_Minnesota Gubernatorial Election

We estimate a multinomial probit model of vote choice and turnout to examine the 1998 Minnesota gubernatorial election. Like supporters of recent third-party presidential candidates, voters who elected Jesse Ven-tura tended to be young, male, lower in education, liberal on social issues, and fiscally conservative. Ventura support was not due to a gen-eral dissatisfaction with U.S. government, but it was correlated with voter dissatisfaction with Minnesota state government. Ventura was the Con-dorcet winner in the election; Hubert H. Humphrey was the Condorcet loser. With Ventura out of the race, Norm Coleman would have beaten Humphrey by approximately ten percentage points. Coleman voters overwhelmingly preferred Ventura to Humphrey, but Humphrey voters preferred Ventura to Coleman by a slim margin. Ventura's candidacy added seven percentage points to the turnout rate. Under full turnout, the vote shares of the candidates would not have changed significantly. Strong third-party candidacies are becoming commonplace in U.S. national elections, particularly at the presidential level. In four of the eight presidential elections between 1968 and 1996, a third-party candidate won at least 5 percent of the popular vote. No other thirty-year period in U.S. history has witnessed such third-party performance.1 Ross Perot's popular vote of close to 20 percent in 1992 was the highest ever recorded by a third party candidate who had no prior political experience, and his nearly 9 percent of the popular vote in 1996 From 1892 to 1924, four third-party candidates exceeded 5 percent of the vote in three elections