Chuck Todd: Time for acceptance

Earlier this campaign cycle, I posited that after the first round of primaries produced likely nominees named Joe Biden and Donald Trump, there would be a phase in which the chunk of voters and activists calling for a third-party alternative would start to make noise.

But as Yogi Berra was once accused of saying: It’s getting late early. And specifically, it’s getting late early in the world of third-party alternatives.

Last month, I referred to what I saw as a looming third-party push as similar to the “stages of grief,” with anger, denial and bargaining hitting before finally getting to acceptance.

At the time of that writing, plenty of polling indicated that the vacuum was real, with a chunk of voters — approximately 15%-20% in each party, plus the lion’s share of the true independents — adding up to a majority who wanted anyone but the two choices the Democrats and GOP were offering.

I don’t think that same vacuum is there anymore. I could hang my hat on a key fact — at this point in 1992, Ross Perot had yet to start gathering signatures to get on all 50 state ballots — and proclaim there’s still time for an alternative to rise. But the reality is that there aren’t enough voters ready to abandon their party and ideology and risk dividing the vote and losing to the other side, especially because of the salience of one of the more divisive issues of our time: abortion.

One of the factors that helped Perot in 1992 was the real concern inside the Democratic tent at the time that Bill Clinton couldn’t win the general election. That meant the search for an alternative to Clinton was something more voters were willing to entertain.

While there is certainly exhaustion and antipathy to our current polarized political