US presidential elections
With vote approaching, third-party candidates face uphill climb
JOHN HARWOOD
If third-party candidates have not won the modern American presidency, they have shaped elections in unpredictable ways. Gary Johnson and Jill Stein hold the wild cards this year, but the value of those cards typically diminishes as the election draws closer.
The pattern of decline determines whether, and how, they influence the outcome. At the moment, Mr. Johnson, the Libertarian nominee, is drawing around 8 percent in an average of national polls. Ms. Stein, the Green Party nominee, is getting around 3 percent.
As expected from a party focused on environmental issues more identified with Democrats than Republicans, Ms. Steins support tends to diminish Mrs. Clintons effort and help Donald J. Trump.
Though the Libertarian ticket includes two former Republican governors Mr. Johnson of New Mexico and William Weld of Massachusetts its influence is less clear.
Mr. Johnsons campaign includes support for smaller government and for the legalization of marijuana. He pries away some older voters from Mr. Trump with the former, and some younger ones from Mrs. Clinton with the latter.
That is why the pattern of his decline matters.
In an ABC News/Washington Post poll released on Sunday, Mr. Johnson fell to 5 percent nationally, from 9 percent in the survey conducted by the news organizations two weeks earlier.
Most of the support that Mr. Johnson lost came from Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, and the shift to Mr. Trump helped narrow Mrs. Clintons lead to two percentage points from five.
To the immense frustration of critics of the two major parties, third-party candidates have failed to significantly influence presidential races.
None has captured a single state since the segregationist Alabama governor, George Wallace, running in 1968 as a nominee of the American Independent Party, won five and grabbed 46 electoral votes in the South.
None has drawn as much as 10 percent of the vote since Ross Perot recorded 19 percent in 1992. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with the government in general and the two 2016 nominees in particular, Mr. Johnson has never reached the Perot level in polling.
The reasons third-party candidates tend to decline as Election Day approaches remain unclear.
Telephone polls in the fall may exaggerate their standing. A study by Joe Lenski, a pollster for Edison Research, found that reading the names of third-party candidates to voters slightly inflates their support by giving respondents an option some did not know they had.
The printed ballots voters encounter at the polls, which typically list major party nominees at the top, do not similarly place alternative choices on an equal footing with their major-party rivals.
Third-party candidacies are caught in a vicious cycle. Because supporters of alternative candidates tend to feel alienated from the political system, they sometimes end up not voting at all. Because third parties have less money and organization, they struggle to find and motivate voters.
The absence of Mr. Johnson and Ms. Stein from the presidential debate on Monday may also depress their support, because their absence signals to voters that they will not be central to the outcome.
Mr. Johnson has said that he has no chance to win without participating in the debates, which are restricted to candidates receiving at least 15 percent in an average of major polls.
Mr. Johnson and Ms. Stein, who both were nominated by their parties four years ago, drew 3 percent and 2 percent in late-September polling by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal before the 2012 presidential debates. They received 0.99 percent and 0.36 percent of the popular vote on Election Day.
Feelings about Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump could break the pattern of declining support. If Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump repel viewers in their debate encounters, Mr. Lenski said, they may wonder, Is this all weve got?
Yet history shows third-party candidates can make a difference by attracting even tiny percentages of the electorate. In 2000, Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan ran under the Green Party and Reform Party banners. Together, they drew slightly more than 3 percent of the popular vote.
In Florida, their combined percentage was even smaller. But that smaller percentage amounted to 114,000 votes. In the final official tally, George W. Bush won the state by 537 votes. Floridas 25 electoral votes, in turn, gave him the presidency. The New York Times
