By Jussi Grut
US third parties – what effect, if any, will they have on the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election?
As one of the most important and divisive Presidential elections in the history of the U.S. draws ever closer, voters are being asked to choose between two candidates, Republican incumbent Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joseph R Biden Jr. Both with unquestionable differences in policy and demeanour yet sharing some more subtle similarities, making it hard for some voters to decide between what they see as the lesser of two evils. Though the history of third parties in the U.S. is hardly comparable to some of the ever changing political landscapes of it’s Western European allies, the effect of third party influence in U.S. elections is not something to be overlooked when making predictions about an up and coming Presidential election. Especially one which raises temperatures on all sides of the political spectrum.
The Duopoly of party politics in the United States is one that has seldom changed since the birth of this relatively young nation, with the two-party system holding strong in almost every election since 1796. Ever since, citizens of the U.S. have been presented with two main parties to choose from, whether that be the Federalists of Alexander Hamilton or the Democratic-republican party of Thomas Jefferson in 1792, or the better-known Democrats and Republicans of 2020. Every President ever elected since the inception of party politics has been a member of one of these major parties, and with the highest vote share for a third party being 19% for Independent candidate Ross Perot 26 years ago in 1994, this is unlikely to change sometime soon.
However, despite third party candidates having never been close to winning a presidential election, vote counts for third party tickets such as the Libertarian and Green parties have been going in an upward trajectory since Ralph Nader acquired 3% of the popular vote in the 2000 Presidential election. In some individual state counts he received a much higher percentage, exceeding the difference between the two main candidates George W Bush and Al Gore. The most high-profile being Florida, in which the loss of Democrat votes to the Greens was one of the factors thought to have handed George Bush the win and the delegates required to win him the Presidency.
Despite a lull in third party support between the 2004 and 2012 Presidential elections, the polarising nature of the Presidential battle between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton along with some questionable policy positions and personality traits on both sides, left room for a small rise in vote share for the two main third parties. Between them, the Libertarian and Green Parties won over 4% of the popular vote. This is a relatively small number when compared to the vote shares of the two main candidates, yet when third party vote totals are compared to the vote differences between the main parties in individual states, they start to make more of an impact. Similar to the crucial results in the Florida race of 2000. Of course, this is not to say that these ballots would have for certain swung the results in favour of Hillary Clinton in key swing states like Pennsylvania and Florida, but there is certainly an argument to say that without third party involvement the results of the 2016 election could have looked very different.
To start with, some assumptions would have to be made about where Green and Libertarian voters would lean if they were given no third party option (again assuming that they will turn out to vote for one of the two main candidates rather than not voting at all), due to the left-wing and progressive nature of the Green ticket, it is a safer assumption to make that a larger percentage of Green voters would have voted for Hillary Clinton rather than Donald Trump if they had to choose between the two. If everyone that had voted Green alone in Michigan and Wisconsin voted for Hillary Clinton, both states would have been won by the Democrats, making it a much closer race, even though Donald Trump would still have had the necessary delegates to win the Presidency. However, taking votes for the Libertarian Party into account makes things more complicated.
Traditionally, the Libertarian ticket runs on the platform of small government and low intervention in matters of economic and social policy, i.e. believing in low/no taxes and low government spending while advocating for LGBTQ+ marriage rights, the right for a woman to have an abortion via any method at any stage and the right for citizens to bear arms. This platform makes it problematic to make assumptions about who Libertarian Party voters would lean towards if they had to vote for either a Republican or a Democrat, as Libertarian party policy effectively sits right in the middle of the two major parties platforms.
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, several Clinton supporters blamed third party voters for siphoning votes away from her campaign and handing the election to Trump, yet this could only have been the case if every libertarian voter was more inclined to vote for Clinton over Trump, which would not be a true statement. Anyhow, let’s assume that this was the case and every Libertarian and Green voter decided to turn out and vote for Hillary Clinton. This would have meant that Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin would all have gone blue and given Clinton the delegates she needed to win the Presidency. However, this outcome would have been the least likely alternative to the outcome in 2016. Libertarian candidates tend to siphon votes from the Republican party rather than democrats because of a history of ex Republican candidates running as Libertarians, e.g. the 2016 Libertarian candidate for president and former Republican governor for New Mexico Gary Johnson, and his running mate Bill Weld the former Republican governor of Massachusetts. Ideological libertarians also sit among the ranks of the Republican party today with Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky taking many libertarian positions during his time in the US senate and many more self-identifying Republican libertarians in lower levels of government and state legislatures.
The likelihood is that a large percentage of Libertarian voters would have voted for Donald Trump if they didn’t have the option of a third-party candidate, making it very possible that Trump may have added delegates from Minnesota, Colorado, Nevada and New Hampshire to his total, where the Libertarian party vote percentage is larger than the difference between the two major parties. If anything, third parties made it more of a challenge for Trump to win the Presidency in 2016.
In many ways the 2020 presidential race is similar to its counterpart in 2016, the US remains polarised, public trust in government remains at a historic low and the Democratic party has nominated another candidate from its pool of establishment figures. Meaning many factors remain the same when it comes to the effect that third parties will have on the outcome. However, not everything remains the same, there have been a lot of changes in the last four years. The US has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic plunging the economy into one of the worst recessions since the great depression, global calls for changes in environmental policy in order to deal with climate change are growing and President Donald Trump is struggling to convince the American public that he kept all the promises he made during his 2016 campaign
Whether or not third parties make a big difference in 2020, drastically swaying the election one way or another, relies heavily on the actions and perceptions of Donald Trump and Joe Biden. There are a lot of reasons voters give as to why they choose third parties over the status quo, but in a hotly contested presidential race in which many voters feel their only option is voting for the lesser of two evils, voters may move away from third parties. According to the New York Times It is the second straight presidential race in which both candidates are viewed negatively by a majority of voters. "Hostility toward the opposing party has eclipsed positive effect for one's own party as a motive for political participation," researchers concluded in a 2018 paper published by Political Psychology.
Needless to say, there will always be ideologs who will vote for their third party as a matter of principle, whoever the main candidates may be, but the 2020 Presidential race is lining itself up to be a vote centered around Donald Trump. An election based on what the electorate believes the identity of the United States should be, an election on whether you love or loath ‘Make America Great Again’. It seems that in 2020, with poll margins widening in states all over the U.S. in support of the status quo, through fanaticism or fear, there remains little room for the success story of a third-party candidate in the 2020 Presidential election.
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