Mark my words a vote for Hillary is a vote for war.[0]
[0]https://www.publicintegrity.org/2016/04/01/19496/defense-con...
The politician will feel that she maintains neutrality, and is making decisions for herself (not influenced by money), but since she has only heard one side of the story, she is likely to choose in that direction.
Similarly, if someone says to you, "hey, I have a problem, can you help me?" then you will probably help them if it's not too much trouble. Politicians are the same, except it costs $400k to be able to tell them that. And then the politician feels good that they have helped someone.
[0] http://www.npr.org/2015/12/23/460762853/how-hillary-clinton-... [1] http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/08/another-day-an...
http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/07/politics/john-kasich-donald-tr...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/07/20/trump_repo...
You might reasonably expect that Pence was made a similar offer. If that's how it played out, you could probably expect a relatively vanilla foreign policy from Pence.
The problem is there's no guarantee that's how it would play out; Trump is narcissistic and unstable. He might actually intend to do that until Pence does something he doesn't like, and then Trump takes the reins back.
Maybe it has always been this way.
Alternately, to people who consider it the same as voting for Hillary, I blithely say, "No, because otherwise I would vote for Trump." Same lovely effect.
No, to all evidence, 1992 was a far stronger year for that; while things might change between now and November, for pretty much the entire election season then Perot alone was polling above the combined total (at the same point in the campaign) of all non-major-party candidates this year. (And, during the primary season, sometimes ahead of both of the major party frontrunners in head-to-head polls that year.)
In terms of the electoral votes, there's essentially no chance of a third party result this year more successful than 1836, 1892, or 1948, and little chance of either electoral or popular vote success of a third party candidate more than 1856 or 1924.
