurdles that any independent candidate would face to getting on the ballot, the bigger challenge could be an enthusiasm gap. In 1992, Perot represented a sort of populist middle-ground insurgency between two major party candidates who were viewed by many as flawed. Incumbent Republican President George Bush was the leader of the coalition that defeated Iraq in the1991 Gulf War, but the United States was also suffering from a recession that hit both blue and white-collar workers. The country was also depressed from riots in Los Angeles that claimed more than 50 lives. The Democratic challenger, Bill Clinton, was dogged by stories of marital infidelity and dodging the draft during the Vietnam War.
Today, dissident Republicans are talking about a candidate who would be a conservative alternative to Trump, which pretty much precludes gaining much traction in the center of the American electorate that might not be excited about voting for the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. Certainly the disaffected liberal supporters of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders wouldn’t be drawn to a conservative independent.
It’s enthusiasm—or a very fat checkbook—that an independent would need to gain the necessary petition signatures to get on the ballot in the vast majority of states, a prerequisite for demonstrating such a candidacy has a viable chance to win in the fall.
Perot’s support was largely organic. He put himself in a position to be drafted by disaffected voters in 1992, and wasn’t tapped by elites in either party to run, which added to the Texan’s anti-establishment and anti-Washington appeal. Any conservative recruited to run by GOP insiders as an independent wouldn’t enjoy that kind of grassroots support. Trump has already captured the hearts of GOP anti-establishment voters who are frustrated with professional politicians.
And what kind of conservative alternative to Trump makes the most sense? Someone who can appeal to Evangelical and born-again voters who are leery of Trump’s ambivalence towards social issues, or free-market economic conservatives repelled by Trump’s anti-trade tirades? What about trying to appeal to Main Street Chamber-of-Commerce types who are chagrined by Trump’s reluctance to embrace entitlement reforms and his flexible stance on the minimum wage? It won’t be easy to find an alternative to Trump who checks all those boxes.
Even if such a catchall candidate could be recruited for the task, he or she wouldn’t be propelled by populist groundswell like Perot was. That’s the kind of energy that is not only needed to mobilize voters to gain access to the general election ballot; it’s the essential ingredient for fueling an independent campaign that would lack any of the institutional support that the nominees of the two major parties enjoy. Such an independent could be at best a protest candidate unlikely to draw many votes in November, not the savior of conservative principles or down-ballot Republican candidates that the Trump dissidents are hoping for.
The map below compares signature requirements by state, both as raw numbers and as percentages of state population. A lighter shade indicates a lower total signature requirement while a darker shade indicates a higher signature requirement. It should be noted that other variables factor in this process; for instance, some states require candidates to collect a certain number of signatures from each congressional district.[1]
Filing deadlines and signature requirements for independent presidential candidates, 2016
James A. Barnes is a senior writer for Ballotpedia and co-author of the 2016 edition of the Almanac of American Politics. He is a member of the CNN Decision Desk and will help to project the Democratic and Republican winners throughout the election cycle.
See also
- Presidential candidates, 2016
- Presidential debates (2015-2016)
- Presidential election, 2016/Polls
- 2016 presidential candidate ratings and scorecards
- Presidential election, 2016/Straw polls
- ↑ This information was compiled by Ballotpedia staff in November 2015. These figures were verified against those published by Richard Winger in the October 2015 print edition of Ballot Access News.
