Could a third party candidate have a serious effect on the 2024 presidential vote?

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that, until I read this article, it had never occurred to me that there were actually a lot of striking parallels between Ross Perot’s 1992 presidential run and Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. Fundamentally, both men presented themselves to the public as populist billionaire ideological centrists, dedicated to cleaning up the Washington swamp, dominated by corrupt career politicians. (It’s easy to forget now how many willfully credulous media types bought into Trump’s claims of ideological moderation in 2016).

Both of them were deeply weird men — I had forgotten that Perot actually quit the race in July, jumped back in just three weeks before the election, and somehow still got nearly 20% of the national vote — although Trump is totally corrupt in a way that’s quite distinct from Perot. Perot’s nativism, expressed via his attacks on NAFTA, was also far more muted and less obviously racist than Trump’s demagoguery. But the parallels are still interesting.

The question of the moment is whether something similar can happen this coming year, with the obvious candidate for a kind of plague on both your houses candidate being the utterly absurd but somehow vaguely popular RFK Jr. I suspect the answer is no, mainly because the key condition that made Perot’s relative success possible — a widespread sense that there wasn’t much difference between Bush I and Bill Clinton — doesn’t exist today, to put it mildly. But it’s worth considering.