Monday Update: Messing Around with Minor Parties

May 27, 2024

It is not exactly clear why Trump asked for the Libertarian Party’s nomination because it’s not possible for the party to do so and remain a viable minor party.¹ Perhaps that’s his plan, to destroy it. Only New York and Connecticut allow multiple political parties to nominate the same person in the same election and aggregate the votes (“fusion voting”) and neither of those states will go for Trump no matter how many party labels he runs under. For the Libertarian Party to nominate Trump they would have to abstain from fielding any candidate on the ballot in all 48 other states plus the District of Columbia, which could damage their ability to qualify as a political party in many places.² No state except for NY and CT allows for candidates to run for president on multiple party lines. It is entirely up to a state to choose to adopt fusion voting or not. This is the legacy of Timmons v Twin Cities Area New Party,³ which I have written about previously here and here.

While there is nothing preventing minor parties from winning just about any political office in the country, they cannot win the presidency thanks to the electoral college. Now, that’s not literally true - a minor party could win the presidency, but the electoral math is overwhelmingly against it. Here’s how this works. In order to win the electoral votes of every state except for Nebraska and Maine,⁴ a party’s candidate must win a plurality of votes in a state (sometimes referred to as “first-past-the-post”). The first place finisher gets all the votes. To win a state, a minor party candidate would at the very least need to receive 1/3 of the vote plus one to beat the candidates of the two major parties. That’s the very least amount needed and it will only work if the Democratic and Republican candidates both get just 1/3 of the vote each. That’s just to win one state.

To win the presidency, a minor party candidate would need to receive a majority of electoral votes, which is 270. Technically, this could be done by the three parties splitting the vote equally in every state, but the minor party getting at least one more vote in enough states that together have 270 electoral votes. That’s incredibly unlikely at any given time, and frankly impossible in today’s political environment. If a minor party had the support of 33% of the voters nationwide, it is more likely that no candidate would reach 270 votes.⁵ In that case the House of Representatives would pick the president in an election in which each state delegation gets one vote. Currently, there are zero members of the House from a minor party. This electoral math ensures that a minor party presidential candidate⁶ could only act as a spoiler for one of the two major parties.

No minor party candidate has won an electoral vote since 1968, when George Wallace, running as an independent, gave racist Southern Democrats a place to hide before they began their mass transition to the Republican Party. Independent candidate Ross Perot got just under 19% of the popular vote in 1992. That is a huge portion of the electorate for a minor party candidate. Wallace only got 13.5% of the vote while winning five states (amounting to 46 electoral votes). Perot did not win a single state in 1992 and thus got zero electoral votes. It takes concentrated amounts of votes across many states to even come close to winning a presidential election.

To be fair, there are other reasons for running a presidential candidate - most important of which might be to secure the minimum amount of support to maintain political party status in some states.⁷ But the argument that a minor party candidate can win a US presidential is for all intents and purposes spurious. There are only two proven ways that minor parties, or insurgent political movements that might otherwise coalesce in minor parties, to become major parties in the US: they replace a major party that has collapsed⁸ or the take over a major political party from within.

Robert Kennedy, whose campaign is weird, dangerous, and seemingly corrupt, does a very regular job of whining about the race. This is no uncommon with minor party and independent candidates, some of whom - apparently like Kennedy - have deluded themselves into thinking they could win the whole thing if only they were given a fair shake or something. According to Axios, the CNN debate set for June 27th will allow Kennedy to participate if he gets at least 15% in four separate polls by June 20th.⁹ He has done that in three already (SSRS/CNN, Quinnipiac, and Marquette). I thought that Biden and Trump would only agree for two head-to-head debates - and that was one reason they were bypassing the Commission on Presidential Debates - but that was incorrect. So, Kennedy may yet participate in the debate, if it is actually held.

Kennedy, like so many other minor candidates from both major and minor parties, thinks if he gets into the debates he pick up support - perhaps enough to win. He’s not going to win, and you know why if you’ve read this far. But, is he likely to pick up support from the debates or not?

The honest answer is we don’t know. Historically, there is no evidence to indicate either way. There are only been one election in American history in which both major party candidates included a minor party candidate in the debates: 1992.¹⁰ Perot appears to have lost support after the debates, but he already had lost a lot of support by that time. There are other factors that complicate our ability to understand his decline - such as him suddenly quitting the race when he might have been ahead and then getting back into it later for reasons that made him sound like he was either nuts or a liar.¹¹

In 1980 Republican nominee Ronald Reagan and Independent candidate John Anderson debated without President Carter, who refused to attend. (Reagan and Carter subsequently debated without Anderson.) Reagan beat Carter by ten points, but Anderson got almost 7%. However, like Perot he didn’t win a single electoral vote. Anderson was a liberal Republican who broke with the party’s rightward trajectory, but it is unclear whether his support came from Carter, from Republican voters who opposed Reagan, or a combination of both. Did the debate matter? Possibly, but that situation was unique and won’t be replicated this year.¹² Also, the reaction to the debate was that Reagan had clearly won. But even if all of Anderson’s votes went to Carter, Reagan still would have won. The most likely reason for Reagan’s victory was that a significant portion of the electorate did not make up their minds until the last week, and they went with Reagan.¹³ We still see that phenomenon in voting among the “double-haters” or undecideds. It helped Trump in 2016 and appears to helping Biden this year.

After a little disruption from my trip to AAPOR, we should get back on a regular schedule this week. In my next post, we’ll discuss what’s going on in the battleground polling. Is Biden really underperforming Democratic Senate candidates there? Are we seeing a reverse coattails phenomenon? What about the voters in these polls; are they going to vote in November? I am going to reserve the end of the week post for news that may pop up, but I have a couple ideas if it’s a slow week. At some point this week, I will post about the new Wisconsin law that could cause nonprofits a lot of headaches this year if they plan to assist voters, so look out for that - particularly if you work for a nonprofit organization.

1. The party ended up nominating Chase Oliver, a former Democrat who ran for US Senate in Georgia as the Libertarian Party’s candidate in 2022. Oliver is a very different candidate from Trump. He’s young (38), gay, and supported Obama in 2008. He says the reason he left the Democratic Party was due to his anti-war position. He became a Libertarian in 2010.

2. While a few states allow for some types of fusion voting in certain elections, only New York and Connecticut allow full fusion voting, and it is only regularly practiced in New York. Wikipedia claims that California allows it for presidential elections, but I can find no legal support for it. Fusion voting was once more common. In fact, Earl Warren was elected governor of California in 1946 as the nominee of both the Republican and Democratic Parties.

3. Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party, 520 U.S. 351 (1997).

4. States receive a number of electoral votes based on the number of members in their Congressional delegation (House plus Sentate). This means every state gets at least three electoral votes, and this is why DC gets three even though it is not a state. States generally award the winner of the popular vote in the state all of its electoral votes. Nebraska and Maine are the two exceptions. They allot two votes for the statewide winner and one vote for each House district a candidate wins. There is a chance one or both states could change that this year, but at this point that is looking more and more unlikely.

5. The minor party candidate polling best this year - Kennedy - is at just 9.9% in the 538 polling average.

6. For the most part, “minor party candidates” includes independent candidates. That is not just for convenience and because for the most part the issues discussed here impact these types of candidates equally, but so-called independent candidates often run on a minor party line in some states to access the ballot. Kennedy is doing this by running on George Wallace’s party line in California (American Independent Party, which still exists).

7. Another important reason is to shape a message, which arguably was the role Perot played in the 1992 election regarding the national debt.

8. The most notable example of that in American history is the rise of the Republican Party from the ashes of the Whig Party in the 1850s.

9. My error on this in an earlier version of this post is almost certain due to not paying that much attention to the five-candidate polling thus far. It obviously will make a difference for the June debate, but otherwise the five-candidate polling just is not important yet.

10. General election presidential debates are relatively new. Although Nixon and Kennedy famously debated in 1960, that was not only the first time that had happened, but the Republican and Democratic nominees did not debate again until 1976.

11. The real reason was most likely that he was just an impulsive, naive, and bad candidate.

12. I am not sure Trump will actually debate Biden in the end, but there is no way he will face Kennedy alone on the stage. Trump is worried that Kennedy will carve off some of his support. Biden may be worried about that as well, but I doubt it. I think Biden just doesn’t want to give a crank a platform he doesn’t deserve and wants to voters to focus on the real stakes: the next president is either going to be him or Trump. If you think Biden might be worried about losing support to Kennedy in a debate, listen to some of this interview and see if it changes your mind.

13. Interestingly, the debate between Carter and Reagan may have made the difference for those voters. The debate was held a week before the election.