Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a special series of discussions about the biggest political event of this year, the 2016 US presidential election.

My name's Freddie Gray and I'm Deputy Edger of the Spectator.

I'm joined today by Professor Gary Gersel, who is the Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge University, and his latest book is called Liberty and Coercion, The Paradox of American Government, from the founding to the present.

Professor Gersel, it's been said a lot that we've never seen a candidate like Donald Trump before, and we've never really had an election like this before.

But I wonder if historically you can point us towards any precedence,

any examples of earlier American elections that might tell us something about where America

will go after November the 8th?

Well, in some respects, there are precedents for Trump.

The United States has a two-party system, as you know.

Each party is very big and capacious with many different ideological tendencies within it.

It's very hard for these parties to move in a single direction, given all the different interests and ideologies they have to satisfy.

So part of the way in which American politics works is insurgents who are outside the mainstream, either on the margins or below, either

a upsurge from below or a candidate like Trump crashing into the party, so to speak,

and trying to establish a different voice, either a third party initiative or to take over one of the parties.

This is quite common in American history. Ross Perrault in

1992 was a populist candidate. Barry Goldwater was in the Republican Party in 1964, took it over,

lost badly to Lyndon Johnson, but set the stage for the conservative takeover of the Republican

Party. Robert Lafellette in 1924 tried a third-party

effort to really institute a British labor parties in the United States. Teddy Roosevelt in

1912, William Jennings Bryan in 1896, the great populist candidate. I think in some respects

we can see Trump following in this tradition. And from all the

names I've just given you, you can see how common an occurrence it is, not every election cycle,

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