predominant despite occasional challenges from national-level third parties which usually affected only presidential races.
Since World War II, the third-party candidacies of George Wallace (1968) and John Anderson (1980) had some impact, but the 19 percent of the national vote accumulated by Ross Perot in 1992 was the first that may have affected the election's outcome. More Republicans than Democrats defected to Perot's Reform party and this may have allowed Bill Clinton to capture the election from the incumbent, President Bush. Yet the biggest problem for any third-party candidate is that the party system is so important that in polls 61 percent of voters "feel that a president who was neither a Republican nor Democrat would have 'serious problems' dealing with Congress."
It is also, as Crabtree notes, very significant that "a candidate such as Ross Perot found it necessary to create a political party to support his independent candidacy." This is a strong indication of the broader importance of parties. While it is bi-partisan politics that affect the management of Congressional business and strongly affect the nature of Congressional legislation, the two major parties also function at every level of politics. As Haley Barbour, the chairman of the Republican National Committee put it, someone who got information about the parties only from "the popular press" would think that "political parties were mere shells through which enormous sum
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