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Fox News Sunday Transcript: May 8, 2016

MANAFORT: Well, he thinks it's important that the country be unified and that his appeal be presented in such a way that his message is clear. But, of course, he is the head of the Republican Party, he wants the party to get behind him and support him.
There has never been a candidate -- a nominee for president of the United States who had every Republican supporting him and everybody accepting every single position of a presidential candidate. Ronald Reagan had the same issues when he was trying to put the party together in 1980. ...
WALLACE: How far is Trump willing to go to sign on to the agenda of Paul Ryan?
MANAFORT: Well, let's make something very clear. Donald Trump just won a Republican primary. He won it overwhelmingly.
The largest turnouts in the history of Republican voters in all of the primaries and he is the historic leader now of getting votes as a Republican nominee. So, it's his agenda that has just been cemented as what the American people or at least Republicans and independents who voted for him want.
There will be a process. There will be meetings of minds. There's a lot that unites the leadership in the Congress as well as Donald Trump.
But the important thing to remember is the national titular head of the party is the nominee of the Republican Party. He just won that overwhelmingly, faster than anybody in Washington thought and running as an outsider against Washington.
So, his agenda is the people's agenda. He made it very clear. His vision was clear. He articulated it very well. There is no doubts to where he stands.

Presidential.

People forget that in 1980 Republican John Anderson ran as an Independent drawing almost 6 million votes (6.6%) and Reagan still won 51% to 41%.

John Bayard Anderson (born February 15, 1922) is a former United States Congressman and Presidential candidate from Illinois. He was a U.S. Representative from the 16th Congressional District of Illinois for ten terms, from 1961 through 1981. Anderson was a Republican but ran as an independent candidate in the 1980 presidential election.

Anderson was at a crossroads. He seemed to have three options: to continue as a Republican despite the fact that the calendar was not friendly and he had lost three consecutive primaries in states where he needed to do well; to drop out of the race; or to mount an independent candidacy. The third option had a huge amount of support. The presumptive major party nominees, Carter and Reagan, then engendered little enthusiasm. Pollsters were finding that Anderson was much more popular across the country with all voters than he was in the Republican primary states. Without any campaigning, he was running at 22% nationally in a three-way race. With the support of one of the premier media strategists of the day, David Garth, Anderson decided to join the race.

Most of Anderson's original support came from Rockefeller Republicans, who were more liberal than Reagan, but it bled away. Many prominent intellectuals, including the author and activist Gore Vidal, All in the Family creator Norman Lear, and the editors of the liberal magazine The New Republic, also endorsed the Anderson campaign. He also had the support of many independents. Cartoonist Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury ran several strips sympathetic to the Anderson campaign. According to the recently published journals of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis voted for Anderson, as did Schlesinger himself. Although the Carter campaign feared Anderson could be a spoiler, Anderson's campaign turned out to be "simply another option for frustrated voters who had already decided not to back Carter for another term. Polls found Anderson voters nearly as likely to list Reagan as their second choice as Carter."

Anderson did not carry a single precinct in the country. Anderson's finish was still the best showing for a third party candidate since George Wallace's 14% in 1968 and the sixth best for any such candidate in the 20th century (trailing Theodore Roosevelt's 27% in 1912, Robert LaFollette's 17% in 1924, and Ross Perot's 19% and 8% in 1992 and 1996, respectively.