Washington Examiner campaign reporter Gabby Morrongiello details some of the obstacles the movement to draft Gen. James Mattis for president will have to overcome, chief among them Mattis’ own reluctance to become a candidate.
The lack of a willing candidate is definitely a problem, although draft movements frequently target people who don’t seem eager to run. But the draft Mattis project seems to have even greater conceptual flaws.
If the objective was just to give anti-Donald Trump Republicans someone besides Hillary Clinton to vote for, it would be fine. You could certainly do worse in the protest vote department and if #NeverTrump really continues to represent a sizeable percentage of voters in the general election after a Trump nomination, it could limit the damage to down-ballot Republicans.
But the people behind drafting Mattis are publicly arguing that they plan to throw the election into the House, where a Republican majority could be tasked with breaking an Electoral College deadlock.
That’s a taller order. To do this, Mattis would not only have to take states from Trump. He would have to take states from Hillary Clinton. Which states would he flip away from Clinton? That’s something they’d have to lay out.
This is assuming Mattis caught on. The movement to draft Ross Perot — who, it turned out, wasn’t entirely a spectator in the process of launching his campaign — began the year before the 1992 presidential election. Perot, who ultimately finished a strong third, was leading in the national polls by June.
Perot backers had a willing candidate who was able to self-fund and strong public support. He still didn’t win any electoral votes (he came closest in Maine), though he might have if he hadn’t dropped out and re-entered the race.
The last third party candidate to carry any states and win their electoral votes was George Wallace in 1968. Wallace was a strong regional candidate with majority support in several states in the Deep South.
There is generally greater support for third party candidates in theory than in practice when November rolls around. Even well-known third partiers frequently disappoint. Ralph Nader won nearly 3 percent of the popular vote and arguably decided the election in 2000. But in 1996, 2004 and 2008, he failed to crack 1 million votes.
Pat Buchanan twice finished second in the Republican primaries, winning the New Hampshire primary and 3 million votes in 1996. He had been a media celebrity for years before that. As the Reform Party nominee in 2000, he got fewer than half a million votes.
Then there is a question of whether voters would accept the legitimacy of a president chosen by a Republican-controlled House, even though it is clearly a process outlined in the Constitution. Many voters didn’t like it when George W. Bush became president despite losing the popular vote to Al Gore, even though the Electoral College is unmistakably the constitutional process. They liked it even less when a Republican majority on the Supreme Court made the final ruling on Florida.
Since then, there have been demands in both parties — from Hillary Clinton Democrats in 2008 and Donald Trump Republicans this year — to have an even less meaningful popular vote decide the nominations rather than the delegates who have that responsibility under the existing rules.
In a partisan America with a super-democratic political culture, where the Electoral College itself likely only continues to exist because of inertia and the difficulty of amending the Constitution, a successful Mattis experiment could be a divisive outcome.
As a general, Mattis knows something about strategy. Those who would like to see him run for president should ask if theirs is sound before they invest resources in this mission.
