What would a new ‘Patriot Party’ run by Trump mean for US politics?

According to the Wall Street Journal, Donald Trump has discussed starting his own political party. At a recent rally, Trump declared that, even as he leaves office, his “movement” is “only just beginning”. His politically ambitious son, Don Junior, had previously claimed that the Republican Party was now “Donald Trump’s party”, as if a piece of real estate. If that were ever true – and there is no mistaking the personal loyalty of many in the “base” – the events of 6 January and afterwards have created an atmosphere of a mutual hostility between Trump and much of the Republican Party. It seems his mind is now turning to a vehicle for his own ambitions, a permanent and reliable platform for interventions over the course of the Biden administration, and one that he himself really does own and control. It even has a working title – the Patriot Party.  

Will it work? Recent Trump fundraising, amounting to some $250m (£180m) since election day, suggests money would not be a problem, even if Trump didn’t use any of his own fortune. It is possible that he could attract defectors from the Republicans at all levels – state legislators and officials, federal representatives senators, advisers, ex staffers and so on. He certainly does have a constituency, and he might well marry his new movement to a social media presence of his own, and ally to a sympathetic broadcast news outfit such as OANN (One America News Network).  

As for votes, well Trump did garner some 74 million legal ones last November, the biggest total for any Republican candidate. In a hypothetical election contest featuring Trump’s Patriot Party in 2024 it would certainly win millions of votes, and some quite large states, possibly Texas or Florida, say; but it would be unlikely to win outright. Conceivably it might lead to a hung electoral college and a possible narrow path back to the White House through that route (where no candidate could muster the 270 votes needed to be declared winner, prompting some horse-trading or, if deadlocked, handing the selection to Congress. It would be another constitutional crisis).  

Trump, with typical hyperbole, says of his movement that “there’s never been anything like it”, but that’s not strictly true. Indeed “third party” interventions in America have been surprisingly common. The lesson of history is that they never win the White House (though can be powerful at state level), but they can often deny one of the major parties victory in an election that would otherwise be theirs. America’s first-past-the-post electoral system and the institution of a separate executive presidency (rather than a parliamentary-based one) has ensured that third parties have been significant spoilers – king makers but never kings.  

Since the Second World War, independent candidates have variously put Democrats and Republicans into the White House when they might have failed in more of a two horse contest. Ralph Nader (Green party) only won 2.7 per cent of the poll, but maybe enough to change history. His support was overwhelmingly on the left and Democrat votes won from Al Gore in the famously ultra-tight election of 2000 ended up installing George W Bush, and all that followed. While W was lucky, his father, President George HW Bush, was denied his second term in 1992 thanks to Ross Perot (as an independent) taking the more dissatisfied end of the Republican vote that was still unwilling to back Democrat Bill Clinton.  

Similarly Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968 with not much more than 40 per cent of the vote thanks to a then racist George Wallace. Wallace was a former governor of Alabama whose slogan was “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”. As an ex-southern Democrat, or Dixiecrat, he helped draw votes from the official Democrat candidate, Hubert Humphrey. The separate involvement of a dissident socialist/progressive ex-Democrat, former Vice President Henry Wallace, and of a southern segregationist, Governor Strom Thurmond, in 1948 might even have helped Harry S Truman to his unexpected win in 1948: standing against racism and leftist extremism helped win the votes of black Americans and moderates in the north.

The segregationist Dixiecrats of 1948 stood in some places as the sole official Democrats, having gained power locally, or as third candidates, a game Trump’s new party, a spiritual successor to the Dixiecrats, could play. They won four southern States and 39 electoral college votes – not enough to rob Truman of his win and force him to adopt their racist policies, but had they been a little more successful, who knows?

It is though also true that an independent centrist named John Anderson probably made no difference in 1980, nor did Perot’s second run in 1996 and nor did a southern segregationist with 15 electoral college votes manage to stop Kennedy and the civil rights movement in his narrow win in 1960.

There is one striking past parallel of an ex-president making a comeback with his own populist movement, and running against his own former party – Theodore Roosevelt, back in Edwardian times. Like Trump, Teddy or “TR” as he was known, was a larger than life, physical sort of character with an assertive loudly nationalistic approach to foreign policy. He was on a mission to break up the monopolistic “robber barons” of the time in rail, oil and steel – roughly equivalent, arguably, to today’s tech giants. His motto was the not-quite-Trumpian “speak softly and carry a big stick”. A Republican, he gave up the presidency in 1908, to spend more time shooting bears, but was disappointed in his successor, President Taft, also a Republican. So he set up his own populist party, the Progressive Party, in favour of “trust busting” the big monopolies, projecting American power abroad and limiting immigration, as well as fighting corruption, strengthening workers’ rights, lowering tariffs and healthcare – so not always like Trump. It was nicknamed the Bull Moose Party after its badge and TR’s rugged outdoorsman image (he once declared himself as strong as a bull moose). At the 1912 election Roosevelt won a respectable 27 per cent of the vote, beat Taft and in effect let in the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who adopted some of Roosevelt’s popular trust-busting policies. A version of the Progressive Party survived into the 1920s, by then hurting Democrat campaigns more than those of Republicans.

Trump could therefore, if history is any guide, deprive the Republicans of power in 2024 at least. The very threat of that might allow Trump to bully the Repubicans into bending to his will. He might even force them to offer him (or a Trump family member) the official Republican nomination, as an alternative to splitting the vote and certain defeat.  Another option would be to use the Patriot Party to capture the Republican party state-by-state through entryism.

Alternatively, Trump could simply go it alone, TR-style. As in 2015-16, he could spring another surprise and break the mould of American politics, despite everything. If the Biden-Harris administration were a disaster, say with a deep economic depression; if the Republicans too were split and in disarray; if Trump’s Patriot Party played the race card against Kamala Harris... well maybe what is now just an angry mob might become a genuine mass movement and could come through the middle and launch some sort of (quite legal) coup in 2024. It is highly unlikely, yet who would rule it out.