Is Romney/Manchin a Winning Ticket?

Michael Busler
4 min readNov 14, 2023

Many, many voters don’t want either Biden or Trump.

There are apparently many Americans who don’t want either political party frontrunner to be president. A recent NPR-Marist poll found 65% of voters don’t want President Biden while 60% don’t want former President Trump. And 14% said they don’t want either. That could mean a third-party candidate may have a chance of winning next November.

Historically third-party candidates have never had a chance of winning, although some have influenced elections. Ross Perot likely took votes away from George Bush in 1992, enabling Bill Clinton to win the White House.

Most recently, in 2016, Green candidate Jill Stein may have siphoned enough votes away from Hillary Clinton to put Donald Trump in the White House. But none of the third-party candidates ever came close to winning. Next November things may be different.

Most Republicans strongly favor Trump’s policies. His economy was one of the best the country has seen in decades. Inflation was low, unemployment was low, interest rates were low and growth was increasing. On national defense, Russia was held in check, North Korea stopped shooting missiles, Iran was on the verge of economic collapse, and therefore not funding terrorism, and China was being confronted.

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Michael Busler

Dr. Busler is an economist and a public policy analyst. He is a Professor of Finance at Stockton University. His op-ed columns appear in Townhall, Newsmax.