February 6, 2024 - 7:00pm
Third-party candidates could push Donald Trump over the edge to victory in November’s presidential election, much as they did in 2016, according to recent polls.
Trump is leading in swing states, and his lead grows considerably when third-party candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Jill Stein and Cornel West are added to the mix. Trump performs better in a five-way race than in a two-way contest in five crucial swing states: Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina, though the addition of third party candidates brings his lead down by four points in Pennsylvania and makes no difference in Georgia, according to RCP’s poll of polls.
The largest impacts can be seen in Arizona and Nevada, where the three third-party candidates boost Trump’s lead by five and four points respectively, and in Wisconsin and North Carolina, where Trump sees a three-point boost.
Any impact of third-party candidates in heavily blue or red states would not bridge the massive margins that Joe Biden or Trump are projected to win in those states — only influence in swing states meaningfully impacts the election.
Biden is six points ahead of Trump in a two-way national race, but the addition of RFK Jr., Stein and West reduces his lead to just two points in a separate Quinnipiac poll. Kennedy takes the lion’s share of third-party votes, 21%, compared to West and Stein’s 3% and 2%.
December polling indicates that a three-way race involving RFK boosts Trump by five points, and it can safely be assumed that Stein and West primarily win votes from would-be Biden supporters.
Both Stein and West threaten to peel off would-be Biden voters who are dissatisfied with the President’s handling of the war in Gaza and climate issues. West has been sharply critical of Israel and said Biden was complicit in genocide for supporting the state. He has been courting swing-state Arab and Muslim voters, and may find some converts among the three-quarters of young voters who are dissatisfied with Biden’s stance on the conflict in the Middle East.
Michigan, which has over 200,000 citizens of Arab descent, could prove to be a decisive swing vote bloc. Given that he only won the state by just over 150,000 votes in 2020, the President will be hoping that the likes of West do not take votes from this demographic. Heavily contested cities like Ann Arbor, Dearborn (both Michigan) and Madison (Wisconsin), could come down to just tens of thousands of votes.
Meanwhile, more than 15,000 people in Arizona — another swing state — have registered to join the No Labels “unity ticket” against Biden and Trump. The group has already secured ballot access in Arizona and 10 other states, with its organisers claiming that they will reach 20 states by the end of this year and all 50 states by election day.
Kennedy has broken with the mainstream of both parties on public health, environmental issues and vaccines, and could pull votes away from both main candidates, though ultimately his inclusion on the ballot is projected to help Trump more.
Democrats, for their part, have been waging a war against third-party candidates. No Labels filed a complaint with the Department of Justice alleging a conspiracy to shut down their effort to put a third-party candidate on the ballot. The group’s detractors have publicly accused them of helping Trump, and several articles have cropped up in the media arguing that a vote for Cornel West is a vote for Trump.
Democrats have good reason to be concerned about a potential third-party spoiler. In 2016, Green Party candidate Jill Stein won more votes than Trump’s margin of victory in three swing states; if Stein’s supporters in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin had instead voted for Hillary Clinton, Clinton would have won the election.
This memory has put the Democrats under added pressure to maintain unity ahead of this year’s election. But once again, it appears as though its shaky coalition of voters is already beginning to disintegrate on both the Left and in the centre.
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SubscribeWhat worries me is a scenario in which the Left manages to force Trump off the ballot in enough states that the Republican Party decides he’s not worth backing as a candidate, and consequently he runs as an independent, splitting the right-wing vote and letting Biden back into office. I don’t know how likely that is, though.
SCOTUS
That would be the best result for the longterm future of the GOP
On using the 14th Amendment to knock Trump off the ballot :
There were 2 amnesty laws related to the 14th Amendment Section 3, dated 1872 and 1898. It’s been successfully argued that both are still in force, barring any exclusion from running for office. There’s also an argument that the office of president is not included in the language of Section 3. Finally, 18 U.S.C. § 2383, the criminal federal statute outlawing insurrection, says conviction includes automatic exclusion from office under the 14th Amendment.
If Section 3 is used to exclude Trump from any ballot, then it can be used to exclude many Democrats from state ballots for supporting the Atifa/BLM insurrection of 2020. Lots of Red States have Democrats in cities who did this.
Trump supporters are far too complacent about the Presidential election – unbelievably, given the calibre of the incumbent, “Biden is six points ahead of Trump in a two-way national race”, and the Republicans failed to flip a single state in the 2022 mid-terms, despite rampant inflation and out of control immigration, both of which could be credibly blamed on the Biden administration. State level opinion polls for the Presidential election are notoriously unreliable, especially this far out, and the mainstream media, and the Fed, will move heaven and earth to help Biden’s re-election.
“and the mainstream media, and the Fed, will move heaven and earth to help Biden’s re-election.”
Too true. Driving home today I listened to ABC News where Janet Yellen, testifying before Congress about the state of the economy, asserted that the Biden administration had created the strongest economic rebound in living memory (or similarly hyperbolic words to that effect). She didn’t simply comment on the state of the economy, as would be appropriate for a supposedly politically-neutral bureaucrat, she gave all credit to the Biden administration.
Yes, it’s still a very long way too go and a lot could still change.
That said, both Trump and Biden are very well known quantities now, so there’s really nothing new for the public to discover about them. Which really just leaves them at the mercy of events.
There’s nothing the US media can do – though it won’t stop them. The harder they go after Trump, the more it validates him amongst his supporters. They never learn. They need a positive message that makes Trump irrelevant (the one thing he reall can’t stand). But they’re fixated on trying to take him down. Like Boris Johnson, he’s successfully dragged them down to his level.
Traditionally, supporters of candidates on either extreme were shy about declaring such a preference. But the midterms and other electoral evidence suggests that it is now the other way – moderates, especially among the Republicans, are keeping their own counsel, so Donald is showing more support than he will get.
But we are nine months away yet.
It’s an interesting point and there may be some truth to it.
But your final sentence seems to imply that the “shy Republicans” will actually vote Democrat.
But I can certainly believe there are shy Republicans around. On the other hand, I thought the pollsters were now able to adjust for these sort of effects.
Interestingly, the betting odds imply Trump has a 60% chance of winning today. And will lost the popular vote. And looking at the forecasts, Trump will have to win at least one of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin which can’t be a certainty.
And if Biden drops out, all bets are off.
All that is very true. And bookies tend to be more reliable than pollsters! If Biden goes, and Dean Phillips manages to seize the job at the Convention, that could produce a Democrat landslide.
This Quinnipiac poll is an outlier, even CNN polling suggests a narrow Trump win.
Yes. Sunday’s NBC poll was awful for Biden.
They need to start rigging the polling too. Otherwise the election results will look odd on the day…
It was an odd thing to write. Trump is currently 1.7% ahead of Biden in a match-up even given the Quinnipiac outlier.
In 2016 there were two significant 3rd party candidates, the other was the Libertarian candidate who won almost as many votes as Jill Biden. Ignoring the Libertarian candidate shows ignorance or bias. Add the Libertarian votes in 2016 to Trump and Stein’s to Hillary and Trump would still have won, though the electoral victory might have been smaller.
Nevertheless, RFK Jr is not leaving the field, he has a point to prove the Kennedy way. Treat me unfairly and I will make your life hell.
While unlikely, it’s possible that the total votes could be: Trump 1st, Kennedy 2nd, Biden 3rd. There is no obvious floor to far Biden can fall. Trump wins on every highly ranked voter issue, some by more than 30 points.
There is no doubt that Kennedy makes Trump look sane by comparison.
Lost me at Biden leading by 6 points.
That is flat out not true. That was one poll by Emerson and it was an outlier. The RCP average is Trump 2.4.
Everything after that makes me question the writer.
The polls are not true; they are the averaging of lies.
Not my own, alas; a politician
Trump loses in another landslide
I can’t wait to see what excuse the Dems come up with to explain why Biden will refuse to debate. All this will be solemnly supported by the regime media of course. Maybe CS can help us out with this.
If the Dems want to beat Trump then they need better candidates than geriatric Joe and Kamala. Even if voters think they could handle 4 more years of the former, the high likelihood they would end up with the latter for at least some of the time will drive those who could never vote for Trump to vote for someone else or not vote at all.
Let’s have Bernie Sanders run again. If we must have a crazy old man running the world, let’s at least have a nice one
Does it Matter.? Polling is an indication of the emptiness of political activity. The candidates are third-rate and the debates are nonexistent. Robert Bolt in his play A Man for All Seasons summed it up in a statement made by Henry VIII, “Most People will follow anything that moves” So, So True. That includes Taylor Swift.
Could we please stop all this obsessing about each new opinion poll until, say, mid-October?