Paul Singer

USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — The so-called #NeverTrump movement has not come up with a candidate to stop Donald Trump’s run for the White House, but a new group is trying to make sure that if they do, that candidate will have a place on ballots nationwide.

John Kingston, a longtime Republican donor and ally of Mitt Romney, has put up seed money for a new group called Better for America to get a spot on ballots for a presidential candidate to be named later.

“You have this moment this year that if you keep the option open, I believe there will be a time when the right American steps forward and says ‘this is country in crisis,’” Kingston told USA TODAY. “I’m basically keeping the option open for these folks.”

The group, which launched in mid-June, has begun petitioning for ballot access using Better for America as a party name, planning to add a candidate name later.

“You can get on a lot of state ballots with a party line, not a candidate line,” Kingston said.

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Richard Winger, editor of Ballot Access News, said that is correct, but without a candidate, the deadline in some states is fast approaching. Only Texas and North Carolina have so far closed their ballots for the general election, but Alabama, Arizona, Illinois and Indiana could all be out of reach for a party with no candidate by the end of the month, Winger said.

Getting on enough ballots to be relevant in the general election requires money, first and foremost. Kingston said he has made “a seven-figure investment,” but Khalil Byrd, who ran a ballot access initiative for the 2012 election called Americans Elect, said it could require “north of $10 million to do both the legal work and the signature gathering around the country,” and perhaps even closer to $20 million. The group will have to collect tens of thousands of signatures nationwide, and Winger said petition circulators are now charging about $3 per signature.

Getting on the ballot is only half the problem. The other issue is that the group does not have a candidate.

Americans Elect was created to offer an alternative, crowd-sourced candidate in 2012, but it ceased operations before the election when none of its proposed candidates generated enough support to win the group's nomination.

Better for America will not have that problem because it will choose a candidate through an advisory board, Kingstion said.

Nevertheless, Byrd cautioned, “It's incredibly difficult to get highly qualified compelling Americans to think about running for president. It is a very difficult thing to convince somebody to do.”

But finding a candidate “is going to come more easily once you have the ballot access,” said former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman, who was part of the Americans Elect effort but is not yet working with Better for America. “It’s pretty hard to ask somebody to go out on a limb without any assurance of the ballot access."

If Better for America can get on a dozen ballots over the next month, “you will see a credible candidate come forward,” Whitman predicted. “There are so many people just chafing at what we have as a choice, and they'd be willing to take that risk.”

Is it Trump or Clinton?

“Hooray for what they are doing,” said Patrick Henry College founder Michael Farris, who has been active with the Never Trump forces in Washington. “The people I have been associated with in the Never Trump movement are very gratified to see the Better for America effort.”

Farris said “both candidates are so flawed ... it is not impossible that an independent candidates could get 270 electoral votes.” But the more likely scenario is that an independent would win a few states and deny either Clinton or Trump the 270 votes they need to win, throwing the election to the House of Representatives.

Everybody involved agrees it is a long shot at best.

But “when you see a car wreck, you’ve got to get out and you’ve got to help a little bit,” Byrd said.