A Guide to Voting Third Party in 2016
I want to vote third party. Should I?
I’ll respond to your question with a question: is Donald Trump down more than ten points in your state?
I can’t tell you what to do, but I can explain why the state you live in is the most important consideration here. We don’t have a popular voting system. We have the electoral college.
The electoral college is a ridiculous, outdated concept that gives disproportionate power to states with low populations. A vote in Wyoming, for example, is worth roughly four times what a vote in New York is worth. Clearly, this is not good, but it’s the system we have.
It takes 270 electoral votes to win the Presidential election. If no candidate gets 270 votes, the House of Representatives gets to decide who wins. With the exceptions of Nebraska and Maine, states are winner-takes-all, so whoever gets the most votes in each state gets all of that state’s electoral votes.
If you live in a state like New York or California, there’s basically no chance Donald Trump is going to win. If you live in a state like Alabama or Mississippi, there’s basically no chance Hillary Clinton is going to win. If you live in those kind of states, it’s not a waste to vote third party. If you live in a swing state–a group which is expanding this election thanks to how disliked Trump is–that’s when it becomes an issue.
But you’ve said before to vote with your conscious!
I have. Especially because the biggest practical/historical argument against third parties is the 2000 election, where Al Gore lost Florida by 537 votes, significantly fewer than were cast for Ralph Nader–an argument which ignores that more than 537 Democrats voted for Bush and that nearly 60,000 black voters (a group that typically votes 90%+ Democrat) were unjustly disenfranchised for having similar names to felons.
But! the fact that the particular case used to dissuade third-party voting is a bad example doesn’t change the fact that third parties can act as spoilers in close races. If Clinton and Trump’s poll numbers stay steady, Jill Stein and Gary Johnson could get a combined 15% straight out of Clinton’s numbers in New York come November and she’d still win. But in Ohio or Pennsylvania, for example, it could change the outcome of the race.
This is also an unprecedented election, where the Republican choice isn’t just pushing bad policy, but is pushing fascism. All of Hillary Clinton’s faults, and there are many, could not possibly add up to being anywhere near what Trump stands to bring to this country.
A third party candidate is extremely unlikely to win, and since we’re staring down the barrel of fascism, taking a risk with that vote doesn’t make sense if you’re not as close to absolutely certain as you can be that you’re not inadvertently helping the fascist win.
Okay, so if they can’t win, why would I bother to vote third party even if I don’t live in a swing state?
Parties that get 5% of the popular vote get federal funding. If you want to help a third party grow enough to unseat one of the two current major parties–something that hasn’t happened since the Republicans replaced the Whigs in the mid-1800s–this is an important step.
If you’re in a state where your vote almost certainly won’t change anything regardless, you may decide that the benefits of helping a party you prefer to the majors gain some traction outweigh the risk of enough others doing the same to lose your state for the better major candidate. In that way, there is strategy in voting third party–again, if and only if you’re in a non-swing state.
What third party candidate should I vote for if I decide to do so?
There are a ton of choices, but the two that are even a blip on the polls and will be on most or all states’ ballots come November are Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson and Green nominee Jill Stein.
Gary Johnson is way more moderate than most Libertarians. He supports a universal basic income, is pro-choice, is for immigration reform that includes easier pathways to citizenship and other positive measures, is pro-LGBT rights, etc. Unfortunately, he’s also for private prisons, a regressive 20% flat federal sales tax to replace income tax, the abolishment of the Department of Education and other federal institutions, the further deregulation of corporations and the financial sector, and so on. He’s better than Trump, but a significant portion of his economic platform would be downright destructive to the working class and marginalized groups.
Jill Stein is being pushed as the candidate for Bernie Sanders supporters who don’t want to follow their chosen candidate in supporting Hillary Clinton in November. She has mostly good policies, and has fought some of the problematic planks of her party’s platform, but she still has some out-there views that could be an issue (e.g. that wifi should be banned from schools because it’s harmful radiation). She is the most progressive candidate with any remotely major support, but she’s also polling fourth of the four major and semi-major candidates. It’s also worth considering whether or not minor-but-crucial victories in this cycle incentivize the Green Party to keep the problematic parts of their platform intact rather than adjusting to gain support next time.
There’s no perfect choice in this election. But when you’re deciding what to do this November, remember that your state will almost certainly go to Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump and consider how much effect your vote could potentially have on which one gets it.
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