One of the less-noted surprises of 2016,
for me, was the lack of any major third-party presidential effort, one led by a
national figure whose focus was not just to serve as a protest vote, but to
actually win the presidency. There were rumblings from the moment that it began
to seem likely that Trump would win the Republican nomination, that someone
like Mitt Romney or Tom Coburn, a former or current officeholder, would emerge
to appeal to the sizable bloc of voters dissatisfied with both Trump and
Clinton. Rumors that Romney was considering the move, and an early poll
showing Romney earning over 20% of the vote in a hypothetical three-way
matchup, further fueled speculation.
Of course, nothing ultimately came of
the rumors, and no well-known figures challenged Clinton and Trump in the
general election. The three main third-party candidates were the Libertarian
Party’s Gary Johnson, the Green Party’s Jill Stein, and the independent Evan
McMullin. (I previously wrote about third-party candidates in 2016 here, here, and here.)
In the end, none of the three made a
significant impact on the race nationally in terms of raw vote totals, although
all three performed better than is normal for third-party presidential
candidates in recent history. Gary Johnson received around four and a half
million votes, or 3.3% of the total, while Jill Stein received 1.4 million, or
just over 1%. Evan McMullin got 608,000 votes (0.45%), many of which were
concentrated in Utah and Idaho.
The state-by-state results are slightly
more impressive. Johnson’s best three states were New Mexico, his home state,
where he earned just over 9% of the vote; Alaska*, where he won 6%; and
Montana, where he won 5.5%. Jill Stein only made it above 2% of the vote in one
state (Hawaii, where she won 3%), but Evan McMullin earned 21% in Utah, only a
few points behind Hillary Clinton. It seems as though Mike Pence’s last-minute
pleading for Utah Republicans to come home did the trick in the end: Trump
outperformed his average in the last few state polls before the election, while
McMullin’s share dropped significantly from the same polls, costing him any
shot at becoming the first independent candidate to win electoral votes since
1968.
It should also be noted that McMullin
earned the highest percentage of votes in a single state since Ross Perot, and
that Gary Johnson set an all-time record for number of votes received by a
Libertarian presidential candidate (smashing his own record of one million
votes in 2012).
What does all this mean? Third-party
candidates’ shares of the popular vote may have dropped significantly from
their polling numbers before the election, but that seems to speak more to the
weakness of these particular candidates and the still-widespread belief among
the electorate that a vote for anyone other than the Democrat or Republican is
simply a vote wasted. To me, the numbers indicate that if someone with a wide
national following, name recognition, and access to donors (like Mitt Romney)
had ultimately waged an independent bid, they could have been victorious, or at
least given Trump and Clinton a run for their money.
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*Alaska had another interesting
third-party candidacy: Joe Miller, the Libertarian nominee for Senate, won
almost 30% of the vote (amusingly, the Democratic nominee came in fourth). But
this is a special case: Miller was actually the Republican nominee for the seat
in 2010, beating incumbent Lisa Murkowski in the primary, but Murkowski came
back as a write-in candidate in the general election and narrowly won
reelection. As such, Miller has abnormally high name recognition in the state
for a third-party candidate. (However, Gary Johnson also did very well in the
state, and Alaska currently has an independent governor. Alaskans, like other
Westerners, are notorious for their independent spirit.)
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