Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Brookings scholar William Galston observes that there is still a path for a third-party conservative challenger to Donald Trump, should he win the GOP nomination. Getting on most state ballots, writes Galston, is not the hardest part:
Donald Trump’s disturbingly isolationist remarks to the Washington Post’s editorial board this week have fortified the determination of many Republicans to find a viable alternative—at their convention if possible, through an independent conservative candidacy if necessary. Some observers may believe that such a candidate couldn’t even get on the ballot because the filing deadlines have come and gone. If so, they are wrong. Back in 1980, from a standing start in late April, Republican John Anderson’s underfunded independent presidential campaign managed to get on the ballot in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia by mid-September. As Richard Winger, the publisher of Ballot Access News, has reminded me, the laws in 1980 were less hospitable to independent candidacies than they are today. The reason: The Anderson campaign was determined to leave a legacy of lowered barriers to the ballot for future candidates, so the campaign pursued the issue all the way to the Supreme Court, and Mr. Anderson prevailed. In 1983’s Anderson v. Celebrezze, the court held that Ohio’s early deadline for independent candidacies to file nominating petitions with the required number of signatures violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of association. Anderson v. Celebreeze remains a binding holding today, and it has had an impact. Mr. Winger points out that lower courts have used it to strike down June filing deadlines in five states—Alaska, Nevada, South Dakota, Arizona and Kansas. As matters now stand, most states’ deadlines are months away. Nine fall in July, 32 in August, and five in September. Four deadlines—Illinois, Indiana, New Mexico and North Carolina—are in June, and precedent suggests that the deadlines would be struck down if challenged.
The hardest part, he writes, is having a plan:
And there is a delicate timing issue. It isn’t too late right now to mount an independent candidacy, but it will be when the Republican Convention convenes in late July. So this venture would have to be launched well before the identity of the party’s nominee is known. The trick for the anti-Trump forces is to proceed simultaneously along two tracks without allowing Plan B to fatally weaken the effort to deny the New York billionaire a first-ballot victory.
