The Entirely Predictable Failure of ‘Americans Elect’
On Thursday, the board of Americans Elect folded its presidential nominating process after the set of declared candidates repeatedly failed to muster the support required to receive the group’s backing. Despite spending $35 million on “swank offices”, a fancy website, and expensive ballot access drives, Americans Elect ultimately attracted neither a credible candidate nor widespread support.
If you read the op-ed pages, you might have had different expectations. For years, commentators have hyped the prospect of a serious independent or third party challenge to the presidential nominees of the two major parties, often by invoking the Internet as some sort of magic elixir that will overcome previous obstacles to mounting such a challenge. Here’s notorious third-party hypester Thomas Friedman, for instance, writing in July 2011:
Write it down: Americans Elect. What amazon.com did to books, what the blogosphere did to newspapers, what the iPod did to music, what drugstore.com did to pharmacies, Americans Elect plans to do to the two-party duopoly that has dominated American political life—remove the barriers to real competition, flatten the incumbents and let the people in. Watch out.
With its deep pockets and establishment backing, Americans Elect seemed perfectly designed to inspire the hopes of pundits like Friedman. Unsurprisingly, the mustachioed New York Times columnist and other like-minded members of the commentariat rushed to embrace the group. (BuzzFeed’s Rebecca Elliot has compiled some of the worst predications about the group’s potential.) By contrast, reporting on Americans Elect tended to be less credulous. In a July 2011 Washington Post feature on incipient third-party groups, for instance, Chris Cillizza noted that “there are still major hurdles to turning voter discontent with the two parties into a credible third-party bid.” The Christian Science Monitor’s Patrik Jonsson was similarly careful to note the “daunting” hurdles Americans Elect faced.