Does Gary Johnson Have a Chance of Affecting Trump’s Election Chances?

With the extreme name-calling, cheating scandals, ongoing FBI investigations, attempts at discrediting and all-around nastiness of the ongoing presidential campaign, a healthy portion of voters — particularly young millennials — have given up on the idea of favoring either of the two major-party candidates and have decided that they’ll support one of the third-party candidates who are also running.

In this election, there are three main third-party candidates that have received enough visibility to score in the low (likely single-digit) percentage points on Election Day. Those candidates are Evan McMullin of the Better for America Party, Jill Stein of the Green Party and Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party. McMullin is a former clandestine operative of the CIA, while Jill Stein is an environmental activist and a medical doctor and Gary Johnson is the former governor of New Mexico.

At this point, Johnson is by far the most popular third-party candidate. Perhaps because he appeals to a certain strain of former Tea Party activists or perhaps because he attracts those Alt-Right Republicans, Johnson has managed to garner as much as 24 percent of voters’ support in early pre-election polls in states like his former home of New Mexico.

But averaged nationally, Johnson’s support is no higher than 5 percent, which, perhaps uncoincidentally, is lower than the 15 percent threshold needed to participate in presidential debates — the main reason why the three recent general election debates featured just Trump and Clinton.

Third-party candidates have featured in American elections every so often, with figures as diverse as Teddy Roosevelt or John Anderson threatening to take away enough of a percentage of one or both major-party candidates’ support as to affect the outcome of the race.

Certainly, there are those who would argue that Ralph Nader did just that in the 2000 contest, enabling Republican George W. Bush to enter the White House instead of Democrat Al Gore. Famously, in 1992, Ross Perot scored as high as 39 percent in national polls for a brief time, besting both Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush before he flamed out through a combination of political nitpicking and paranoia.

In this presidential race, the unfavorability ratings of both Trump and Clinton have been high enough that third-party candidates — traditionally viewed as extremely marginal personalities with no chance of winning — actually may have an opportunity to significantly cut into the vote shares of both Democrats and Republicans.

In this election it’s Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson who poses the biggest threat to electing Republican Donald Trump — much larger than the risk that ultra-liberal Green Party candidate Jill Stein poses to Democrat Party nominee Hillary Clinton.

Although Johnson has no serious shot of winning the election, he does have a chance to affect Trump’s chances in specific states, such as Maine, Arizona and Iowa, at least in terms of the popular vote. In the election of 1992, Ross Perot received nearly 20 percent of the popular total, but no electoral votes, making his candidacy more of a protest vote than anything else.

Whether Johnson could actually capture a single electoral vote himself is debatable, but if he’s able to, it would be detrimental to Trump, who’s going to need all of the electoral votes he can muster to reach the critical 270 level that it takes to win the election, particularly in the face of a nonstop media barrage and the possibility of rigged voting machines.

One positive for Trump is that Johnson has committed several major gaffes in recent months, such as professing a lack of knowledge about geography and world events. Johnson claimed not to know what or where Aleppo, Syria was, turning off a sizable number of potential voters.

When pressed by an interviewer, he could not name a single world leader outside the United States who he admires, and he’s professed a desire to pass the Transpacific Partnership (TPP) agreement that would further erode American jobs, making him the sole candidate of the five mentioned thus far who has publicly supported the unpopular pact.

Recently, Johnson’s vice-presidential running mate, Massachusetts ex-Governor Bill Weld, took it upon himself to lash out at Donald Trump, saying that he would be happy if the Libertarian candidates cut into Trump’s vote share, even if they have no shot at winning. “I have had in mind all along trying to get The Donald into third place, and with some tugging and hauling, we might get there,” Weld told the Boston Globe.

This makes the Libertarian campaign highly suspect, and the more one looks at Johnson’s prominent supporters (many of whom are drawn from the conservative #NeverTrump movement), the more his candidacy almost seems designed specifically to reduce Trump’s chances of winning (although some commentators have said Johnson and Weld may affect Clinton’s campaign more).

Given Johnson’s faults, however, combined with his low visibility and fairly poor charisma, it seems unlikely that the Libertarian Party will place that highly in the general election.

Their platform does not seem to be designed particularly well to appeal to millennial voters who might have otherwise voted for, for example, primary Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, nor does it seem like Johnson would even attract conservatives who might otherwise consider supporting Hillary Clinton.

For his part, Bernie Sanders has been warning his former supporters away from Johnson and away from third-party candidates in general, in favor of supporting Clinton. “I would say to those people out there who are thinking of the protest vote — think about what the country looks like and whether you’re comfortable with four years of a Trump presidency,” said Sanders on MSNBC.

But it’s unclear how many Sanders followers will get the message and/or how many will actually stay away from Trump. At this point in time, Sanders is no longer a candidate, and Trump is the political outsider with the greatest chance of winning the election.

~American Liberty Report


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