Bloomie Weighs 3rd Party Run

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Former Mayor McBig Gulp is contemplating an independent run for President:

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is taking early steps toward launching an independent campaign for president, seeing a potential path to the White House amid the rise of Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Bernie Sanders.

Bloomberg has retained advisers and plans to conduct a poll after the Feb. 9 New Hampshire primary to assess the state of the race and judge whether there is an opening for him to mount an independent campaign, according to three people familiar with his thinking.

Now, one might think "great, he's gonna burn through a shitload of his money doing that". But one needs to keep some perspective. Bloomberg is worth somewhere between $37 and $42 billion. He can self-finance a presidential run with less damage to his net worth, on a percentage basis, than most people would take buying a car. He dumped $100 million into winning a third term as mayor of NYC, which required yanking a term-limits ordinance that had been passed, twice, by the voters.

The last wealthy person to run a third-party campaign, Ross Perot, sucked off enough conservative votes from Bush I to elect Bill Clinton in `92.

I don't imagine that Bloomberg has a chance. But if he does run, there is a chance that no one candidate will get 270 votes in the Electoral College. If so, the 12th Amendment specifies what happens next:

if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice.

The vote would be taken, presumably, by the current Congress. 34 states have House delegations that have a majority of Republicans as their representatives. That's easy arithmetic: 34>26. The Democrats would have to flip enough congressmen so that 9 GOP-majority House delegations would support their guy. Not going to happen, there aren't enough ambassadorships in nice countries to accomplish that.

It has happened before. In the election of 1824, the candidate with both the most votes and the most electors ended up losing. It came close to happening in 1876, but the Republicans sold out their Black constituents and, in exchange for getting the presidency, made the South free for the imposition of institutionalized racism that imposed a form of economic and political slavery.*

That would only happen, of course, if The Former Nanny Mayor managed to win states. What is more likely is that he would suck off enough votes from the Democratic nominee to make the Republican the winner in states. Since most states allocate their electoral votes by "winner take all", in a tight three-way race, getting 39-40% of the vote will more than be enough to win.

In this hyper-polarized political environment, being president when 60% of the voters didn't vote for you would be like being elected to run an open-air toxic waste dump from an onsite office trailer.
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* Something modern Republicans fail to mention when they try to brag about their historical support for civil rights.