Good news for Kamala Harris on third-party candidates
If anything, such candidates may now help the Democrats more
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are sure to be on the ballot in November in all 50 states. Not so all the would-be candidates from third parties. With summer drawing to a close, and presidential campaigns intensifying, several such candidates have been facing the distraction of lawsuits that seek to stop them competing in some states.
In recent days a Democrat-aligned group has challenged Robert F. Kennedy junior’s right to be on the ballot in Pennsylvania, New York and Illinois, hoping to hobble the idiosyncratic independent candidate. And officials in Wisconsin dismissed an attempt by Democrats to remove Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, from the ballot in that swing state. The logic of these legal challenges is straightforward: for much of the campaign third-party candidates appeared to be siphoning support from the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden. But now that Ms Harris has replaced him, this reasoning may be flawed.
For Democrats, fear of a third-party “spoiler” looms large, particularly in the six or seven swing states that will decide the election. The last time Ms Stein was on the ballot in Wisconsin, in 2016, she won 31,072 votes—more than Mr Trump’s 22,748-vote margin of victory. In 2000 the Green candidate, Ralph Nader, won nearly 100,000 votes in Florida. After an agonising dispute over “hanging chads”, George W. Bush was judged to have won the state by just 537 votes, and Democrats accused Mr Nader of handing him the presidency.
Third-party candidates contest this framing. They say that they draw support from both parties or that their voters would stay home if they were not on the ballot. But litigation over ballot access shows that Democrats take the threat seriously.
The assumption that third-party candidates hurt Democrats may no longer be correct, though. Polling conducted by YouGov between late May and early July, while Mr Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee, showed Mr Kennedy winning 3.8% of voters who said they supported Mr. Biden in 2020 (see chart). Ms Stein was winning a further 1.5% and Cornel West, a left-wing independent candidate, another 0.9%. In total, around 7% of Mr Biden’s 2020 voters told YouGov that they planned to opt for a third-party candidate this year. But in YouGov’s polling since Ms Harris became the Democratic nominee that number has fallen by more than half. Mr Kennedy now wins a larger share of 2020 Trump voters than Biden voters.
This shift is borne out by findings from other polling firms, which ask respondents to choose between multiple candidates as well as how they would vote in a head-to-head between the two main ones. In polls conducted before Mr Biden’s withdrawal Mr Trump had a 1.3 percentage-point advantage on average in questions that asked about multiple candidates compared with head-to-head polling. With Ms Harris as the Democratic nominee, the effect is reversed: the vice-president has a 0.9-point greater margin when third-party candidates are included.
Historically, polls have tended to overstate the strength of third parties. It may be that respondents use third-party options to signal dissatisfaction with their own party. That could help explain why many voters have come back to the Democrats since Ms Harris became the candidate. Even if they overcome barriers to ballot access, third-party candidates are unlikely to win a big share of the vote in November. True, it takes only a few thousand votes to swing a tight election. But the chances of such minnows handing the White House to Mr Trump have fallen sharply. ■