By Eddie Fleming
Opinions Contributor
Many voters are considering voting for third party candidates this year in lieu of Clinton or Trump, but those ballots would be pointless; they will instead have a more or less identical effect to not voting at all.
The FiveThirtyEight election forecast gave the most prominent third party candidate, Gary Johnson, a less than 0.1% chance of winning, and a 0.4% chance that he will get even one vote in the electoral college.
This is likely due to the fact that third party candidates are generally not doing well in the polls. A CNN average of several polls conducted from between the 12th to and 18th of October found Johnson at 7% in the polls and Jill Stein, campaigning for the Green Party, at an even lower 2% of the vote.
In certain states, the numbers are more favorable, such as Alaska, where Johnson is polling at 18% as opposed to Trump’s 36% and Clinton’s 31%.Utah is even more promising for third party candidates, placing Trump and Clinton with 26% each, independent Evan McMullin at 22% and Johnson with 14%.
The nationwide average is far less optimistic, however, as McMullin is virtually unheard of outside Utah and the other two noteworthy candidates take single digit spots in virtually every national poll. In fact, third party candidates have never done well in the U.S., not once winning a presidential election and perpetually being overwhelmed by the two largest parties.
Even the law reflects this, with the winner-take-all system of the Electoral College making it even harder for third party candidates to get electoral delegates.
In a historical context, the best a third party candidate has ever done is in 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt broke off from the Republican party to run for the Progressive Party and won six states, which granted him 88 delegates to the electoral college; allowing him to finish a distant second to Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson, who finished with 435 delegates.
Losing 88 to 435 is the best a third party candidate has ever done, and based off of polls, it seems likely it will be a loss by a much larger margin than that.
That’s hard to ignore– even with the enormous amounts of dislike directed towards both candidates, it seems certain one of them will win simply because they are the only candidates with real chances of doing so.
Remember that the largest of the third party candidates is polling in at only 7%. If polls showed Clinton or Trump had 7% of the vote would you give them any chance of winning?
That “voters have to think for themselves and shouldn’t necessarily take it from the Republican’s and the Democrat’s in Washington” is Johnson’s argument, but when the odds are that unfavorable for a candidate, it would be better to spend your vote on the major candidate you dislike less as opposed to effectively not voting at all by voting for a third party candidate.
