Don't rule out a third candidate bombshell in the 2012 presidential election People knew Jon Huntsman's presidential dreams were just that when they read his tweet last summer: "To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy. The former Utah governor sealed his fate a few weeks later by speaking in Chinese during a presidential debate. It is unclear what possessed Mr Huntsman to believe Republicans were looking for someone with qualifications. That is surely why his fellow Mormon Mitt Romney, who spent his missionary years in France, has refrained from slipping into French. It would be like playing Edith Piaf at a Nascar rally. This year is certainly bad. But US politics has always been tough going for anyone perceived as being too intellectual (those who slip through, such as Barack Obama, are daily reminded of their vulnerability). On being told he had the support of every thinking man in America, Adlai Stevenson, the 1950s Democratic candidate, famously replied: "Yes, but I need a majority." Every now and then, however, the intellectuals get itchy feet. This time it comes in the form of Americans Elect, a "third candidate" - as opposed to third party - platform that hopes to trip up the duo on the dance floor. With the exception of Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, who has highlighted its transformative potential, the media has largely ignored it Perhaps the media is right to: Americans Elect could fizzle out like so many other efforts to crack America's two-party duopoly. Unlike the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, Americans Elect comes as much from the rooftops of Manhattan's Upper East Side as the grassroots below. Even Stephen Colbert, the comedian who has set up ironic election funding vehicles, has attracted more coverage. Yet the internet-based platform also has the capacity to upset the 2012 election - and in ways that are impossible to predict. Among observers of this year's mercurial Republican primaries, which take their next twist tomorrow in Arizona and in Mr Romney's home state of Michigan, the expectation is that politics will settle into a standard contest between two candidates. That assumption could prove very wrong. In 1992, Ross Perot helped throw the election to Bill Clinton by taking almost a fifth of the vote - most of it from George H. W. Bush. His name was registered on the ballot in only 27 states. Americans Elect is close to reaching the 2.9m signatures it needs to put its candidate on all 50 ballots. If its eventual candidate polls above 15 per cent - not a tall order in a season that briefly put Herman Cain in the driving seat - he or she would qualify for the presidential debates. Anyone who watched Britain's debates in 2010 will remember how much more exposure they gave to Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader. A third candidate could disrupt the course of politics. Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose candidacy in 1912 paved the way for the progressive era of Woodrow Wilson. The monomaniacal Mr Perot helped lay the groundwork for Mr Clinton's fiscal conservatism in the 1990s. All of which are best-case scenarios for Americans Elect - a group that talks and thinks like an internet start-up. The worst-case ones are just as easy to imagine. Instead of producing a substantive figure along the lines of David Petraeus or Colin Powell, the former generals who crop up as the types of candidate the group would like, it could produce a wild card such as Ron Paul, the libertarian goldbug, or the follically memorable Donald Trump. Indeed, the group was forced to set up a "qualifying committee" last year when it appeared that Lady Gaga might sweep the stakes. Even so, on the platform's website, which has registered almost 400,000 "delegates" for the online primary between April and June, the top two names are Mr Paul and Bernie Sanders, the independent Democratic senator from Vermont, who is the only self-declared socialist in Congress. More reassuringly, Mr Huntsman is running third. "With an open process like this there's always a tail risk people will vote for a nutcase," says Lynn Forester de Rothschild, one of American Elect's strongest backers. Indeed, a very large chunk of its supporters are disaffected Republicans. Their dream would be to draft someone like Dwight Eisenhower, who was twice Stevenson's nemesis in the 1950s. Their hopes are easy to mock. And their tendency to depict both parties as equally culpable for America's polarisation is plain wrong - Republicans have gone far further to the right than Democrats have tacked left. Yet their despair at US politics is easy to grasp. Back in Eisenhower's day, three-quarters of Americans said they trusted elected officials to do the right thing most of the time. Today that number is one in 10. Distrust has paralysed Washington. Nor is there much to suggest it will change in the near future. At intervals, "right-thinking" do-gooders wander on to America's political stage. Often they fall flat on their face. Occasionally they alter the script. Election 2012 is already the most restless most people can remember - and it retains the capacity to surprise. Twitter: @EdwardGLuce