Louisiana governor-turned-senator Huey Long expressed unhappiness with the two major parties before his 1935 assassination. He stated of the nation’s binary choice:
It reminds me of the patent-medicine man who used to visit our area with two bottles of medicine. High Popalorum. Low Popahirum was another. We asked him what the difference was, and he answered the High Popalorum was formed by cutting the bark off a tree from the ground up and the Low Popahirum from the top down.
In 2024, some gentlemen plan to try and create a third major party to compete for the presidency
In his 1968 third-party presidential campaign, Alabama Gov. George Wallace declared there isn’t “a dime’s worth of difference” between parties. Some gentlemen seek to break the two-party presidential system in 2024. They hope one or both parties would spare voters in 2024 from reheating 2020’s unappetizing meal, demonstrating their gentility.
The late 19th century Mugwumps, largely Republicans, supported Grover Cleveland in 1884 because they were disgusted by their party. No Labels refugees from both parties share a Mugwumpean aversion to bad manners. No Labels’ main disappointment, without a policy goal, is that poisonous tribalism inhibits bipartisan solutions to evident issues like Social Security and Medicare’s unsustainable trajectories.