US major party alternative: Nobody for President

By Canberk Yuksel

NEW YORK

Thinking outside the box has become rule-of-thumb advice but some applications are less practical, such as in national elections.

Enter Nobody for President, a social media campaign supported by hundreds of thousands who hope no one will be standing to take the oath of office come Jan. 20.

They recognize that the way things are, their road is a dead end and they offer no solutions. They are simply fed up.

With early voting already underway and just one week to go before Election Day, Americans in general are learning to live with the idea that they will have either Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton or Republican hopeful Donald Trump in the Oval Office for the next four years.

But we are living in a world where “hype aversion” is a term, and in the minds of many, the two front-runners are not even living up to that.

Trump and Clinton are two of the most unpopular candidates in modern American history. According to net favorability polls, both are in negative territory by unprecedented double-digit margins.

So, for some, the soul-searching continues.

There are alternatives. A small minority of voters are drawn to Jill Stein, a physician-turned-politician who is the Green Party’s candidate for president.

Just this weekend she held an “Ask-Me-Anything” session for the denizens on the popular online discussion network Reddit and she has raised $3.5 million dollars on a liberal platform, purely from campaign donations. She polls around the 3 percent mark.

Still, some others find appeal in the message of Gary Johnson, a former two-term governor of New Mexico, who is running a campaign as the candidate for the Libertarian Party. He is much better known for not recognizing the Syrian city of Aleppo -- “and what is Aleppo?” – than for his policies for the future of the United States.

Third way

Having once polled in double digits before the Aleppo debacle, Johnson’s supporters have even tried abortively to get him into the debates.

He has raised north of $11 million in campaign money but the fateful international relations gaffe coming from a political science major -- and another stumble when asked to name a foreign leader he liked -- appears to have cost him a sizable chunk of his support, with polls putting him around 5 percent.

With Stein and Johnson unlikely to win an election anytime soon, there is a third way: Not the Third Way of bridging differences between the right and the left, but the third way of lack of direction and disillusionment.

“The system is broken,” Fred Barnet, the administrator of the NGO-listed Facebook page “Vote Nobody 2016” with a little more than 112,000 likes, told Anadolu Agency. “The president, no matter who he or she is, has way too much power and too little accountability.

“I suppose you can expect to see the name of the page changed to Vote Nobody 2020,” Barnet said.

Like Johnson, Barnet, 34, studied political science and has a MA in public administration and describes himself as a “non-voter”.

The page’s avatar reads: “Vote Nobody for President: America Wins!” along with a wallpaper picture captioned “I’m already against the next president.”

The page is adorned with captioned pictures that aim to convey the emotion of being a non-voter.

One depicts a middle-aged couple at home. The husband, holding a candy dish, opens the door to find two children trick-or-treating, and says: “What do we have here? A scary clown and witch!” His wife, reading a newspaper with the headline “Election 2016”, responds: “Tell me about it.”

Another features photos of Trump and Clinton, apparently captured during rallies, stacked on top of one another.

Stopped being funny

The photo of the Republican -- with a rare apologetic smile -- is captioned “Everything that is wrong with our culture”, and that of the Democrat, wearing a solemn but positive expression, with the caption, “Everything that is wrong with our government”.

Vote Nobody has reviews from supporters, too.

Shirley A. Burton from Alabama said: “This is a FANTASTIC page for all of us who have had enough of this circus!”

In another, Scott Jackson from Ohio lends his support to Nobody for President. “By far the best candidate this year,” he said. “The others are all jokes that stopped being funny months ago.”

Jennifer Ferguson from Illinois takes it all with a grain of salt, and offers a dose of reality. “The idea is great but it will not work unfortunately,” she said, while still rating the page a perfect 5 stars.

“We can vote but we can vote against the duopoly and the dynamic duo. We need a Brand New Congress, President, and Supreme Court.”

And Barnet gets her. After all, the page is genuinely non-partisan and entertains no alternative names. As for its goal, Barnet said: “I would like to continue to stay relevant, continue to make people smile, continue to make people question the candidates.

“I would like to see a drop in turnout from previous presidential election cycles, or at least a large increase in people not choosing to support either major party candidate.”

Vote Nobody has an unrelated sister page, Nobody for President, which has a bit more of a radical tone and more than 133,000 likes. “Start leading yourself,” the subheading of its avatar say, and another photo post describes hoping for progress through the four-year election cycle as “insanity”.

“All politicians are the same. It’s you who never learns,” it asserts.