I don't think that most people realized what happened when Fox limited the "adult clown debate" to the top 10 contenders for the GOP nomination. By creating two levels of debates, they marked several serious contenders for the nomination as irrelevant before the bulk of campaigning had even started. Worse yet, the GOP delegated the task of culling out weak candidates to an interested, non neutral organization whose business should be reporting the news (with appropriate spin) and not being involved in the process of making the news itself.
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Currently, the joker in the deck is Donald Trump. He has the ability to foul up the GOP's chances for victory, as he can set the tone for the party well after the campaigns would normally be tacking back to middle ground to attract the interest of independent voters. Trump's success is easy to explain - he has gathered the interest of voters who believe that the 2 mainstream political parties no longer listen to the true wishes of the people. And in many ways he is right.
The way I view Trump's election bid is simple - it started out as a great publicity gimmick to promote Trump's other ventures. One problem - he didn't expect to succeed as well as he has done so far, and he's now caught in his own trap - he must make a serious run for an office that I don't think he wants to hold. He is now caught by his own words - he has to break the logjam that the two party system has made in Washington for his reputation to be preserved. So he has to learn how to tone down the BS and Bluster, and start saying things with real meaning. This is going to be hard for the greatest snake oil salesman alive in this country today.
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If Trump ends up making a 3rd party run for the presidency, I expect that he will not get on the ballot in all 50 states. This might not be as big a problem as it sounds. As long as we use the electoral college to perform the real election of the president, it is possible for a person to win the office of POTUS with the votes from a handful of states.
This brings us to examining previous 3rd party runs for POTUS. The most recent run that had any chance of success was H. Ross Perot's run - and he failed miserably. However, is we look back to the election of 1912, all hell broke loose when Teddy Roosevelt ran against Taft and Wilson. (And there were 2 other viable candidates, one of them being the Socialist, Eugene V. Debs.) Although Taft and Roosevelt had more votes than Wilson, the disunity in the "Republican Tribe" gave the election to the Democrats. And this is what the kingmakers in the GOP fear most.
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As for me, I like what I've seen so far. Trump is exposing the hatreds at the core of the GOP base, and the elders running the party machine don't like it. Trump's candidacy is going to bring a breath of needed fresh air to the GOP - and may finally force its leaders to rectify the mistake made when it chose the "Southern Strategy" of appealing to religious fundamentalists and racists during Nixon's reign.
I hope this happens. It would be nice to see a conservative party that only focuses on economic conservatism for a change....
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