The Third Party Effect in 2020

Gov. Gary Johnson and Dr. Jill Stein

In the coming weeks, as people start to actually vote (North Carolina will be first, and will start mailing out absentee ballots on Friday), it will be very hard to sort through "the noise" of a fall election season.  With cable news and media outlets unable to handle an election that isn't a horserace, it's probable you're going to see some polls that aren't as worthy elevated, potentially over-read certain scandals, and generally hear data points that might sound good, but aren't actually worth your attention.  I know that my audience here isn't super large, but I don't want to contribute to trying to make the election something it's not, so while I will be writing about some of these things, and trends that I feel are good or bad for either of the presidential (or down-ballot candidates), I'm going to try really hard to make my arguments fact-based, and worthy of your time/discussion, rather than scrounge for clicks or make you anxious, as I know with such a pivotal presidential election (I know this is trotted out every four years, but I suspect that 2016/20 will stand out as two of the most important presidential elections in the history of the Republic, alongside 1860 and 1916) your nerves are frayed.  But I am not going to be shy about discussing political data that I do think is important in understanding who might win in November, and we'll start that conversation today with a look at third party candidates on the ballot, and what they might mean for the eventual results of the presidential race.

In 2016, Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, and Evan McMullin (the three best-performing third party candidates on the ballot) achieved 4.89% of the vote, and both Johnson & Stein cleared 1% of the national popular vote (McMullin received 0.54% of the vote).  This might not sound like a lot, because it's not ultimately that much (it wasn't even enough to warrant their inclusion in the debates), but it was a high-water mark for third party candidates.  In 2012, no third party candidate cleared 1% of the vote, and it didn't happen in 2008 or 2004 either.  Gary Johnson actually did better than Ralph Nader did in 2000 (the year of the infamous Florida Recount), and you have to go back to the 1990's with the back-to-back candidacies of Ross Perot before you can find a third party candidate that did better than Johnson in 2016, and all the way back to 1980 with John Anderson & Ed Clark to find an election where two candidates cleared 1%.

This was the result of a couple of different things.  For starters, Johnson & Stein had both run for president before (in 2012) and thus had a base, even if it was a small one.  Secondly, all three candidates, while they didn't make the debates (though Johnson was polling high enough there was occasional speculation he might make the third), all received a lot more press than you would normally attribute to candidates who, even while their polling was way better than the end results (Johnson hit as high as 13% in some polling), would be polling so low.  This was in part because the two major party candidates were uniquely unpopular-both were not well-loved by the other side (in fact, they were hated), and were the two most unpopular candidates put forth by a major party in at least a generation.

This led to an unusual, under-discussed aspect of the electoral college.  While none of the three candidates won an electoral college vote, a high number of states didn't give any candidate a majority of the vote.  In fact 15 states neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump won over 50% of the ballot (for the curious, these states are New Mexico, Colorado, Virginia, Maine, Minnesota, Utah, Nevada, New Hampshire, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, & Wisconsin as well as Nebraska-2).  This is a big pile of the electoral college, and had, say, Hillary Clinton been able to scoop up some of the third party voters in just a few of these states, she would be president right now (conversely, had Donald Trump picked up the majority of the third party candidates, he would have won a landslide electoral victory, and possibly the popular vote).

Jo Jorgensen (L-SC)

This brings us to 2020, because other than Kanye West-do you even know who the third party candidates are this year?  And even West is currently only on the ballot in 10 states, numbering 83 electoral college votes.  The reality is that while there are definitely third party candidates this year (in addition to West, Jo Jorgensen for the Libertarians and Howie Hawkins for the Green Party will likely be on your ballot), none of these candidates are getting the attention or the support in public polling that Johnson, Stein, or even McMullin did.  If we're headed back to a situation where third party candidates are maybe getting 1-1.5% of the national popular vote, that leaves a lot of votes for Joe Biden or Donald Trump to scoop up.

Which makes this morning's article from NBC News so interesting.  In it, it appears that 47% of third party voters from 2016 are intent on backing Joe Biden, while only 20% are going to back to Donald Trump, and 33% are remaining undecided or will back one of the current third party candidates.  This becomes crucial when you consider how close Hillary Clinton was in key states.  If you take the third party vote in 2016, and apply 47% of it to Hillary Clinton's column and 20% of it to Donald Trump, you would get a different result in the election.  Clinton would win Michigan & Wisconsin by 1-point, and Pennsylvania by a little less then half a percent; she would also be within recount territory in both Florida and especially Nebraska-2.  And as I'm sure you know, MI/WI/PA going to Clinton would have been enough to hand her the election.

There are some problems with this theory-this is a national poll, and you can't assume that it would be applied universally in every swing state.  There will also be new voters, voters who voted for Clinton and now vote for Trump (as well as Trump voters that migrate to Biden), but this is a big deal.  Third party candidacies do not appear likely to play a big part in the 2020 election, and considering that they were a large part of why Donald Trump became president in the first place, that he is doing so poorly amongst these voters against Joe Biden should be a worrying sign for his campaign, and something they're going to need to find a way to combat, otherwise Biden's going to have a key advantage in November.