Klug served in the House of Representatives from 1991 to 1999. He hosts the political podcast “ Lost in the Middle: America’s Political Orphans.”
Is this the year the first independent candidate can make a serious run for president since Ross Perot rattled Republicans and Democrats in the 1990s? Nearly 60 percent of Americans say they would consider a third-party candidate for president, according to a recent Harris Poll.
This year voters may have a complicated ballot with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West and a possible No Labels ticket jockeying for position. Could Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) be part of the rumored No Labels bipartisan ticket, or make a run on his own?
“Voters may be surprised at how many choices they actually have,” Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the University of Virginia, told NBC News. “It’s going to make polls even harder to figure out. It’s an added haze over the whole battlefield.”
There have been three serious independent candidacies in U.S. history. Each of them displayed a unique set of skills. Teddy Roosevelt brought unmatched charisma to the race. Little appreciated was the sophisticated organization of George Wallace, whose campaign was the first to figure out how to tap into direct mail as a fundraising tool. And Ross Perot had a tireless army of grassroots volunteers.
But in the end, they all fell short. One Hundred and ten years later, Roosevelt still holds the record for third-party candidate success, having won a mere six states. Wallace managed to capture five in 1968. Perot did not win a single state in either 1992 or 1996.
Frankly the major challenge for all of this year’s rumored candidates is navigating the onerous rules put in place by Republicans and Democrats to keep others off the ballot and freeze them out of the debates.
To get perspective, I interviewed Perot’s and Ralph Nader’s campaign managers for my podcast, “Lost in the Middle: America’s Political Orphans.” The United States, they argued, does not tolerate antitrust behavior in the economic system but, sadly, it does in the political world.
We explored the appeal of independent candidates as well as the gauntlet of real-world challenges. I also explained how a campaign rally for one of them cost me my date for the prom.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.