The Ross Perot presidential campaign of 1992 was an effort spawned by grassroots supporters to elect Texas industrialist Ross Perot as President of the United States as an independent candidate. Perot focused the campaign on the federal budget, economic nationalism, an escalation of the war on drugs and implementation of "electronic town halls". He largely financed his own campaign and relied on marketing and widespread grassroots support to spread his message. In certain polls, Perot led the three-way race with Republican nominee George H. W. Bush, the incumbent President, and Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, the Democratic nominee. He dropped out in July 1992 amid controversy, but reentered in October, and surpassed the 15% polling threshold to reach his goal of participating in all three presidential debates. Despite an aggressive use of campaign infomercials on prime time network television, his polling numbers never fully recovered from his initial exit. On Election Day, Perot appeared on every state ballot. He won several counties and finished in third place, receiving close to 19 percent of the popular vote; the most won by a third-party presidential candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. (more...)

The Thaddeus McCotter presidential campaign of 2012 began when he filed papers on July 1, 2011, to run for the Republican Party's 2012 nomination for President of the United States. He officially announced his candidacy the next day at a rock festival near Detroit. McCotter, who had been a congressman from Michigan since 2003, was first mentioned as a potential presidential candidate on an April 2011 episode of the Fox News show Red Eye. During the campaign, he focused on reform of government and Wall Street. Commentators noted that McCotter's lack of name recognition hindered his chances for nomination. When included in Republican presidential preference polls, he regularly received less than one percent support. Following a last place finish in the Ames Straw Poll and the lack of any invitation to presidential debates, he dropped his candidacy on September 22, 2011, and endorsed Mitt Romney. He resigned from Congress in July 2012 amid a fraud investigation surrounding his congressional re-election campaign. (Full article...)