Reasonable only in relation to other 3rd party candidates. Still doesnt make him a serious candidate with a remote (let alone legit) chance of “breaking the duopoly”.
Not at the beginning, before his mouth and past paranoiac actions became an issue. There is this info…
A Time magazine poll found that Perot had 37% support of all the electorate, ahead of both Bush and Clinton who tied for second at 24%. At this time, Vice President Dan Quayle became the most senior member of the Bush administration to criticize Perot, calling him a “temperamental tycoon”.
From…
Ross Perot 1992 presidential campaign - Wikipedia.
BTW, it’s possible that Trump himself, should he had gone independent in 2016, would have been a serious contender. IMO you need name recognition and money to build a competitive 3rd party. Perot and Trump had both.
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LOL. He would have taken Republican votes away from the GOP candidate and Hillary would have won.
But if RCV was used, then there’s no way to know who would’ve won, except that it would’ve been the person that is liked by more people than disliked. Actually I don’t know if RCV makes sense for our presidential elections, given how the electoral college interferes with the popular vote. I guess it still does, but the votes aren’t equal.
That is correct: Trump would have taken more Republicans to his camp plus some independents. And he’d had been a contender, which was my point.
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Prior to their campaigns, Trump had 100x the name recognition of Perot. Perot was an incredibly private person prior to 92, and almost unknown. He had name recognition only in:
- Patriotic and military circles due to his unceasing POW-MIA efforts to return them or their remains
- computer nerd circles due to EDS
- some stock market circles due to his GM green mail
- and some additional patriotic/military circles due to his rescue of hostages from Iran
Although it seemed “natural” in 92, I suspect he had planned and was well prepared to run a campaign long before his appearances on Larry King. Combined with his previously private undertakings, those interviews are what made him famous, along with a supposed groundswell of grassroots support, and the little general’s homespun story telling and blue collar sayings. 
The only other third party candidates who I remember were both important only by how much media attention they got. George Wallace and John Anderson each got a lot. Anderson’s coverage leaned positive and Wallace’s was absolutely sledge-hammer negative.
Of all the third party candidates in my lifetime, Wallace was the only one to get electoral votes (three or four states). Those votes were all from states looking to retain the enforcement of segregation. Surprisingly, MA was not among them. He ended up with under 20% of the vote, and failed in his goal to make the House and Senate decide the election.
John Anderson ran as a third party candidate in 80. Despite generally favorable media coverage, he got less than 10% of the vote and wasn’t even a spoiler. He took liberal Republicans from Reagan and blue dog Democrats from Carter.
I think that depends on your definition of contender. I don’t think “I’m all ears” Perot was a contender, despite getting 20% of the vote. To me, he was only a spoiler, but a very entertaining one. To be fair he could have been a contender for the Republican nomination in 96 had he not veered into the black helicopter lane, be we’ll never know.
Just so you know, I voted for H. Ross Perot in 92. I don’t mind admitting it because I was in such a blue state that George Washington would have lost if he had an R beside his name. 
As for the Time poll that you quoted, he was an unknown. Heck, even Biden was polling fairly even with Trump when he couldn’t poop in his diaper without making it obvious. I’ll admit that it was probably a push poll, but the Time poll may have been one too. 
After both sides trying to figure out whether it would better for them not to debate, it looks like they’ve agreed to a presidential debate on Sept 10th.
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Now they are haggling (so to speak) about microphones. Harris desperately wants to play the abused woman card.
I hope it goes on. It will be interesting if Snuffanopolis and the other ABC partisans are able to avoid asking Harris about her radical positions in 2019.
The latest wild u-turn
Kamala Harris flip-flops, embraces the border wall after dubbing it a ‘vanity project’
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Any Cliff Notes summary of the rules agreed to so far?
AFAIK the rules are the same as the Trump Biden debate in July, Except at ABC instead of CNN. Moderator asks a question. Each debater gets a fixed time, five minutes I think, to answer with the other person’s microphone off.
Edit. This debate place and format was agreed to by the Biden campaign.
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Really? There’s not a snowball’s chance in the underwater coastline that she will get a direct question on that subject. This shows their woeful confidence in her, since she’ll have the questions and answers ahead of time, but they don’t trust her to remember the answer, or stick to the script.
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There’s huge amount of dark money coming in for the Democrats, but still a sizable amount
https://www.axios.com/2024/08/22/crypto-election-spending-2024-pac-public-citizen
Crypto is dominating corporate election spending
The crypto industry accounts for almost half the money contributed by corporations to political action committees so far in 2024, according to a new report from Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group.
Why it matters: Crypto is pioneering a strategy for direct corporate election spending that could usher in a new era of spending by big companies to get the outcomes they want in elections, the organization argues.
By the numbers: Blockchain companies have supplied 48% of the $248 million of corporate money donated to influence federal elections this cycle, according to the research.
- Fairshake, the crypto industry’s dominant political action committee, says it has raised $169 million. Public Citizen goes with a larger figure ($202 million) based on Federal Election Commission data, but that includes a double-counting of cryptocurrency-based contributions from individual donors, according to the OpenSecrets research group.
- And though some of that money comes from wealthy individuals, Fairshake’s been a magnet for business dollars, with nearly $114 million coming from corporate backers.
- Contributions have come primarily from Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange, and Ripple, the company behind a stablecoin called XRP. Both companies have been at the forefront of crypto’s battle with regulatorsfor legitimacy.
This is now “muted microphone gate”. ABC has spoken, but the Democrats want to have their way
**[quote=“onenote, post:836, topic:4749, full:true”]
This is now “muted microphone gate”. ABC has spoken, but the Democrats want to have their way
[/quote]
maybe a muffler?
Willie says he’s got a muffler for her. Her response was garbled. 
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Some Labor Day news.
Good luck getting a meeting with the phantom candidate
Non-government unions are disappearing.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/union2.pdf
Highlights from the 2023 data:
• The union membership rate of public-sector workers (32.5 percent) continued to be more
than five times higher than the rate of private-sector workers (6.0 percent). (See table 3.)
• The highest unionization rates were among workers in education, training, and library
occupations (32.7 percent) and protective service occupations (31.9 percent). (See table 3.)
• Men continued to have a higher union membership rate (10.5 percent) than women (9.5
percent). (See table 1.)
• Black workers remained more likely to be union members than White, Asian, or Hispanic
workers. (See table 1.)
• Nonunion workers had median weekly earnings that were 86 percent of earnings for workers
who were union members ($1,090 versus $1,263). (The comparisons of earnings in this news
release are on a broad level and do not control for many factors that can be important in
explaining earnings differences.) (See table 2.)
-2-
• Among states, Hawaii and New York had the highest union membership rates (24.1 percent
and 20.6 percent, respectively), while South Carolina and North Carolina had the lowest (2.3
percent and 2.7 percent, respectively). (See table 5 and chart 1.)
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Germany - the evil far-right Nazi-affiliated, er only real Conservative Party in Germany, made historic gains winning over 30% of seats in several states’ government.
Interestingly, a far left party did well too, and you’ll never guess what made those communists popular.
former communist party politician, won more than 15% of seats in Thüringen and more than 11% of seats in Saxony’s parliament, just eight months after the party was founded.
Like the AfD, the leftist party also advocates tightening immigration into Germany and opposes support for Ukraine, wanting a diplomatic solution to that country’s war with Russia.
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Uh, when did Ukraine invade Germany? 
Free Speech online? Kamala’s DOJ will want to have a word with you about your ‘hate’, and sue or shut down platforms that don’t censor like she wants. In her words,
Nate Silver’s excellent polling and political modeling site 538 got bought by ABC a while back and they broke up somewhat acrimoniously. So don’t trust the ABC 538, which has some new models and probably more ABC bias, and check out Nate’s independent site running his old models as before.
Also, the debate is finalized for Harris vs Trump for this Tues.