ABSTRACT
Prior to the 2012 presidential election, many political analysts predicted that the United States would see the rise of a prominent third party candidate. For instance, Daniel Wood (2011) of the Christian Science Monitor argued, “Not only has voter angst created fertile ground for a third-party appeal, there has also been a rise in the number of voters who don’t identify themselves with either major party” (para. 5). A Gallup poll from September 2011 reported a record-high 81 percent of people in the United States were dissatisfi ed with how the country was being governed, and 53 percent had little or no confi dence in elected offi cials (Saad, 2011). Another Gallup poll found that 52 percent of U.S. voters wanted a third party option in 2012 ( Jones, 2011). This data led experts like political scientist J. David Gillespie to forecast trouble for the two-party system. “If I were a betting man,” Gillespie remarked, “I would say there’s a fi fty-fi fty chance we’ll see something this year that will be substantially greater than what Ross Perot was able to do in 1992” (as cited in Knafo, 2012, para. 6). Despite these predictions, third party candidates fi nished with less than two percent of the popular vote.
