Donald Trump could campaign for the Republican nomination well into March before deciding to ditch the GOP and mount an independent bid for the White House.

According to a POLITICO analysis, the obstacles standing in his way are few, so long as he’s willing to spend seven figures to secure a place on the ballot. In fact, more than two-thirds of delegates could be awarded before the window would begin to close on an independent Donald Trump campaign.


At this week’s GOP debate, Trump said that he’s no longer considering a third-party run. But his sporadic, strategic flirtation with an independent campaign has Republicans taking their poll leader’s commitment with a grain of salt. After signing a pledge in September that he would support the eventual Republican nominee, Trump continued to raise the possibility of going it alone if he felt the party treated him unfairly — and his latest pronouncement is no more binding.

“Knowing Donald Trump as I do, everything is negotiation and every negotiation can be renegotiated,” said former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele.

“If there’s one thing we’ve learned from watching Donald Trump for the past six months it’s that what he says today has very little relevance to what he’s going to do tomorrow,” said Republican strategist Dick Wadhams. “If [Ted] Cruz or someone else defeats him in Iowa, who knows how that will affect his behavior?”

A Trump campaign official said Tuesday’s statement reflects Trump’s confidence in his chances of winning the Republican nomination. “He’s ahead by double digits nationally,” said the official. “He feels that people are behind him, so it’s just not necessary to keep up … a third-party run.”

But should he stumble in the Republican primaries and change his mind, Trump’s path to a nationally viable independent presidential bid faces three logistical obstacles: the cost of ballot access, early ballot access deadlines and “sore loser” laws in some states that are designed to prevent candidates who lose primaries from running outside their parties in general elections.

Though any Trump bid could face obstacles erected by state elections officials, they are surmountable, according to experts.

Trump could compete in Republican primaries through late March — when two-thirds of states will have voted and two-thirds of delegates will have been awarded — before deciding to mount an independent run and still make the ballot in every or nearly every state if he is willing to pay the seven-figure price, according to Richard Winger, the editor of Ballot Access News. Ralph Nader’s ballot access attorney, Oliver Hall, and Bill Redpath of the Libertarian National Committee concurred with that assessment.

The cost of getting a candidate’s name on ballots in all 50 states and the District of Columbia without the backing of a major party would likely reach into the low seven-digits, according to Hall. Winger estimated a cost of $3 million for the process using paid consultants and signature-gatherers. Trump’s campaign has already experimented with the use of volunteers to gather ballot petition signatures in the Republican primary, an approach that could lower the cost of an independent bid.

Like Nader and Ross Perot, Trump would likely qualify as an independent candidate in some states and as the nominee of minor parties in others, depending on which process each state makes easier. Perot launched his own ballot access effort in late March of 1992, and he appeared on ballots in all 50 states that year.

Hypothetically, Trump could wait even longer and still make the nation’s first filing deadline for independent presidential candidates, which comes in Texas on May 9 and calls for 80,000 signatures. “If there is any candidate out there who could mount that kind of sprint signature drive … it’s Trump,” said Hall, citing the businessman’s personal wealth.

Because of a 1983 Supreme Court ruling that bars states from imposing overly restrictive deadlines for getting on presidential ballots, Trump would also have strong grounds for challenging Texas’ deadline if he were to make a good-faith effort to meet it and fail. The next round of ballot application deadlines — in Illinois, Indiana, New Mexico and North Carolina — comes in June and could also be vulnerable to legal challenge if those states cannot make the case that they need more than four months to verify signatures and print ballots.

Ballot petition deadlines are not the only legal obstacle standing in Trump’s way. Along with Ohio and South Dakota, Texas is one of three states that maintain that their sore loser laws — which bar candidates from running in general elections after losing party primaries — apply to presidential contests. (A 2012 court decision upholding Michigan’s refusal to put Gary Johnson on its ballot as the Libertarian Party’s candidate on sore-loser grounds would not apply to an independent candidate, according to Winger, who described that ruling as an anomaly for other reasons.)

The laws could complicate Trump’s efforts in those three states, but according to Hall, state governments will have a hard time justifying such restrictive measures for presidential elections in federal court for several reasons, including their impact on the rights of voters nationwide.

Winger also said there is good reason to believe that the application of sore loser laws to presidential elections is unconstitutional. But he suggested that if those states do succeed in barring Trump, there might be a workaround. Trump could put a close family member on those ballots, and the family member could in turn instruct presidential electors to cast their Electoral College votes for the mogul.

Constitutional principles notwithstanding, Republican officials — and perhaps Democrats in Rust Belt and other left-leaning swing states — would be unlikely to let Trump on state ballots without a fight.

Already, in Ohio — where a Trump independent bid could sink the GOP’s chances at the presidency — the Republican secretary of state Jon Husted said on Monday that Trump would be ineligible to appear on the ballot as an independent because it was too late for him to credibly leave the party. “There is no way he could disaffiliate himself from the Republican Party in good faith for this election,” said Josh Eck, a Husted spokesman.

Experts have greeted Husted’s position with skepticism. “Good luck with that argument,” said Dan Tokaji, a law professor at The Ohio State University who specializes in elections. He said the issues that motivate independent presidential bids often don’t arise until deep into the primary calendar and that courts are very unlikely to uphold any restriction imposed this early in the cycle. Tokaji added that Ohio officials would be on firmer ground if Trump participates in Ohio’s March 15 primary before attempting to make the ballot as an independent. “There, at least, they would have a straight-faced argument to make,” he said.

But according to Winger, Ohio would have an especially hard time barring Trump because of its own recent history. The state allowed perennial presidential candidate Lyndon Larouche on the ballot as an independent in general elections in 1984, 1988 and 1992 after he lost Democratic nominating contests in those cycles.

Even if sore loser laws fail to block Trump, elections officials may have other tricks up their sleeves, including aggressive scrutiny of ballot petitions.

“Those signatures can be invalidated for all kinds of reasons,” said Hall. “Literally down to, ‘the i is not dotted and the t is not crossed.’ Literally.”

“There’s a whole lot of avenues for the strict application — let’s call it over-strict application of state ballot laws,” said Hall. “Somebody once described these laws to me as cat’s claws. They’re always there, but they’re retracted. They can come out if a secretary of state decides they don’t want somebody on the ballot.”

But a well-organized, well-funded independent campaign would have a good chance of overcoming such legal obstacles.

Hall said that in 2004, after Nader was blamed for Al Gore’s narrow 2000 defeat to George W. Bush, the consumer advocate faced a massive legal assault from Democrats — 29 complaints in 19 jurisdictions — seeking to bar him from ballots. He said that though they drained his campaign’s resources, Nader prevailed in almost all of them.

Though Trump has so far avoided committing a significant share of his own wealth to his presidential ambitions, the prospect of a legal assault is unlikely to deter him.

Legal battles are something of a specialty for the businessman, who has earned a reputation for litigiousness in his career. And as he tweeted in October, “Remember, Trump NEVER gives up!”