As expected, the Green Party made it official, and yesterday nominated former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (Georgia, and then a Democrat) to be its presidential candidate.
I suppose this is a record for Georgia: the state claims two former members of Congress running for president on partisan tickets in the same year, with McKinney joining Bob Barr (former Republican member).
At pollster.com, Mark Blumenthal discusses the challenges to measuring the support of third-party and independent candidates, and notes that the pollster.com team has recently added a graphic tracking the presidential race with Bob Barr and Ralph Nader (a non-partisan candidate). Pollsters, and pollster.com should now add Cynthia McKinney to their analysis for the 2008 US presidential campaign.
On purely objective criteria–name recognition and prior experience–has there ever been a better field of third-party/independent presidential candidates? In spite of the objective quality of the candidates, I suspect that Nader and McKinney will have a hard time combining for even 2% of the national popular vote, and that Barr would have an outside chance of cracking 5% only if Republican John McCain appears to be headed for a loss of blowout proportions.
