Close, But No Cigar: The Fall and Rise and Fall of the Reform Party
A Timeline in a While, by @Plumber, Japhy, and @Revolutionary Avocado
Close, But No Cigar: The Fall and Rise and Fall of the Reform Party
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Close, But No Cigar: The Fall and Rise and Fall of the Reform Party
A Timeline in a While, by @Plumber, Japhy, and @Revolutionary Avocado
Prologue: Close, But No Cigar
Prologue: Close, But No Cigar
Some people might ask: why the Reform Party?The answer could easily be “Why not?”, but that isn’t it. While the Reform Party appears to be truly dead and in need of a good burial (or perhaps an exorcism followed by a quick cremation at high heat), Reform’s influence on modern American politics is profound. While Reform candidates never won the presidency, the party came within striking distance on at least two occasions, and unlike most third parties Reform managed to elect a variety of candidates down the ballot. Former Reform state affiliates remain important parties in a half-dozen states, and there are three ex-Reformers currently serving in statewide office.
Perhaps more importantly though are Reform’s effects on the American political system. Reform-driven changes to state electoral laws have proliferated. Nine states use some form of ranked-choice voting on their ballots, and even more allow electoral fusionism, wherein multiple parties endorse the same candidate and appear on the ballot. While Democrats and Republicans remain the two major parties, smaller parties–representing the fringes, cross-pressured voters, and particular regional or sectional interests–are competitive all over the country. Moreover, Reformer policies–on trade especially but also on immigration, public spending, and foreign policy–have been thoroughly integrated into the Democrats and GOP, driving the current and ongoing realignment of the so-called Seventh Party System.
So, why write about Reform? They might be nuts, but they're important, goddamn it.
The 2000 Election: From One Billionaire To The Next
The 2000 Election: From One Billionaire To The Next
In the summer of 1999, the Reform Party found itself in an awkward position. Ross Perot had made it clear to party leadership that he would not run again. 1996's efforts to draft another prominent candidate had failed, and the pool of viable Ford-Carter-Reagan Era conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans—particularly those who shared Perot's skepticism of free trade—was even smaller and less viable in 2000. The party’s leading alternative to Perot, Governor Jesse Ventura of Minnesota, remained committed to his pledge that he would not consider running for higher office at least until the end of his first term.
Without a clear candidate, Perot's nascent party seemed doomed to irrelevance. While opposition to liberalized trade was its organizing principle, the coalition otherwise spanned the spectrum, from Marxists and progressive gadflies to the paranoid "constitutionalists" of the Patriot Movement. There was precious little these groups could agree on, and while Perot had devoted some of his substantial fortune to building out a party infrastructure, this wouldn't matter without a candidate who could win votes.
In that vacuum, opportunists circled. The far right, sensing their chance, organized a movement to draft former Nixon aide Pat Buchanan as the party's candidate. The cult-like Natural Law Party and its leader John Hagelin sought to co-opt the Reform Party for their movement. On the party's left, the 1996 Green Party nominee, consumer advocate Ralph Nader, was working to sound out his own chances.
The most successful of these opportunists though was one that Perot, who was quietly threatening to pull the plug on the whole endeavor, could live with. New York businessman Donald Trump had sounded off for years about running for President. A coarse but famous and charismatic property developer, who was impressed with the success of Ventura and Perot, Trump was more than convinced that he could best the likely nominees Vice President Gore and Governor Bush. Ventura, who had met Trump through various Hollywood connections, thought the man a blowhard but more intelligent than he let on and someone who could be shaped into a strong candidate.
Flattered by Ventura and egged on by GOP operative Roger Stone, a longtime associate, Trump saw the Reform Party as a tool to variously promote the brand of the Trump Organization, provide him a soapbox by which to call on changes he believed would be good for the nation, and to satisfy his own ego. What both Ventura and Trump were unaware of was that Roger Stone had also been promoting the idea of a Reform Party run to Pat Buchanan, seeking a battle by two men he considered lightweights to cripple the party that he and many Republicans blamed for the defeats of George H. W. Bush in 1992 and Bob Dole in 1996. Trump’s announcement that he would form an exploratory committee pushed Buchanan to make the leap, and Buchanan’s announcement that he would run pushed Trump to do the same, setting the stage in October of 1999 for the Reform Party nomination. Nader, sensing the winds, would for the time walk away from the party, while Haglin would have poor showings in Reform's hastily organized primaries and rapidly became a non-factor.
By January, Trump had staked his positions out, with the help of Perot, Ventura and their policy advisors. Trump declared himself to be anti-NAFTA, anti-gun control, tough on crime, pro-universal healthcare, and supportive of lower middle-class tax cuts. Declaring himself “extremely moderate,” he contrasted himself to Buchanan who he likened to Attila the Hun, and attacked as “enamored with Adolf Hitler.” Buchanan’s campaign strenuously denied this, but could only distance themselves so much from the radical right, as Buchanan counted on the growing Patriot Movement bloc within the party to pad his numbers. David Duke’s move to join the Reform Party was never outright supported, but in practical terms it provided a lifeline, even as Buchanan’s refusal to denounce this quiet support cost him his campaign co-chair, the eccentric socialist activist, Lenora Fulani.
While Perot and Ventura had fiercely struggled in the personalistic factional politics that are so common in American third parties, open support for Buchanan by Klansmen like Duke pushed Perot to seek compromise with Ventura for the sake of the party. And with media savvy, harsh jabbing and occasional bits of wisdom from Stone, Trump was able to find momentum, deflecting Buchanan’s attacks on Trump’s business practices and debauched social circles as sour grapes from a no-fun Nazi. After Super Tuesday, Trump had romped in most of the party’s primaries and had a clear majority of awarded delegates. With defeat clear, Buchanan quit, accusing party chairman Russ Verney of bias and accepting the nomination of the Constitution Party he had declined in 1992 and 1996.
As August turned to September, Trump was regularly hitting the high teens in the polls, tapping into the discontent many voters felt for the major party candidates, Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W. Bush. After considerable wrangling and with a threatened lawsuit (something Trump was known for), Trump earned himself a spot at one of the National Presidential Debates: the third, and last, held on October 17th, at Washington University in St. Louis.
Trump did not disappoint. The Vice President became “Sleepy Al” Gore, determined to kill Social Security with his lockboxes and “the tired, old, same old, same old.” Governor George W. Bush, whose campaign had most strenuously opposed Trump’s inclusion, was hammered mercilessly for his silver-spoon upbringing and complicated life story. When Bush committed another trademark malapropism, Trump broke debate rules and pounced. “I call him George Dummy Bush, he failed out of Yale, big-league,” was mangled as Trump's microphone was cut off by the moderators, but the insult struck a nerve with Bush, who turn red and babbled incoherently. It also struck a nerve with voters, many of whom were concerned about Bush’s lack of preparedness: while Gore hadn’t been able to land such a hit, Trump could.
In answering his own questions, Trump received little in the way of the harsh interruptions his rivals did, the two seemingly trying to present an image of decorum. It hardly mattered, the moderators could not get the Reform nominee to offer much in the way of details, being dismissed with waves of the candidate’s hands as he proclaimed that he would nominate “a cabinet of experts,” as he had said repeatedly during the campaign, and that “his people would find the votes.” Opinion polling after the debate found that Gore had won, if only by default. Combined with Trump pulling somewhat more voters from Bush than him, this led to a Gore victory on Election Day.
In the end, Trump didn’t meet his high polling numbers, as soft supporters either came home to their respective major parties or didn’t show up at all. Donald Trump won 9.2% of the vote nationwide, a respectable showing for the Reform Party which still didn’t come close to Perot's independent run in 1992. However, the race had its bright spots: spending in Alaska and New Hampshire netted the party its first handful of state legislative seats, where Trump won 19.1% and 17.4% respectively, and Reform gubernatorial nominees broke 10% in New Hampshire, Montana, North Dakota, Utah, and West Virginia.
Trump would claim for the rest of his life that the run had been a mistake, that it had cost him his relationship with his then-girlfriend, Melania Knauss, that the Reform Party was a mess, and that he believed long-standing rumors that he was passed over for the short-lived NBC reality show The Apprentice, which instead settled on Sheldon Adelson as its host. He would return to his real estate investments, permanently destroying any possibility of a return to politics with particularly crass comments in the aftermath of the September 11th Attacks. Trump’s legacy is that of a minor nuisance and a transitional figure for the party, but one who helped cement its status as the country's most viable third party and its identity as a big tent opposed to the otherwise-bipartisan consensus around trade liberalization.
Okay his first mistake was not sticking to Oprah as his proposed vice presidential candidate.
2004: Left, Right, and Center
2004: Left, Right, and Center
The world as Americans knew it came to an end on September 11th, 2001: The twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed, the Pentagon burned, and the US Capitol’s dome shattered as airliners hijacked by al-Qaeda extremists struck near-simultaneously. With thousands dead, the peacetime issues of the Bush-Gore-Trump election were swept away. President Gore, speaking from the Capitol steps, with the Capitol still smoldering in the background and flanked by the bipartisan leadership of Congress, announced that America was at war. This “Global War on Extremism” won several early victories. Receiving near-unanimous permission from Congress, Gore mounted an invasion of the anarchic country of Afghanistan, where the ruling Taliban regime sheltered al-Qaeda’s leadership. On December 11, 2001, President Gore announced that Osama Bin Laden, al-Qaeda’s leader and the organizer of the 9/11 attacks, had been killed in combat with U.S. troops as he tried to flee for the Pakistani border. It would take months for DNA tests to confirm bin Laden’s identity but Al Gore became for a moment, the most popular president in American History.
The Reform Party under the leadership of the Ventura faction had been planning a major push in the midterms. Aiming to build up the party from the ground up, the "Minnesota Mafia" had recruited candidates and organized ballot initiatives to expand fusion and ranked-choice voting in as many states as possible, including California. However, their carefully laid plans were disrupted, as the Democrats kept the Senate and retook the House of Representatives for the first time in eight years, riding a wave of public support. Still, Reform made some gains. They won a handful of state legislative races across the country (primarily in New Hampshire, Minnesota and New York), won several of their ballot-reform referenda, reelected Governor Ventura for a second term, and in an upset, elected billionaire Reformer Tom Golisano in New York. While Golisano’s election had more to do with the state of his opponents—Democrat Andrew Cuomo and Republican Bernard Kerik—then with a breakout win on his part, it did establish him as the only rival to Ventura for stature within the party.
Even as discontent about peace negotiations and nation-building efforts in Afghanistan grew, it was clear after the midterms that a second Gore term was all but assured. The once-sluggish economy was on the upswing, driven by roaring housing construction and investment in public infrastructure in the National Defense Natural Resources Allocation Act of 2003, also known as the Waxman-Jeffords Act for its lead negotiators. The President’s push to end America’s dependence on fossil fuels as a national-security issue ruffled feathers—particularly in producer states like Texas, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia–but found widespread popular support elsewhere, and its impact in coal states was reduced by investment in "clean coal" and infrastructure projects in affected regions. While Gore’s focus on global warming was ridiculed on Fox News, SNL, and other late-night shows, it resonated with a critical mass of the public, who soon adjusted to higher gas prices in the name of patriotism. 2003 and 2004 saw a series of airstrikes and special forces raids on targets in Iraq, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia and into the tribal areas of Pakistan. All in all, American politics seemed to quickly adapt to the new normal, with usual budget fights and a Supreme Court nomination–with Fourth Circuit Judge Pamela Harris replacing Justice John Paul Stevens in a smooth confirmation–returning to the fore.
Early press coverage of the Reform Party primary assumed that it would be a fight between the party’s two governors. But, with Ventura renewing his pledge not to run until he completed his second term and Golisano settling into his new position in Albany, both men seemed content to agree that neither of them should be the party nominee. Instead, they encouraged Mayor of Oakland—and once and future California Governor—Jerry Brown to get in the race. “Governor Moonbeam” had a solid record of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism which appealed to that vaunted, ubiquitous, yet somewhat elusive faction of the American electorate. Moreover, Brown’s opposition to NAFTA and FTAA was a matter of public record. Brown took exploratory meetings and talked up the possibility of a bid to advisors and donors, and the Reform Party National Committee did what it could to ensure an open field to be his for the taking, but as the Reform Party would come to learn in the years that followed, backroom dealings are never an assured thing in a populist and often-polarized party.
The party’s best-laid plans collapsed when Jerry Brown, first and foremost a pragmatist, accepted President Gore’s nomination to serve as the country’s first Secretary of the Environment following the signing of the Waxman-Jeffords Act. Suddenly, the obvious choice was off the table. With this earthquake, Ralph Nader announced his decision to leave the Green Party and run for the Reform Party nomination, and was joined a week later by Republican Congressman and right-wing libertarian Ron Paul. They were far from the last contestants: Reform Party National Chairman Dean Barkley looked on in horror as others entered the race, most notably the anti-Nixon, anti-Vietnam War former Congressman Pete McCloskey and the actor Warren Beatty.
As Barkley scrambled and began an emergency search for a more viable option, another bombshell dropped. Texas Governor and 2000 candidate George W. Bush announced in November 2003 that he would be seeking the Republican nomination again, pre-empting the long-anticipated announcement of his brother Jeb, Governor of Florida, by two days. What followed was a media circus about the “Jack and Bobby War” in the Republican Party for the remainder of the primary season, as the two brothers engaged in an increasingly vitriolic campaign for the GOP nomination. Attention would from that point on would be hard to find for Reform, empowering the splashy entryists with their name recognition and rapidly-inducted loyalists.
Desperate, the party sought answers. In a private phone call just after Thanksgiving 2003, Barkley and Golisano both claimed the other outright begged Ventura to jump in the race, but he refused. According to Barkley, Golisano ended the call by proclaiming “Well if you won’t, someone has to, it might as well be me.”
The Golisano 2004 campaign is the stuff of legend for the connoisseurs of the politically obscure. In a party with a long history of repeating its victories and defeats, the Buffalo businessman rang of Trump, though with less fame, less fortune, and less charisma. Jetting across the country with his well-paid but disorganized campaign staff, he simply couldn’t create a spark or draw in crowds, and what crowds he did draw found him alternately off-putting and deadly boring. His more charismatic rivals pounced, being baited at a town hall by Paul’s questions about the Federal Reserve and snapping at Nader (and earning a moment of national attention) as he called Consumer Advocates a “hack outfit trying to destroy American free enterprise.” Wholly reliant on his fortune to fundraise, seeing the tabloids question his marriage, and with Ventura and the Minnesota Mafia enraged at his half-cocked effort, Golisano quietly dropped out of the race before the first primary.
At this point, there was serious discussion about throwing the institutional weight of the party behind Beatty, and his populist, dilettante, pseudo-socialist platform. But, at the absolute last moment, a figure was found to become the standard-bearer. Douglas Wilder had been the first Black Governor of a former Confederate State since Reconstruction when he was elected in 1990, and had run for the Democratic nomination in 1992. A Korean War veteran, he was considered too old by many. Yet, by embracing opposition to the FTAA talks, calling for a winding down of Gore’s “Hundred Little Wars” and taking a tough line on crime, Wilder was able to stake out a central position in the party, and thrilled to be back in the game, ran with it. As an experienced politician, he was able to run a campaign and handle Paul, Nader and the others, and his promise to “govern America down the middle” resonated with a critical mass of Reformers seeking normalcy.
Wilder was helped by his opponents’ disastrous campaigns. Nader’s constituency in Reform was a mix of Natural Law holdouts, Green defectors and young voters attracted to his radical message, but his fanatical conviction in himself above all else doomed him. Nader consistently failed to secure endorsements as his most likely allies on the left were either supporting Gore or more interested in building on the Green Party’s decent showing in 2000 and hoping to secure federal matching funds like Reform had. Key leaders in Reform who might have been wooed, like Lenora Fulani were turned away because of the sort of minor personal disagreements a decent candidate for dog-catcher would have been able to patch over. Short on funds and operating effectively separate from the rest of the party, Nader secured a continual if tiny trickle of delegates up to the convention.
Paul would prove a harder nut to crack. The Congressmen from Texas had been the Libertarian nominee for President in 1988 and earned a reputation in the 90s as the “Congressman for the KKK.” Anti-abortion, pro-gold standard, anti-intervention, and well-versed in threading the needle between appeasing racist supporters and appealing to more earnest supporters of small government, he had a ready-made base among old Buchanan holdouts, Libertarian defectors, and the more mainstream conservative wing of Reform. He was also able to find support from Charles and David Koch, and made inroads through the innovative use of AOL Instant Messenger to recruit younger supporters.
At the 2004 Reform Primary Debate aired on C-SPAN before Super Tuesday though, Wilder established himself as the man to beat. Nader appeared sanctimonious and cold, Paul a hardliner and a fanatic, Beatty was clearly unserious, and McCloskey outdated. Wilder, on the other hand, was prepared, relatable and a reasonable, experienced figure. He brushed aside criticisms that he was a newcomer to the party by pointing to Paul and Nader’s recent party switches, and his criticism of the “obscene” turn in modern culture and promises to return more government programs to the states reassured right-leaning voters that he was “one of the good ones.” The board was effectively cleared, with Paul really only able to trade in his status as the only White name in the top three.
None of this drama—nor the selection of David Cobb as the Green nominee or Alan Keyes, the Constitution Party's choice—made much impact on the American people though. All eyes were turned to the battle within the Republican Party. In the end, Jeb and George swatted away at each other while arch-conservative Kansas Senator Sam Brownback accrued enough delegates to become the Republican nominee. Promising to fight Gore’s “big government power grabs” and abolish multiple federal departments while defending “traditional marriage” and restricting abortion, Brownback was a highly polarizing figure who was widely seen as extreme. To combat this impression, Brownback selected New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, a libertarian-leaning conservative who tempered some of Brownback’s fervor but who became notorious for being gaffe-prone and possibly stoned.
In September, the race was upended yet again. Following reports of extensive new Sudanese military atrocities in Darfur, including the possible use of chemical weapons against civilian targets, President Gore launched Operation Nubian Dawn. A coalition of NATO and Egyptian forces, with Ethiopian, Emirati, Qatari, Saudi and Chadian logistical support, struck into Sudan in order to attack Islamist targets and the regime of Omar al-Bashir. Egyptian forces crossed Sudan’s northern border and Marines took Port Sudan without much of a fight, while British, French, and American airborne forces seized the airport at Khartoum, bringing the regime down as elements of the Sudanese military surrendered en-masse. Bashir was apprehended by U.S. forces as he attempted to flee the city, lucky not to have fallen into the hands of either his mutinous troops or the rebel forces. While chaos ensued after the regime’s fall and for a brief moment, it seemed that the Republican and Reform tickets might have been handed a disaster on which to build, Bashir was soon on his way to The Hague and U.S. casualties remained low. After a wave of reprisals against pro-government militias and their communities, under pressure by the U.S., all major Sudanese rebel groups joined a ceasefire and agreed to support an interim government led by technocrats and headed by Ansar leader and former Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi in preparation for the formation of a constitutional assembly. Thus, while the world looked in horror at what had been going on in the western reaches of the country, Gore instead had another feather in his cap: doing what Bill Clinton hadn’t in Rwanda a decade before. With the first U.S. troops coming home in October, relieved by a mix of African Union and Arab League blue helmets, President Gore was photographed with a “Mission Accomplished” banner behind him on the helo-deck of the U.S.S. Boxer, greeting the victorious soldiers. For many, this marked the moment that the President’s election was assured.
Thus, while Wilder had bested the worst instincts of third-party voters, and made sure the party was at least a known force in the race, secured by his work in interviews and with reporters and a breakneck series of tours and talks across the country, he wasn’t able to win. Wilder’s performance in the second and third debates before the election were poor. Gore was untouchable in regards to his foreign policy victories, anti-war sentiment was low, and on economic issues it was Brownback’s ‘starve the beast’, neoliberalism and Gore’s retorts that took center stage, not the neo-protectionism of which Wilder was a late convert. It was a common view that the elder statesmen appeared tired and stale, even if his answers were neat and to the point. Fred Armisen (a controversial choice of its own) would portray him on SNL in a nightcap and baggy pajamas for the rest of the election.
In the end, Wilder secured 7.2% of the vote. This was a decline from Trump and Perot, but at least secured federal funding for another cycle, and held up among third-party performances in general. It was also the most successful run of an African American candidate in history up to that point, something which drew lavish praise from editorial boards even as they endorsed Gore for reelection. Wilder drew votes from both parties, but particularly more moderate Republicans who couldn’t stomach a vote for Brownback. Many Republicans grumbled that he had cost them the crucial state of Virginia, while Democrats maintained it was support for Gore’s foreign policy which swung the state.
2008: Jesse's Last Stand
2008: Jesse's Last Stand
Aside from the Global Warming Reduction Acts, the 2004 Buenos Aires Climate Agreement, and the 2005 Montreal Accord–finalizing the long Oslo process and giving the Palestinian people a state–Gore’s most significant legacy was likely the appointment of Barack Obama as the first Black American Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. This put liberals in charge of all three branches of government for the first time since the 1960s. The charismatic Obama had worked in all three branches of government: he had been a state senator and then Congressman from Illinois before serving in Gore’s Justice Department as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. There were some within the Democratic Party who believed that the soft-spoken Congressman could even be the first Black President of the United States, and that Gore’s appointment wasted such an opportunity to the detriment of the party’s interests.
While merit-based, as Obama had been a constitutional scholar before his legislative career began, Gore’s appointment of Obama was also an attempt to manage a multiracial political coalition increasingly strained by the ongoing war in Sudan. After 9/11, the people of the Middle East were terrified about becoming collateral damage via the wrath of the world’s sole remaining power. President Gore called “to root out those who coddle terrorists, and the tyranny that breeds such extremists.” Although there were elements within the Gore Administration that wanted to invade other countries in the wake of 9/11, Gore had continued Clinton-era light-touch counterrorism policies (if at a larger scale) until the Sudanese intervention. But, in the months after the “Mission Accomplished” banner was waved in 2004, Sudan’s fragile peace began to crumble, and the withdrawal of U.S. troops was halted and then reversed. The blodshed of the 2005 Ramadan attacks in Cairo, Alexandria, and the resorts of the Sinai Peninsula, for which al-Qaeda successor groups claimed credit, rocked the world and saw Egypt quietly threaten to withdraw its peacekeeping forces unless the American presence was redoubled, which Gore obliged. As the American military presence increased, and U.S. troops fought bloody engagements in Sudan, Chad, and southern Libya to suppress Islamist insurgency and prop up an increasingly authoritarian and dysfunctional coalition government in Khartoum with no end in sight, opposition to the war swelled. Where Gore had once been greeted as a savior in liberal jurisdictions and European capitals, he was now haunted by protest chants–“Gory Gore, We Want No War!”
Opposition to the war in Sudan along with Gore’s other “globalist” policies became a major engine for Reform’s growth. In the 2004 election, a plurality of Muslim Americans voted for Reform nominee Wilder, with traditionally conservative-leaning Muslim voters alienated from Gore’s cultural liberalism and Middle East policies, and from the Republican turn to Christian nationalism. While President Gore rhetorically discouraged Islamophobic and anti-Arab racism in the wake of 9/11, actual policy was a different matter: the federal government adopted intensive surveillance policies targeting those communities, with the FBI notoriously wiretapping mosques and entrapping young, troubled Muslim-American youth into “terror plots” largely conceived by FBI handlers. Yet, the Republican Party criticized these policies for not being harsh enough, driving Muslims and anti war activists to Reform.
The first evidence of this sweep came with the 2005 New York City mayoral election, where incumbent Democratic Mayor Mark J. Green was defeated in a huge upset by Reform Party candidate and former City Councilman Sal Albanese, who built an unlikely coalition of outer-borough Giuliani voters, Muslim and Arab New Yorkers, left-wing activists, and unions angered by Green’s hard bargaining and imperious attitude. Vice President Lieberman’s reputation for Muslim-baiting after 9/11 ensured the constituency would be up for grabs in the 2008 presidential election. Albanese’s triumph built on the momentum of Governor Golisano’s statewide win for Reform in 2002 but also on the surprise win of Green Party nominee Matt Gonzalez in the 2003 San Francisco mayor’s race.
2006 proved to be a landmark year for Reform: the Democrats had hit 14 consecutive years in the White House, and voters were ready for a change, yet the Republican Party remained mired in infighting between hardline Christian conservatives and emerging moderate challengers. This was an opportunity Reform claimed. In California, which had adopted a “fusion voting” system similar to New York’s by ballot initiative during the 2004 elections, Contra Costa County Supervisor Peter Camejo was elected Governor on a tripartisan Reform-Green-Peace and Freedom Party ticket. Camejo defeated a weak Republican nominee in Bill Simon and Democratic Congressman Bob Filner, who was favored until the final weeks of the race, when he was accused of multiple incidents of sexual harassment and groping. Camejo outright won Latino voters, with Univision providing valuable coverage to the socialist organizer’s run, and endorsements from Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (or “AMLO”) and Democratic primary loser and former Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante likely proving decisive in his narrow victory. Simultaneously, Mexican American businessman Roque “Rocky” de la Fuente won California’s 49th District, marking the first time Reform won a seat in the House of Representatives, meaning that for the first time in a generation, three parties were represented in the new Republican-controlled Congress. Running a protectionist anti-immigrant campaign in English while advocating a more nuanced position in Spanish, the contradictions of Congressman de la Fuente only lasted one term, but he showed that it was possible for Reform to break through in the House, rather than just in local offices too minor for anyone to care about or statewide offices big enough for voter discontent to throw them off party line.
With a Reform-led coalition gaining control of the governorship in the United States’ most populous and culturally influential state, Reform was ready to genuinely contest the 2008 election as the true opposition party, the only one uncorrupted by power politics. Yet, Reform’s ideological incoherence and flirtation with anti-immigrant politics continued. Even while Reform elected Latinos in California, it supported harsh anti-immigrant and anti-Latino politicians elsewhere. Reform candidate and former Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo finally won the Governor’s office on a populist anti-immigrant campaign in Colorado. Meanwhile, after Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana voters voiced their discontent with both political parties by unseating Democratic Governor Kathleen Blanco and returning Buddy Roemer, a Democrat-turned-Republican-turned Reformer, to the Governor’s mansion.
The first inklings that the 2008 election would be tumultuous came in the form of an unusual spike in mortgage delinquencies in the fourth quarter of 2006. But what began as a slowdown in the property market slowly–then quickly–metastasized into a full-blown economic crisis. President Gore blamed greedy financiers and high oil prices, Republicans blamed economic mismanagement and Gore’s environmental policies, and neither sought to blame the true culprit: years of bipartisan financial deregulation. But Reformers identified it, and private polling of a possible general election found a generic Reform candidate in the lead for the first time ever. This scared many prospective challengers away from the Democratic side in particular, leaving widely disliked Vice President Joe Lieberman as the presumptive nominee.
In the leadup to the 2008 primary, Camejo and Ventura were seen as the two leading candidates for the presidential nomination. But Ventura alienated many Americans by suggesting President Gore may have deliberately allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur, a position for which he was excoriated by leaders of all three parties. Camejo, competing with Tancredo and a herd of also-rans, swept Reform’s primaries. He did so, despite rampant Red-baiting, with the aid of endorsements from Sal Albanese and Tom Golisano, who thought that Camejo was more reasonable than his sometimes-fiery rhetoric and that a left-wing outsider would be a potent candidate for an electorate in the midst of a financial crisis. Camejo was also helped by the fact that his record as an executive showed he could work with Democrats to pursue incremental reforms rather than self-immolate or try to rule as a dictator. Signs of Reform’s maturity were evident, as when Golisano was asked how he could support and campaign for a communist, he answered with a shrug and what became an ironically potent slogan for the Camejo campaign: “Nobody’s perfect, but Pete’s an honest guy.”
Meanwhile, in the Democratic primary, Vice President Lieberman was challenged in the primary by freshman Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent democratic socialist who caucused with the Democrats but had consistently refused to join them. After 16 years of the Republicans attacking “Clinton-Gore socialism,” the openly democratic socialist’s campaign caused much hand-wringing from the party establishment, particularly after Sanders won the Iowa caucuses, followed by a crushing victory in New Hampshire’s primary. Sanders’ campaign echoed Camejo’s, as while they used different buzzwords, both focused their fire on the FTAA, immigration reform, and the banking sector. Yet, Camejo’s populism was multilingual in English, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Tagalog, Korean, and Vietnamese, while Sanders, focusing on white voters in the early primary states, ran out of steam as he hit Super Tuesday, although the two candidates fought a brutal slog until the Democratic National Convention. Yet, Sanders and Lieberman both competed to win over an electorate that had taken an anti-immigrant turn, something which would ultimately drive many Latino, Muslim, and Asian Americans to support Reform. Lieberman, conservative to his bones, selected Georgia Senator Max Cleland as his running mate, promising a campaign focused on national unity and defense in frightening times.
Meanwhile, the GOP nomination was wide open for the taking in 2008, with candidates adapting to more populist times. The top candidates were thought to be former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, former governor Jeb Bush of Florida, and Gary Johnson of New Mexico, an outsider. Senator George Allen of Virginia, and former Secretary of Defense John McCain also ran, as did former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. Yet, this time, the conservatives were divided and the Republican Party’s moderates had united behind the patrician and popular Massachusetts Governor, who promised a “Grand New Party” that could erase old national divides and win again. With Virginia Senator George Allen and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee splitting Southern evangelicals, Romney was able to triumph by winning pluralities in many states on Super Tuesday. Romney selected South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford as his running mate, a well-liked figure throughout the party who provided some Southern evangelical representation.
Heading into the general election, the Reform Party looked poised for possible victory. Seeking party unity in the face of Tancredo’s flirtation with an independent run and 2004 vice presidential nominee Clint Eastwood’s endorsement of Romney, Camejo had selected long-time Reformer Jesse Ventura as his running mate, with Ventura undergoing an apology tour for his “dumb-as-crap” 9/11 comments, as he memorably put it during one interview with CNBC. After receiving an endorsement from Sanders, the Camejo/Ventura ticket emerged from the Reform convention in San Diego with their poll numbers hitting as high as 40 percent of the vote.
Then the unthinkable occurred. While Camejo had previously suffered from lymphoma, he was in remission by the start of his presidential campaign. With a busy campaign schedule, the California Governor had been unable to monitor his condition adequately. On August 5, 2008, Camejo collapsed at a campaign event and was rushed to hospital. Within three days, he was dead, and his party and movement was adrift. He was succeeded by Lieutenant Governor Jackie Speier in California, who spoke at his nationally televised funeral. Per Reform Party bylaws, Camejo’s death led to an emergency convention, which duly selected Jesse Ventura. Many in Camejo’s campaign wanted to draft Senator Bernie Sanders or San Francisco Mayor Matt Gonzalez to head up the ticket, but couldnt prevail over Ventura’s long commitment to the party. While Ventura initially preferred former Connecticut Governor and longtime Lieberman rival Lowell Weicker as his running mate, seeking party unity, Ventura ultimately selected Gonzalez. Rocky de la Fuente, ever-mercurial, endorsed Romney over Ventura out of spite, and briefly starred in a special Telemundo miniseries entitled “Junto con Reforma, Junto con Romney” before leading Reform for Romney.
The closing months of the campaign were dominated by foreign policy crises. The U.S. financial crisis had rippled outward, causing economic turmoil and political unrest. Powered by a sudden spike in food prices, a wave of uprisings unsettled the Middle East. It began in the Republic of Palestine, where President Mahmoud Abbas–who had inherited his position from Yasser Arafat and had never won an election of his own–resigned after a disputed election and the jailing of opposition leader and later President Marwan Barghouti. Protests soon spread to Lebanon, where protests against the longtime Syrian occupation faced down tanks, and to Sudan, where protestors in Khartoum demanded the end of the American military occupation and a new government. Syria itself soon faced mass demonstrations in Damascus and Aleppo, and neophyte President Bashar al-Assad vacillated between appeasing the protesters by releasing political prisoners and restoring liberal reforms from his first days as president and cracking down. In October, Tunisians toppled President Ben Ali, while in Egypt, police and military units were met with barricades, Molotov cocktails, and chants of “bread and freedom” in Cairo’s slums. The the so-called Arab Spring was amplified by sympathetic global coverage from Qatari outlet Al-Jazeera, and turbocharged the growth of Web 2.0 social networks MySpace, YouTube, and a months-old website called Twitter, which began to advertise itself as “the global group chat.”
Feeling the revolutionary fervor of the moment, the Gore Administration initially gave rhetorical support to protestors’ democratic demands and announced that it would accelerate its planned withdrawal from Sudan. Romney condemned Gore’s policy as conceding American leadership and abandoning key U.S. allies, something which Vice President Lieberman–a notoriously hawkish advisor who had supported invading seven countries in five years in addition to Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks–agreed with him. Lieberman went so far as to promise that he would support a humanitarian intervention in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein had met the initial wave of protests with mass murder. In response, Gonzalez acerbically called Joe Lieberman “Genocide Joe,” condemning the hypocrisy of his support of the Bahraini and Egyptian governments’ brutal crackdown on dissent while supporting intervention against Saddam Hussein for the same offenses.
With Iraq spiraling out of control, Gore resisted a full-scale intervention, but responded with renewed airstrikes, recognition of the Iraqi National Coalition (chaired by Ahmed Chalabi) as the legitimate government-in-waiting of Iraq, and provided support for an emerging insurgency inside the country. Controversially, this brought the United States and Iran, which had maintained a relatively quiet detente since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and who had restored diplomatic relations in 2007 with Iranian President Mehdi Karroubi, closer together. This came at the expense of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, whose government–run by archconservative Crown Prince and regent Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud–lobbied heavily in Washington for a reversal, and quietly provided intelligence and money to the Hussein regime.
In the face of International chaos and economic ruin, the race broke in the direction of change. In the final poll of the election, Lieberman lagged behind in third place, with Ventura polling just ahead of the beleaguered Vice President. Ventura had called for an end to all of the country’s wars, a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, as well as one abolishing the Senate to support a unicameral and expanded House of Representatives as the sole legislature, property tax reform, gay rights, medical marijuana, and abortion rights. Yet, try as he might, Ventura could never escape his flirtation with 9/11 trutherism with a majority of voters, and his running mate’s comments defending China’s reaction to the Tiananmen Square uprising didn’t help. With his anti-war position under fire by a media relentlessly focused on his 9/11 comments, Ventura’s instead tried to shift the focus to domestic policy, but there, his relatively thin record in Minnesota made his economic pitch fall flat, while stray comments at a campaign rally that appeared to blame Black and Latino homeowners with subprime mortgages for the state of the economy hurt him with key Democratic-leaning demographics.
Election Night 2008 was called almost as quickly as in 2004. While Romney won more than 400 electoral votes, the recount in Minnesota lasted weeks: when the dust cleared Ventura had defeated Romney by just under 100 voters. Winning both his home state and Maine's Second Congressional District, Ventura did what even Perot could not — actually win electoral votes. Despite Duverger’s law working against third parties in first-past-the-post elections, Reform gained its first Senate seats, with Angus King of Maine and Sarah Palin of Alaska’s Reform-aligned Independence Party. Four members were elected to the House of Representatives: while Rocky de la Fuente lost his seat, folk singer David Mallet won in Maine's Second, 26-year old former Somali refugee Ilhan Omar won a seat in Minneapolis in a four-way race following longtime Congressman Martin Olav Sabo’s retirement, Golisano deputy and former social worker Ann Costello won the open 25th District in New York, and unpopular freshman Idaho Congressman Bill Sali was defeated by Reformer and Sudan War veteran Matt Salisbury. This unlikely collection of legislators became colloquially known as “the Squad,” after Salisbury referred to them as “my squad in enemy territory.”
The new president’s transition period was consumed by responding to the myriad crises facing the country. Eager to save their lives and claim victory—over Lieberman, at least —Bashar al-Assad resigned as president and left Syria for exile in London, while Saddam Hussein fled Baghdad for his hometown in Tikrit in the face of defecting army units and advancing Iranian-backed militias. But, these crises would not be Reform’s responsibility; rather, they were an issue for President Romney.
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2008 United States Presidential Election
Republican: 48.47% Mitt Romney / Mark Sanford 417 Electoral Votes
Democratic: 29.43% Joe Lieberman / Max Cleland 110 Electoral Votes
Reform/Green/Libertarian: 21.55% Jesse Ventura / Matt González 11 Electoral Votes
Pirate: 0.42% Ralph Nader / Winona LaDuke 0 Electoral Votes
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2012: The Apex
2012: The Apex
While Jesse Ventura’s 2008 run had demonstrated that the Reform Party was still alive and kicking, it hadn’t demonstrated that the party could win a national election. Some unsympathetic observers declared that Reform was a dead party walking, and there were reasons to think this was true. Despite a desperately unpopular incumbent administration represented by a somehow even more unpopular candidate, and a Republican nominee distrusted by significant parts of his party’s base and with manifest vulnerabilities, Ventura had failed in the end to defeat either of the major parties. Ventura himself declared his retirement from politics, and with Matt Gonzalez’s turn back to California state politics in a pending run for state Attorney General, the most prominent remaining Reformer on the national stage was right-wing Colorado Governor Tom Tancredo.
But announcements of Reform’s demise proved to be woefully premature. President Romney’s agenda benefitted from a strong majority in the House and Senate, and his American Rescue Plan—nearly a trillion dollars of deficit spending on infrastructure and tax cuts—was bipartisan and popular. However, the next agenda items proved less so. Temporary tax breaks were one thing, but permanent tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations in the midst of economic calamity attracted populist anger, as did facially toothless financial regulatory reforms. A proposed program providing loan guarantees and tax subsidies for property buyers who promised to maintain and rent out foreclosed homes was excoriated by Democrats and Reformers as a “road to serfdom for the middle class,” and hastily dropped. While it proved more embarrassing than concretely damaging, Vice President Mark Sanford’s sex scandal marred Romney’s first months. Caught on camera kissing an Argentinian national for whom he had pressured the State Department to secure a diplomatic visa, Sanford resigned after only five months as Vice President, and was replaced by former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee.
The final straw for the American electorate was the Social Security Reform Act of 2009. Building on Gore’s 2005 bipartisan reform, which had established small, optional private accounts on top of lockboxed pre-existing Social Security benefits, Romney’s reform shifted significantly more of the program over to private accounts. This promised to infuse the stock market with billions in Social Security funds, prompting euphoria on Wall Street but rancor from seniors worried about the government undermining a key lifeline and putting their retirement in the hands of the same people who had just destroyed the economy. Romney only managed to pass the bill by a handful of votes, and that with a rollback of many of its more controversial features.
In 2010, with Democrats still consumed with infighting after their 2008 drubbing and Romney’s approval ratings hovering in the mid-30s, Reform partially filled the breach. In Congress, Reform gained three more Senate seats. Segway inventor and businessman Dean Kamen won an open seat in New Hampshire. Meanwhile, Palin’s husband Todd, a part-Yup’ik unionist who had become prominent alongside his wife for his work linking the labor movement and Reform, defeated Republican Senator Mead Treadwell. In West Virginia, Democratic state supreme court justice Spike Maynard defeated Democrat Lloyd Jackson and Republican Bill Maloney in a tight three-way race.
In the House, Ilhan Omar was the only Reformer incumbent to lose reelection—to Democrat Keith Ellison—while the caucus grew elsewhere. From the New Hampshire 2nd—where newscaster and former Miss New Hampshire Tricia Ann-Regan McEachern defeated well-known Republican and Democratic candidates—to the Washington 3rd—where local attorney Tom Ladouceur narrowly won in the second round by boxing out the Democratic nominee for second place against two-term Republican incumbent Joseph Zarelli—Reform now held ten seats in the House.
In the states, Reform also made gains. While Tancredo—unpopular in his own right due to burgeoning corruption scandals and a weak state economy—lost reelection to former Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, running once again on the Democratic Party line, Reform picked up a slate of gubernatorial seats. Senator Sarah Palin—disliking the long commute between Washington, D.C. and Juneau—defeated Republican nominee Lisa Murkowski, avenging her 2006 gubernatorial loss to Lisa’s father. In Maine and Rhode Island, longtime politicians Eliot Cutler and Lincoln Chafee adopted the Reform Party line in lieu of running as independents, and handily won open races. In Idaho, veterinarian and hunting-rights activist Rex Rammell won a four-way race for Governor, as former Congressman Bill Sali defeated incumbent governor Butch Otter in the Republican primary, only for Otter to run a write-in campaign in the general election. Yet, while Reform’s successful candidates had tended to be party-switchers like Sarah Palin, Chaffee, and Maynard, or longstanding political activists running in states with highly unsettled political dynamics like Rammell, Massachusetts Reformers elected a novice candidate who would lead the party to its strongest-ever electoral showing.
Elizabeth Ann Warren was born in Oklahoma City to a working-class family in 1949. As she discussed frequently in her campaign speeches, after her father had a heart attack in 1963, Warren’s mother was forced to enter the workforce for the first time after a lifetime as a stay-at-home parent. Warren married at 19 and later divorced her first husband, although she kept his name, and rose to prominence first as a legal scholar focused on bankruptcy and later as a public intellectual, with her publication of The Two-Income Trap and the personal-finance guide All Your Worth. While Warren was a working mother and law professor, The Two-Income Trap viewed many of the gains of liberal feminism with a critical eye, and mourned the loss of traditional family structures in what more radical scholars might have identified as casualties of the neoliberal consensus.
In the midst of the 2007 financial crisis and subsequent banking bailout, Warren was tapped to serve on the Emergency Asset Relief Oversight Board by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. EAROB, meant to provide a patina of supervision to the bailout, became a media sensation as Warren questioned financiers in public hearings, to the embarrassment of the leadership of both parties. Ventura, enthralled by her performance, invited Warren to meet with him and was later photographed at a campaign event reading a dog-eared copy of The Two-Income Trap. Warren, under pressure to reign in her criticisms, instead quit the Board and joined Ventura’s campaign as an economic policy advisor.
In the face of a still-suffering economy and a weak Republican incumbent in Kerry Healey, on a cold day in December 2009, Warren announced her candidacy for Governor of Massachusetts. Warren hammered the corruption of the political process and the pay-to-play culture of the State House, and ran on a populist platform that included a major expansion of aid to working-class families and infrastructure spending, financed by tax increases on the wealthy, along with new state aid for parochial and charter schools. Governor Healey had been unable to establish a foothold despite her incumbency, and a bruising Democratic primary saw former Assistant Attorney General Deval Patrick win with just 32% of the vote, as he was weighed down by his work in corporate America, including for Bank of America and AIG. Warren was endorsed by one of Patrick’s primary opponents, education reform advocate Chris Gabrieli, and several others refused to endorse at all. On Election Day, Warren had won with 41% of the vote, with Healy in a distant third.
While a political novice, at Ventura’s urging, Warren soon set her sights on the presidency. President Romney was struggling, and while the bipartisan-compromise American Healthcare Act—modeled on a similar compromise program in Massachusetts—was signed into law in November 2011, the president remained mired in a swamp of low approval ratings. Democrats, meanwhile, continued to struggle with party unity despite their return to Congressional majorities, with the AHCA seeing several notable defections from the party’s left flank in the House and Senate.
Warren was immediately the frontrunner for the nomination: while she received spirited challenges from Tom Tancredo and Rocky de la Fuente, endorsements from Ventura and the now-retired Golisano carried weight with the solidifying party infrastructure, and most of the left-wing voters who had entered the party as part of the Camejo campaign rallied around her populist pitch. Warren had the nomination sewn up by Super Tuesday, and selected former Reagan Secretary of the Navy and Gore’s Ambassador to Vietnam Jim Webb as her running mate to lend needed national security experience to the ticket.
Even with the fall of Saddam Hussein in June 2009, the Iraqi Civil War continued to rage, as rebel factions turned on one another and remnant Ba’athists organized to retake power, it spilled over to its neighbors. In Syria—where new President Manef Tlass allowed elections and even local opposition-controlled governments but continued to dominate the country through a well-established deep state and Ba’athist party machinery—all sides of the conflagration in Iraq recruited volunteers and smuggled weapons, while Saudi support for the neo-Ba’athist Sunni “Naqshbandi Army'' was met with retaliatory terrorism by Shi’a militias. Clashes in the Persian Gulf nearly erupted into war, with Romney realigning towards the Saudi side. Only the transition in Egypt—where Hosni Mubarak had resigned and retired to Dubai, replaced by former Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa and other old-guard moderates committed to a democratic transition—was a bright spot in the region. Economic crisis in Europe, including Greece’s exit from the Euro, continued to weigh down the global economy.
With this chaos, oil prices remained high and volatile, and growth was slow. President Romney—who had promised to be an effective emergency manager—pursued a second round of stimulus, but faced opposition within his own party to anything beyond a payroll tax holiday. Romney’s executive suspension of the federal carbon tax was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and while efforts to expand drilling at home eventually passed, it was only with pro-labor and environmental concessions that many Republicans were unwilling to swallow. Firebrand Texas Congressman Ted Cruz even hinted at a primary challenge to the embattled president, although he was soon bullied into submission.
While Romney was smoothly renominated, without a Democratic heir apparent, more than 20 candidates lined up to take on President Romney in 2012. A bloody primary ensued, with New York Senator and former First Lady Hillary Clinton coming out on top with a narrow majority of delegates. Seeking party unity, Clinton selected third-place finisher and former Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry as her running mate, but it was too late for some Democrats, several of whom endorsed Warren in the general.
By September 2012, the election was anyone’s race, with Warren regularly within striking distance of first place or even leading in public polls. Warren’s campaign addressed a longstanding criticism of Reform, that its candidates lacked policy substance. Warren became known for her elaborate and detailed white papers on everything from hot-button issues like education and health care to snoozers like bankruptcy and telecoms reform. Three-way general-election debates reached substantive policy issues, with Romney defending his record and both Clinton and Warren proposing significant new programs and tangling over the complicated policy legacy of Clinton’s husband’s administration. Clinton, long an advocate for families, proposed a complicated program of federal investments in early childhood education infrastructure, while Warren countered with a more straightforward proposal, sold as supporting the traditional American one-income family structure: $300, per month, per child, with additional childcare vouchers for young children that could be converted to cash for stay-at-home parents in two-parent households.
However, Warren’s complicated past emerged to bite her. A bombshell investigation in the Wall Street Journal delved into Warren’s past claims of Native American ancestry, which were revealed to be at best a misunderstanding of her family’s status and at worst a deliberate misrepresentation that had benefited her career at the expense of genuine Native Americans. In a striking public incident, Warren was heckled by members of the Cherokee Nation at a public event in Oklahoma, and her response to a direct question in the second presidential debate was widely viewed as evasive. While her poll numbers only fell somewhat in direct response to the issue, it sparked a general decline.
On Election Day, Governor Warren’s campaign reached 24.3% of the popular vote and won four states—Alaska, West Virginia, Maine and New Hampshire—in a historic but still-heartbreaking result for the Reform Party. President Romney eked out reelection with just over 40% of the vote, winning multiple states in tight three-cornered races. Reform also picked up an additional two Congressional seats, the West Virginia Governor’s Mansion (with coal magnate Jim Justice as an Appalachian Perot), and more than three dozen state legislative seats across the country. Reform now held the balance of power in four state’s legislatures, and served as a vital bloc of votes for both major parties in a Congress with narrow Democratic majorities.
2012 marked a historic high for the Reform Party, but it would also mark the end of Warren’s national ambitions. While she won reelection as Governor in 2014 and has remained active in state and national politics, the presidential race put a strain on Warren’s health and family. Warren still speaks bitterly of the national press’ scrutiny of her personal history, something she blames for accelerating her brother Don Reed's death. But Warren’s legacy lives on, with her campaign marking the beginning of the end of the neoliberal era of American politics.
Well that sucks. I know Warren wouldn't win, but I hoped that she would have gotten more votes than that.
It's quite a lot of votes! Had the Democrats nominated a real shitshow of a candidate (Edwards comes to mind), it's quite plausible that Warren could have boxed them out and maybe even won. And the fact that a third-party candidate running on a protectionist, economic populist platform won a quarter of the vote (disproportionately from voters who might have otherwise pulled the lever for a Democrat, given Romney’s unpopularity) will have real knock-on effects for Democrats.
Another fine update with Reform managing to have things slip out their grasp once again and Romney hanging on thanks to a national split than anything else. Seeing what the down-ballot results were should be interesting, as Reform's really become a bloc that needs paying attention to, especially with Romney's lacking approval ratings at this point.
2016: Two Americas, First as Tragedy
2016: Two Americas, First as Tragedy
The 2012 election had left the Reform Party at an unexpected crossroads. Warren’s performance had been strong, exceeding the baseline set by Ventura despite an incumbent president and a competent Democratic candidate. Moreover, the emerging Reform caucus in the House of Representatives had real power, negotiating committee assignments with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and acting as active participants in the legislative process. Yet, finger-pointing over the loss and the new responsibilities of being an increasingly established part of the political process put stress on Reform’s sprawling and mutually distrustful coalition.
The 2014 midterms went badly for the incumbent party, as had been the case in most “six-year itch” elections for decades, but it was also the first test for the Reform Party’s 2010 class of governors. Reform held up well in New England, where Governors Warren, Cutler and Chafee all won reelection comfortably. On the West Coast, Reform candidate John Frohnmayer won a three-cornered race for Governor of Oregon with a campaign focused on anti-corruption and addressing the ongoing collapse of the state's logging industry. In Congress, Reform held its ground in the House and flipped a Senate seat in Kansas, with former Perot campaign volunteer and businessman Greg Orman defeating longtime Senator Pat Roberts. Conversely, conservative Reformer and Governor of Idaho Rex Rammell lost to Republican nominee and property developer Tommy Ahlquist. Governor Palin in Alaska opted not to run for reelection in order to focus on her pending 2016 presidential bid, and Reform candidates ran strong but unsuccessful campaigns in Arizona and Nebraska in ways that frustrated national Reform leaders.
The emergence of new third parties didn't help matters. On the left, the union-backed Working Families Party, more pragmatic members of the ailing Greens, and other left-wing insurgents from the Democratic “netroots” had combined to form the United People’s Party, with a professed focus on winning down-ballot races and a pledge not to act as a spoiler in presidential races. On the right, Gary Johnson had re-emerged as chair of the Liberty Party, an effort to organize America's libertarians into a party that could actually win elections, whether through cross-endorsements or well-targeted independent campaigns for office. Both efforts pulled energy away from Reform, heightening the sense among some party leaders that their hard-fought gains might be slipping away.
Into this breach stepped a charismatic savior. A populist ex-Democrat from the South with the accent to prove it and a look right out of central casting, former Senator John Edwards presented a perfect fit for Reform. Edwards had had a relatively undistinguished Senate career, serving quietly as a backbencher while plotting his move to the White House. Seeing the writing on the wall for Democrats, and with his wife struggling with breast cancer, Edwards skipped 2008 despite rejoinders from progressive activists to challenge Vice President Lieberman. In 2010, Edwards opted not to run for reelection in order to focus on building a campaign operation, and was widely discussed as a potential frontrunner for the 2012 nomination.
However, with the party establishment largely behind Senator Hillary Clinton and a crowded field to oppose her, Edwards managed only to win his home state and came fourth in delegates. Clinton considered selecting him as vice president, but after a backroom meeting between the candidates erupted into mutual accusations of disrespect, Clinton publicly ruled him out. Edwards retaliated by walking out of the convention, and at a press conference in front of the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, endorsing Governor Elizabeth Warren for President. Edwards subsequently served as a leading surrogate for Warren, with his stump speech about the “two Americas, the elites and everyone else” echoing Warren’s rhetoric, and was widely rumored to be at the top of her shortlist for Attorney General. For Reform Party activists, this was partisan loyalty enough to make Edwards a true Reformer.
Meanwhile, Republicans saw a struggle between Vice President Mike Huckabee and challengers both to his left and his right. Huckabee was widely seen as something of a buffoon who had ceded too much of his former social conservatism for the Republican evangelical base but was too extreme on social issues for Romneyite moderates, This growing clash within the party was heightened by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's sudden death in September 2015. While early in Romney's presidency, he had smoothly confirmed Associate Justices James Loken and Alberto Gonzalez—replacing Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas, respectively—Scalia’s replacement had to go through a Democratic Senafe. At Huckabee’s urging, Romney nominated OIRA Director Adrian Vermule. A former Scalia clerk and administrative-law scholar, Vermule was widely respected in the legal academy for both his brilliant intellect and controversial ideas. While he initially received surprisingly bipartisan support, mobilization by Democratic grassroots organizations increasingly turned the caucus against Vermule. A bombshell report by progressive magazine Mother Jones identified Twitter user “Yung Aquinas”—whose posts expressed homophobic and extremist ideas—as a pseudonym for Vermule. Soon after, Vermule publicly withdrew himself from consideration. While Romney subsequently confirmed former law professor and Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Steven Calabresi, the Vermule debacle further weakened Huckabee's bid.
With Huckavee on the ropes, his opponents took advantage. Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint ran to Huckabee’s right as social and economic conservatives, respectively, while Governor Tommy Ahlquist, a Mormom businessman who’d worked to push an increase in education spending funded by new taxes through the conservative Idaho state legislature, ran as Mitt Romney’s true heir apparent. Huckabee won a closer-than-expected primary, and selected DeMint as his running mate in an ill-fated bid for party unity.
Finally, with their party establishment in tatters after two consecutive losses, the Democratic primary was a true free-for-all. On the back of strong performances in Iowa and New Hampshire, dark horse Utah Senator Rocky Anderson emerged as the eventual victor. Anderson, who as Salt Lake City Mayor had narrowly won his 2010 Senate race in a four-cornered battle between incumbent Senator Bob Bennet as well as Conservative and Reform candidates, was broadly progressive but also held trade-skeptic populist views that poached from Reform’s platform and rhetoric. In his primary campaign, he also took pro-Second Amendment positions, arguing that lawful gun possession was a civil-rights and racial-justice issue and that past reforms had done little to stem violence. Anderson selected Brooklyn Congresswoman Inez Barron as his running mate. Barron, a former schoolteacher, had succeeded her late husband Charles in the state assembly and then run for Congress in 2010. She had established herself as a progressive firebrand in the House but also a canny political operator with a strong in-district operation, and was an early Anderson endorser.
As the country entered the final stretch of the 2016 election, Edwards initially performed very well, hitting 30% of the vote in polls with an unusually high overall number of undecided voters. He benefited from the public’s perception that both Anderson and Huckabee were too extreme, with voters regularly listing him as the candidate whose views were closest to their own. However, cracks were already showing. Palin was something of a wild card, and while the two were able to play nice in public, it quickly became common knowledge that Edwards and Palin could not be in a room together. The National Inquirer spread rumors, later revealed to be pushed by Roger Stone, that Palin’s and Edwards’ animosity was the product of a past extramarital affair between the two, something which was lended credibility when Palin’s husband and Alaska Senator Todd Palin announced in early September 2016 that he would be filing for divorce. Edwards and Palin were also attacked on more meritorious grounds, from profligate campaign and government-office expenditures on clothing, haircuts, and meals to allegations of corruption around Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere.” The campaign organization was a misnomer, with feuding staff and inefficient spending. Meanwhile, Anderson’s campaign took a similar line to the Reformers on trade and, to a lesser extent, immigration, pulling away less committed Reform voters in the Northeast and Midwest.
With Huckabee facing his own scandal in the form of key aide Josh Duggar’s arrest on child sexual abuse charges and with both campaigns seeking a distraction, the 2016 presidential debates devolved into a circus of crude innuendo. This was exemplified by Huckabee’s famously criticized “zinger” in the second presidential debate, that “John Edwards knows there are two Americas, because he’s got lady friends in both of them.” While many voters believed Anderson was too extreme, they also believed he was honest, which was more than could be said about either of his opponents.
On Election Day, Edwards won just under 12% of the vote, half what Warren had achieved four years prior. Down-ballot, Reform fared better. While several of its House members were defeated, eight survived. In the Senate, while teachers’ union president and Democrat Douglas Ley defeated New Hampshire Senator Dean Kamen in a tight race, Spike Maynard survived an equally tight challenge in West Virginia. Also there, Governor Jim Justice—who faced active corruption investigations by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Wheeling—lost the first hotly contested Reform Party primary to Cecil Roberts, president of the National Mine Workers of America, who pushed the Democratic candidate into a distant third place and won an outright majority of the state's vote.
While Edwards took some of the blame for the party’s decline, more attention focused on Palin, who was expected to rally right-wing voters to the ticket but abjectly failed to do so while drawing serious negative attention. Edwards returned to his law practice and continued plotting his path to the Oval Office, as the United States welcomed a new kind of Democrat—or perhaps a very old one born anew—to the White House.
The Democrats have Congressional majorities and maintain them through Romney's reelection, but if Reform votes entirely against their agenda, they aren't particularly large majorities. Reform certainly has the presence to make its issues felt when they stick together as a caucus.