The Impact of Prior Third Party Voters on the 2020 Election
At the risk of starting a thread that will devolve into another discussion of voter fraud, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the impact of third party candidates on the 2020 Presidential Election.
First, a couple of factoids of interest: in the 2020 election, President Trump received 11 million more votes than he did in 2016. More importantly for this discussion, he received a higher percentage of the popular vote in 2020 than he did in 2016, 47.2% vs. 46.1%. Further, he received a higher percentage of the popular vote in four of the five states that flipped in 2020 from Republican to Democrat: Arizona, 49.1% in 2016 vs. 48.7% in 2016; Michigan, 47.9% in 2020 vs, 47.5% in 2016; Pennsylvania, 48.8% in 2020 vs. 48.2% in 2016; and Wisconsin, 48.9% in 2020 vs. 47.2% in 2016.
How is this mathematically possible? Simple, the number of voters choosing third party candidates in 2020 returned to an historically normal level. Indeed, the entire increase in percentage support for the Democratic candidate in 2020 could be fully explained by former voters for third party candidates if those voters broke strongly for Biden. This seems quite likely for the reasons discussed below.
Until 2016, in recent elections, third party candidates have not drawn significant support. In 2004, 0.95% of the electorate voted for third party candidates, in 2008, 1.42% did and in 2012, 1.74% did. However, in 2016, the percentage of voters choosing third party candidates jumped to 5.73%. in 2020, the number dropped to 1.7%. While the third party candidates may have done an unusually good job getting their messages out in 2016, a more plausible explanation is that voters were extremely dissatisfied with the major party candidates, particularly Hillary Clinton.
I attribute the increase in third party candidate support to Clinton’s weakness rather than Trump’s because Trump’s performance in 2016 was on par with other recent Republican candidates. It was only slightly worse than Romney’s in 2012 (46.1% vs 47.2%) and was slightly better than John McCain’s in 2008 (46.1% vs. 45.7%). However, the performances by Romney and McCain resulted in landslide losses in the Electoral College. The real change was Clinton’s substantial drop in support as compared to the support for President Obama (48.2% vs. 52.9% and 51.1% in 2008 and 2012 respectively). Indeed, this year’s result is almost identical to the 2012 election in terms of the percentage of votes cast for major and third party candidates.
It will be an interesting research project for some political scientist to measure more accurately the impact of 2016 third party voters returning to major party candidates on the 2020 Presidential Election. Given the relatively strong performance by President Trump as compared to other recent Republican candidates, including his own performance in 2016, it is reasonable to conclude that former third party voters played a significant role in changing the outcome of the election.
(This post was last modified: 11-25-2020 07:19 PM by orangefan.)
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