I mean, if you want to keep going back, you could go all the way back to the Dixiecrats.

The States' Rights Democrats did not formally declare themselves as being a new third party, but rather said that they were only "recommending" that state Democratic Parties vote for the Thurmond–Wright ticket.[18] The goal of the party was to win the 127 electoral votes of the Solid South, in the hopes of denying Truman–Barkley or Dewey–Warren an overall majority of electoral votes, and thus throwing the presidential election to the United States House of Representatives and the vice presidential election to the United States Senate.[18] Once in the House and Senate, the Dixiecrats hoped to throw their support to whichever party would agree to their segregationist demands. [18] Even if the Republican ticket won an outright majority of electoral votes (as many expected in 1948), the Dixiecrats hoped that their third-party run would help the South retake its dominant position in the Democratic Party.[18] In implementing their strategy, the States' Rights Democrats faced a complicated set of state election laws, with different states having different processes for choosing presidential electors.[18] The States' Rights Democrats eventually succeeded in making the Thurmond–Wright ticket the official Democratic ticket in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina.[20] In other states, they were forced to run as a third-party ticket.[20]

Naturally, the repeated agitation of these contradictions resolved themselves with an ideological split on social issues between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. I mean, I'm not the right guy to dive into this history, honestly. However, my laypersons grasp on these developments leads me to believe that this tension on social issues is what eventually manifested in this spoiler playbook.