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| Rep. Justin Amash (L-MI) |
Justin Amash's announcement sets up something that oddly we had not seen yet in this year's contest-an actual high-profile third party nominee, even if "high profile" is probably straining its definition here. After 2016, when Evan McMullin, Gary Johnson, and Jill Stein were all able to do surprisingly well (by third-party standards, even if not remotely close to approaching the poll numbers they showed), I wondered if we might see a new trend of former politicians with delusions of grandeur running for third party bids, even though they'd have no chance at the White House. That hadn't happened until Amash got in, though. Jill Stein turned down the option to run for a third bid for the Green Party, the same with both Gary Johnson & his running-mate in 2016 Bill Weld. Political gadfly Don Blankenship is running on the Constitution Party ticket, and while Jesse Ventura is once again floating the idea of running for president, he has been out-of-office for twenty years, and honestly-wouldn't his core supporters already be supporting Trump? Amash's entry changes that-he's a sitting member of Congress (the first since John Anderson to run as a third party nominee), and thus has a platform not often afforded to third party presidential candidates.
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| Ross Perot |
That said, Amash is not going to be president, and with this run, likely ensures that will never happen in the future. Third party candidates are always treated more seriously than they should be in the question of "will they be president?" No third party candidate has gotten into the double-digits in a presidential campaign since Ross Perot in 1992 (arguably the last time a third party candidate should have been taken seriously), and no third party candidate has won electoral votes since George Wallace in 1968. Only once since the Civil War has a third party candidate gotten more votes than one of the two main parties, in 1912, and they had to recruit a former president (Theodore Roosevelt) to do so, and none has ever won.
Amash's candidacy will not equal Perot, Wallace, or Roosevelt in any regard. Polling for third party candidates has already been low at this point in the cycle, even by historical standards (considering this is the time when voters who supported losing primary candidates are more likely to be frustrated before aligning in November behind their party's nominee). With Trump in the White House, most people seem content to either vote to keep the president or vote for the most-likely candidate to beat him (the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden). Amash isn't going to change that, and one wonders what he's exactly getting out of this other than the same sort of press that accompanied Stein & Johnson, though it is very rare that a third party presidential bid ends with people liking the person more at the end of it, certainly not since 2000.
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| Ralph Nader |
Which brings us to the actual question-at-hand: will Justin Amash play the "spoiler?" In 2000, Ralph Nader, aligned with the progressive Green Party, received almost 100,000 in an election Al Gore lost by only 237 votes. As a result, Nader became something of a pariah as his performance in a crucial swing state handed the election to George W. Bush. Similarly, in 2016 Jill Stein of the Green Party got more votes than Trump's margin-of-victory in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, enough to give Hillary Clinton the presidency; one could argue that Gary Johnson & Evan McMullin also cost Clinton/Trump states, though it's harder to tell where their votes may have landed considering the uniqueness of the #NeverTrump movement. Regardless, Amash is in a position to play a spoiler here.
But one wonders if he will. Amash is from Michigan, and thus might be able to over-perform there; Gary Johnson's home state of New Mexico was his best state, as was Evan McMullin's home state of Utah. But New Mexico & Utah were not considered swing states, and in the case of McMullin, a vote for him headed into the election was a plausible path for a third party to win the state (I even discussed this possibility at the time). Michigan is, and one that will be pushed hard, and one wonders how amenable a swing state's voters will be to voting for a third party candidate. Four years after Florida, Ralph Nader made the difference in John Kerry losing in exactly zero states. Nader's run in 2008 conceivably cost Barack Obama the state of Missouri, though that wouldn't have mattered when adding to 270 (Obama didn't need a win there to become president), and in 2012 neither Romney nor Obama came close enough in a single state for a third party to matter. The point is-it's conceivable that Amash could be a spoiler, but generally third party candidates get such paltry vote totals that they don't matter (we just really notice when they do matter).
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| Gov. Gary Johnson (L-NM) |
This is a harder question to answer, and hearkens back to what I said about Johnson & McMullin. Johnson had enough votes to make the difference for Clinton in not only Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, but also Nebraska-2, Arizona, and Florida; McMullin had enough votes to swing Utah to Clinton in theory. But this is just in theory-it doesn't take into account that Johnson & McMullin are considerably more conservative than Clinton, and these voters might either A) not have voted for her or would have voted for a different third party candidate or B) been Trump voters who would have voted for him in a head-to-head, but took an out when presented with an option. After all, if we were to assume that Johnson voters were really deflected Trump supporters, the Republicans could claim they were cheated out of New Hampshire, Nevada, Minnesota, and Maine in 2016. The reality is that we don't know how elections would have played out in most cases with third parties, because third party voters are such a small group & vote that way for a variety of reasons (the exception here is Nader in 2000-common sense dictates that the majority of the Green Party's nominee's supporters would have gone with environmental champion Al Gore over oil executive George W. Bush, and even making the specious assumption that 95% of his voters would stay home rather than vote, that was enough with only a 537 vote margin to swing the election to Gore).
My gut states, though, that this is probably a problem Biden doesn't want. Considering Trump's approval ratings, and how many states came down to third party margins mattering in 2016, Biden doesn't want to risk a situation where #NeverTrump voters have an option other than him on the ballot. It's harder to see, after four years, a lot of would-be Trump supporters going third party. It's worth noting that both 2004 & 2012 are the only elections this century with an incumbent president running for reelection, and both were the only two cycles where a third party candidate didn't have the margin to swing an election.
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| Peter Meijer (R-MI) |
Amash's entry has a consequential impact on the battle for the US House majority, however. Right now, Amash doesn't caucus with anyone, meaning the Republicans would either need to beat him or would need to win an additional seat to make Kevin McCarthy the Speaker. With Amash out of this race, that changes things. Amash had a decent chance in the race considering his local brand to be able to win over disgruntled Republicans and perhaps a few Democrats who simply didn't want a Republican in the office-there was a recipe there for Amash to get a plurality win over the Republicans. There was also the chance that the Republican and Amash split the vote, giving the Democrats an opportunity at a plurality win. This has happened before. In 2009, the Democrats were able to win a New York congressional seat when Republicans split their vote between an Independent (Doug Hoffman) and the endorsed Republican (Dede Scozzafava), allowing Democrat Bill Owens to nab a victory. Without Amash in the race, the fundamentals of the seat realign, and with an R+6 PVI, the presumptive Republican nominee Peter Meijer will become the probable favorite to win the contest, and give the GOP one less seat they need to reclaim as they hunt for a House majority.
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