The Electoral College is the reason we choose the president in 50 separate state elections and not in a single national election. What this means, in practice, is that it is not enough for a third-party candidate to have a large national constituency. That candidate could win a lot of votes — as Martin Van Buren accomplished in 1848 under the banner of “Free Soil,” as John Anderson did in 1980, and as Perot managed to do twice, in 1992 and 1996 — but would have a hard time winning electors.
Instead, to have any hope of fulfilling the constitutional requirement to win a majority of electoral votes, a third-party candidate would need at least a plurality of voters in a huge number of states. The party would need, on a state-by-state basis, to outcompete one of the other two parties, so that it could notch electors under the winner-take-all rules that apply in most states.
This, unfortunately for anyone with third-party dreams, has never happened. The closest any candidate has ever come is Theodore Roosevelt in the 1912 presidential election, when his Progressive Party (also known as the Bull Moose Party) eclipsed the Republican William Howard Taft to win electoral votes in California, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Washington. But Roosevelt still lost in a landslide, with 88 electoral votes — and 27.4 percent of the national popular vote — to Woodrow Wilson’s 435 electoral votes and 41.8 percent in the popular vote. Taft, the incumbent president, won two states.
The sheer unlikelihood of anyone pulling a repeat performance of Roosevelt in 1912 raises the question of how a third party could succeed under the current rules. And the answers lies with the next most successful third-party presidential campaigns, both of which won several states concentrated in the former Confederacy. In 1948, with Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina as its candidate, the States’ Rights Democratic Party — better known as the Dixiecrats — won four states and 39 electoral votes despite gaining just 2.4 percent of the national popular vote. Twenty years later, in 1968, George Wallace and the American Independent Party won 46 electoral votes and 13.5 percent of the popular vote.
What both results suggest is that under the Electoral College the next best alternative to a large and well-distributed national constituency is to have a small and intense regional one. It is, it seems, the only other way to win electoral votes as a third party. And while there’s no chance that a regional third-party candidate could become president, he or she could — if neither major party candidate won an electoral majority — potentially decide the result of the election in the House of Representatives through savvy negotiations with lawmakers.