1. ¹Rutgers Univeristy
2. ²Michigan State University

^*The authors thank Sidney Milkis, David Plotke, Andrew Polsky, and the anonymous reviewers of Polity for helpful comments on early drafts, and the Frank Kneller Fund that facilitated this faculty–undergraduate research collaboration.

Abstract

American politics has featured numerous intra-party and third-party insurgency campaigns. Scholarship on minor party, independent, and dissident campaigns has focused on how they have influenced electoral and policy outcomes. In particular, the existing literature highlights the capacity of these campaigns to play spoilers in presidential voting or to place new issues on the public agenda, but says little about their efforts to transform the political process. Revisiting forgotten elements of V.O. Key's work, we highlight the fundamental procedural ambitions of many intra-party and third-party insurgencies, campaigns driven as much (if not more in some cases) by visions of stronger popular democracy in national electoral politics as by final vote counts or specific policy innovations. Two significant dissident campaigns receive special emphasis: the insurgencies of Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 and Eugene McCarthy in 1968. Like many other major electoral insurgencies, both cases exemplify the centrality of procedural reform aspirations for these campaigns and, on occasion, their capacity to leave an indelible mark on the rules of electoral and partisan politics. Ultimately, their procedural triumphs compelled political leaders and other insiders to adapt but they did little to advance popular democracy or better serve the interests of ordinary citizens.