Steve Kornacki: The Return of Ross Perot Syndrome

Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor.

It's been nearly 20 years since an erratic Texas billionaire with a fondness for charts and a paranoid sensibility became an overnight political sensation, briefly emerged as the leading candidate for president of the United States and wound up securing nearly 20 percent of the national popular vote.

And now, for the first time since that 1992 election, the conditions that made H. Ross Perot's unlikely rise possible are again poised to shape a presidential election.

It takes a lot for a truly credible independent candidacy to take off. There are a few third party options in every national election, and sometimes even big names step forward -- like Eugene McCarthy in 1996 or Pat Buchanan in 2000. But almost always, they go nowhere. McCarthy, a two-term Minnesota senator who helped take down Lyndon Johnson in the 1968 Democratic primaries, attracted just 0.9 percent when he went outside the two parties, while Buchanan got 0.4 percent when he tried it.  And while Ralph Nader's campaign in '00 may have been consequential, he still failed to attract even three percent of the vote.

If an independent candidacy is going to break through, it's very helpful, if not necessary, for a few specific conditions to be present: (1) An incumbent president; (2) intense economic anxiety that creates broad dissatisfaction with the president; and (3) a popular sense that the opposition party has nominated an unacceptable alternative....