History shows that incumbent Presidents face challenge in fending off third party threat in vote | Democracy, elections and voting at Democracy Chronicles

The conventional wisdom is that an independent presidential bid by New York billionaire Donald Trump would harm the Republican candidate in 2016. That’s probably incorrect. Most often, significant independent general-election candidacies harm the incumbent or incumbent party more than they do the challenging party. As Alan J. Lichtman and Ken DeCell note in their book, “The…