The Enduring Appeal Of Third Party Presidential Bids
The NPR Politics Podcast
NPR
4.4 • 25.7K Ratings
🗓️ 24 July 2023
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode: White House correspondent Asma Khalid, political correspondent Susan Davis, and senior political editor and correspondent Ron Elving.
The podcast is produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, this is Brittany from Washington, DC. I'm turning 40 this week and celebrating by writing 500 |
| 0:05.6 | miles across Iowa on the registers great annual bike ride across Iowa or rag bride. This podcast |
| 0:13.5 | was recorded at 12.44 pm Eastern time on Monday, July 24th of 2023. Things may change by the time |
| 0:21.7 | you hear it, but I will officially be covered by the age discrimination and employment act. |
| 0:26.6 | All right, here's the show. |
| 0:31.5 | Congrats on that rag-by-ride. I think rag-by-ride sounds like a particular form of punishment to me, but... |
| 0:35.3 | I know I saw Tamra. So Tamra is also doing that ride and she said to picture of herself it was like day one done. |
| 0:41.1 | Yeah, this time of the year we should really do the time stamp in mid-western time. |
| 0:45.6 | Oh, well hey there it's the NPR Politics podcast. I must mahala that I cover the White House. |
| 0:51.0 | I'm Susan Davis I cover politics. And I'm Ron Elving Editor correspondent. |
| 0:54.7 | And today on the show the history and efficacy of third-party campaigns. Most Americans are not |
| 1:01.3 | enthused about the idea of a rematch between President Biden and former President Donald Trump, |
| 1:06.1 | the current GOP frontrunner, but right now it seems like a rematch is the most likely outcome. |
| 1:12.2 | And supposedly in a good faith effort to offer an alternative, a number of third-party efforts have |
| 1:17.2 | cropped up. And Ron, because these third-party efforts have a long history in modern American politics, |
| 1:23.7 | I wanted you to kind of give us a history crash course here. Maybe you can start with Ross Perot in |
| 1:28.0 | the 1990s. Yeah, let's just talk about Perot in 1992. During the spring of that year he was actually |
| 1:35.0 | ahead in the national polls of both incumbent president George H. W. Bush and the upstart |
| 1:41.4 | Democratic challenger who was about to be nominated a guy named Bill Clinton. And Perot was actually |
| 1:47.6 | running ahead of both of them and he was putting up 60 million of his own money so he could get on |
| 1:52.3 | the ballot in all 50 states and buy a lot of television time to talk about the issues he cared about. |
| 1:57.6 | And there was enough of an appetite for a third-party candidate then to briefly at least |
... |
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