Exploring the Bloomberg Brouhaha

June 20, 2007 — -- The possibility of a Mike Bloomberg tilt at the White House raises the two questions that always buzz around independent candidacies: Can he win, and if he can't, could he be a spoiler?

The cautious answer is that anything's possible. But with both history and current data as our guides, neither looks likely.

Polls generally find a decent level of support for the idea of independent candidates running for president — inclusivity is a good thing, options are nice, it's a free country and all that. Actually, voting for one is another matter. You have to be really disaffected with the major-party nominees, and have a compelling alternative. Relatively few people ever get there.

Spoiling can be easier than winning, but that requires an independent to suck votes disproportionately from one of the major party candidates, and to take enough support to tilt the race. It's tougher than it sounds, probably requiring, among other things, a very close contest in the first place.

It's also tricky to pin down. Some would say Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the state of Florida, and thus the 2000 election. Others can say no, it was David McReynolds. (The Socialist candidate got 622 votes in Florida — more than Bush's 537-vote margin.) Yet others might say it was Gore who cost Gore the election. It's a debater's game.

In this cycle, Bloomberg has not been polling impressively, nor has he been taking votes disproportionately. Tested against Hillary Clinton and either Rudy Giuliani or John McCain, Bloomberg had 7 to 9 percent support in a Fox News poll early this month and in an RT Strategies/Cook poll in April. Both surveys, moreover, suggested that he drew support about equally from the major-party candidates in those match-ups.

Bloomberg aside, the public is hardly issuing a full-throated cry for an independent candidate. In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll last October, just under half (48 percent) said they'd favor "building a new independent political party to run a credible candidate for president," but fewer, 30 percent, "strongly" favored it. In a Marist poll last November, 41 percent said they'd be "likely" to vote for an independent – but with fewer still, just 10 percent, "very" likely to do so. In a CNN poll last May, just 31 percent said they'd consider an independent, and only 16 percent were "very" likely to do so.