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As election officials continued to count the votes cast during the 2020 presidential election, some Republican strategists wonder if votes for third-party candidates could have closed the gap between President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in key states in the battlefield.
Neither candidate had enough electoral votes needed to finish the race Friday night, although Biden was ahead in terms of both the Electoral College and the popular vote. A handful of swing states were still up for grabs on Friday, and in some cases the number of votes cast for Libertarian Party presidential candidate Jo Jorgensen overcame the gap between Biden and Trump.
“Libertarian voters could have tipped the Electoral College by at least 22 votes by supporting Trump in the battle states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada,” political strategist Ryan Cassin told Fox News. “By wasting their votes, they have likely become saboteurs of Trump’s reelection effort.”
Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker singled out his state specifically as a place where Jorgensen’s vote counts exceeded the margin between Biden and Trump. “If it holds up, the @ LPNational candidate got 38,000 votes in Wisconsin and the margin between @JoeBiden and @realDonaldTrump is less than 21,000 votes.” Walker tweeted. The Associated Press called the state for Biden on Wednesday, with less than 21,000 votes remaining between Biden and Trump on Friday night. Meanwhile, more than 38,000 voters voted for Jorgensen, according to AP election results.
Jorgensen’s votes cast in Georgia and Pennsylvania also exceeded the margins between Biden and Trump on Friday night, and his vote count in Arizona was also very close.
Jessica McGowan / Getty
Jorgensen herself has dismissed the idea that third party candidates get votes from the two main parties.
“I don’t consider it receiving votes, because those votes belong to American voters,” Jorgensen told CNBC. He added that his party’s research indicates that most of his support in the elections comes from independent and first-time voters.
“Libertarians are not attachments to the Democratic or Republican parties, and we tend to be blamed for either party when they lose,” Libertarian Party Chairman Joe Bishop-Henchman said in an email to Newsweek. “If a candidate fails to win over libertarians, the answer is not to limit voters’ options, but to nominate better candidates who speak out on libertarian issues.”
So far in the 2020 election, Jorgensen has more than 1.7 million votes or about 1.2 percent of the total cast. His performance marks the second-best by a Libertarian Party presidential candidate since Gary Johnson received more than 3 percent of the popular vote in 2016.
“Despite the fact that the coronavirus makes the campaign difficult and the media blackout of our candidates, winning the support of 1 in 90 Americans is not bad,” Bishop-Henchman said. “We also elected our first state legislator in a generation and several local officials, and we will continue to build on that and win more next time.”
Third party candidates are often criticized by Democrats and Republicans who say they alienate voters from leading party candidates. The last time a president who was neither a Democrat nor a Republican held office was Millard Fillmore, a member of the Whig Party, who ascended to the presidency in 1850 after the death of Zachary Taylor. The biggest traction a third-party candidate has gained in a recent presidential race was Ross Perot, who won more than 18 percent of the popular vote in 1992. Twenty years ago, another third-party candidate had a significant impact on the The 2000 presidential race when Ralph Nader of the Green Party won more than 2 percent of the popular vote in a close contest between the Democratic candidate, Al Gore, and the eventual Republican president, George W. Bush.
Dan Lee, assistant professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, pointed to Jorgensen’s and Johnson’s performance four years ago as examples of how underinvestment in the party’s top candidates developed among third-party voters. . “People were unhappy with politics in general. The time had come for a third party candidate,” Lee said of the 2016 election.
The difference this year is that there is a stronger feeling of negative partisanship, Lee said. Newsweek. The fear of voting for a candidate with little chance of winning probably discouraged many third-party candidates from doing so, he said.
“I think we are caught in this loop where people are going to be afraid to pull the trigger and vote for a third party candidate because they are going to have a special fear of launching the elections on their least favorite side.” He said Read.
While Bishop Henchman said his party supporters are not “adjuncts” to any of the major parties, many political analysts have said that Libertarian Party voters tend to be fiscally conservative and socially liberal. According to research by Christopher Devine, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Dayton who has published analysis on third-party candidates, libertarian voters leaned toward conservatives when voting in the 2016 presidential election.
“Our estimate for 2016 was that, among libertarian voters who still had voted for president, about 2-1 would have elected Trump [Democratic presidential nominee Hillary] Clinton, “Devine said Newsweek. Although Devine said he was hesitant to make broad statements about a party that has a diverse makeup in terms of voter political preferences, he said libertarians tend to be motivated more by economic policy than social issues, which translates to many lean toward conservative candidates. Devine said it was too early to project how libertarian voters would lean during this election cycle, but if they had to choose between Democrats and Republicans, he guessed they would likely pick Republican candidates.
Like Devine, Lee believes libertarians are likely to lean toward conservative candidates when they are not voting with a third party. “They are often economically conservative but socially liberal,” Lee said, later clarifying that their social liberalism was less geared toward social justice issues and more toward “stay out of my life” policies, such as marijuana legalization. .
“Overall, the balance would still tip toward the Republican Party. For the Libertarian Party, economic issues are particularly important or salient to them, and on those issues they align more with the Republican side,” Lee said.
Some libertarian voters may lean toward conservative candidates, but Devine said their turnout in the election is not guaranteed if they are not excited about the options on the ballot. “If you can estimate statistically based on other predictors of how people vote in elections, if it weren’t for having a libertarian on the ballot, about half of them would not vote,” Devine said. “They don’t keep voting automatically and then they have to choose between the two main party candidates. Our estimates suggest that about half of them would not vote for president, or at least they would not cast a major party vote for president.”
But Devine said he believes the votes in favor of Jorgensen affected the shape of the presidential race in key states on the battlefield this time “just because the margins are so narrow.”
Devine pointed to Georgia, a state in which Biden was leading Trump by about 4,000 votes Friday night. Jorgensen’s votes cast in Georgia, more than 61,000, totaled about 15 times that gap.
“When you have a vote in a state that’s down to less than 1 percent, maybe even 0.2 or 0.3 percent, almost anything could make that difference,” Devine said.
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