Frank Wilkinson comments on the silliness of an anti-Trump third party campaign:
There is something nutty about this, and not simply because third-party candidates face a difficult road in American politics. Kristol and like-minded conservatives are seeking a vehicle for a conservative candidate for only one reason: The nation’s conservative party just rejected more than a dozen opportunities to nominate someone acceptable to them.
In other words, having started the primary season with more than a dozen champions, then having failed to win the competition within the conservative party, these conservatives are now eager to compete in the even less receptive arena outside the conservative party.
It is also telling that several of the people identified as possible candidates for this protest campaign have either already endorsed Trump or don’t want to be considered. When this speculation first started up a couple months ago, Rick Perry’s name was often mentioned as an anti-Trump champion, but he expressed no interest in running a doomed spoiler campaign and just this week declared his support for Trump. Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse is perhaps the only truly #NeverTrump Republican politician in office today, and he is all for a protest candidacy provided that he isn’t the one doing it. Presumably even Sasse can see that the protest would be a thankless, time-consuming effort that would earn the candidate the opprobrium of the vast majority of Republicans. If Sasse doesn’t want to do it, who would? More to the point, why would anyone want to do this?
Suppose for a moment that a Trump-Clinton race is closer than many, including me, expect it to be. Instead of expanding Clinton’s margin of victory, the anti-Trump protest campaign gives Clinton a narrow win as intended. For the next four or eight years, anti-Trump Republicans would be blamed at least as much for making Clinton president as Trump is, and probably more so. What politician with any hope of a future in the GOP would want to be part of such an effort? As we’re seeing in the last few days, there don’t seem to be any volunteers for this role because everyone can see how pointless the exercise would be.