One of the last things I wrote before the election was on how third parties tend to collapse before elections. It is something that has injected volatility late in elections before, and in retrospect I have should have taken it more seriously.
Anyway, here is the summary of how the late vote broke via Patrick Ruffiani.
Johnson and Stein held on to about half of their total vote (though this conflicts a little with the pre-election polling). Those who deserted Johnson broke for Trump by about 50-40, while those who deserted Stein broke 3-1 for Clinton.
About 36% of Johnson and Stein voters were undecided about the House races – perhaps suggesting that a good percentage of their voters were never reachable.
An interesting comparison on how that tracks to the House vote.
I always assumed that because the third party vote tended to be young that is would break for Clinton. It didn’t happen to nearly the extent I thought it would.
The Stein vote did break for Clinton. The Johnson vote broke for Trump. No big surprise. Greens are disaffected Democrats and Libertarians are disaffected Republicans. I’m just shocked that 20% voted for Clinton. maybe, like me, they couldn’t tell the difference between her and conventional Republicans.
Stein shed a larger proportion of her polling number than Johnson did and his numbers were more than twice that of Stein’s.
Not sure how helpful this presentation is because it makes the Johnson through undecided appear to be a substantial portion of the electorate. At 6% it was larger than in the last three presidential elections, but that’s partly because Johnson and Stein were better known this time around and Obama or Romney or Obama or McCain was an easier choice for more voters than Clinton or Trump. Still, Johnson, Stein, and McMullin weren’t strong alternatives.
I’m still very surprised that a substantial number of Johnson voters, no matter what their absolute number, broke for a Democrat. And what do we make of those Democrats who voted for Clinton and for the (R) Congressperson? Of course, in many CD’s there is only an (R) on the ballot, but then why vote for them? I do know some people who think you must vote for every office. Every election, the judges warn me that I have an undervote. They are shocked when I say I don’t vote for offices where I know nothing about the candidates. BTW, I try to find out. Minor offices often don’t even have a website or a newspaper endorsement or a Union endorsement. I discount Union endorsements that just list each and every Democrat, even corporate Dems. I’m not buying a pig in a poke, even before I Demexited.
Not surprising as all. Take away Johnson’s support for legalized marijuana and what’s left? Capitalist fundamentalism. It’s where the losers in the GOP/Dem capitalist system go to dream of their unrecognized superiority and where smart super-winners go to advance a no-tax policy.
This time around, Johnson became a placeholder for “not Trump and not Clinton.” With Stein under heavy attacks from HillaryCo, there was a natural and uninformed default to Johnson. Then they got a look at the guy. Sheesh — as ignorant as Trump.
WI – late Oct/Nov polls
HRC 44-48
DLT 39-43
Johnson 3-5
Stein <1-2
McMullin 1-2
other/DK 3-9
Actual
HRC 46.5
DLT 47.2
Johnson 3.6
Stein 1
McMullin 0.4
other 1.3
While tiny at 1.3%, “other” excluding Lib/GRN/McM was high. (Nationally it was 1.1%.)
We can’t know the proportion of DK that didn’t want to admit that they planed to vote for or leaned towards Trump couldn’t admit that they wouldn’t vote for the woman. Or if such a high number authentically made their choice in the last day/week. I suspect the former because generally “late deciders” prefer the expected winner over the expected loser.
In the end Stein basically doubled her vote from 12 – so a fair number of her voters had voted for her before and are completely unreachable I suspect.
Reachable by whom? Your comment reads as if you think Stein voters are ignorant and stupid for having ethics and morals that don’t allow them to compromise. Sadly, their numbers on the left side of the aisle were less than a third of those that couldn’t stomach voting for Trump. (But Democrats never tire of DFH punching.)
2012
Johnson 0.99%
Stein 0.36%
other 0.39%
2016
Johnson 3.27%
Stein 1.06%
McMullin 0.53%
other 1.07%
Looks to me as if the GOP left more votes on the table than Democrats did.
Unreachable by Democrats. I didn’t imply they were dumb – I said some would be unlikely to vote for any Democrat. They have reasons for voting the way they did, which depending on the state I have varying degrees of respect for. Voting for Stein in California is a very different thing than voting for them her in Wisconsin. I still they were pretty wrong voting for her in any state.
Totals of third party candidates on the left:
’96 680
’00 2.9 million
’04 119K
’08 161
’12 469
’16 1.455 million
So what percentage of the Stein vote could be won by a Democrat? I think some are protest votes in deep blue states and don’t matter much in the end.
The ’04 and ’08 totals are very low – and maybe those are the voters you never get.
I suspect the number is close to Stein’s total in 2012.
No question though that the Libertarians hurt the GOP more than the Green hurt the Dems.
In fact McMullin was close to playing a decisive role in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Trump won Michigan by 11K, and McMulling got 8K votes.
What do those numbers signify? According to uselectionatlas.org, greens got way more than that in those elections (e.g., Nader got 466K in 2004).
Whatever those numbers may signify, low vote counts might also reflect not being on the ballot. But it does look like Trump might have won more without any 3rd party candidates.
Sloppy presentation. Those are only the GRN votes. Nader ran as in independent in 2004.
It’s really quite meaningless unless the number of 3rd party “right” and “left” votes are presented side-by-side. And only meaningful if they are also presented for key states.
For example – 2000
Nationally – GOP margin -0.5%
Right:
Ref 0.43%
Lib 0.36%
Con 0.09%
NL 0.08%
total 0.96%
Left:
GRN 2.74%
Undefined 0.05% (includes the cranks)
New Hampshire GOP margin 1.27%
Ref – 0.46%
Lib – 0.48%
total 0.94%
GRN 3.7%
Undefined 0.29%
Florida GOP margin 0.01%
Ref 0.29%
Lib 0.28%
NL/C 0.06%
total 0.63%
GRN 1.64%
left 0.02%
Undefined 0.29%
So, where did Gore mess up, New Hampshire or Florida? And in this instance, when is the key.
I understood and respected 2000 GRN voters. Even as I supported Gore and gave him too big a pass for his VP choice. I might not have been as generous if I’d been a NH resident and seen that Democratic primary up close.
How much difference was there between the WJC and GHWB administrations? How many people recognized the GWB would be worse than GHWB? I may well have deluded myself into believing that Gore would be better than WJC. But frankly, if 2000 had more clearly been another WJC and WHWB contest, I too might have gone GRN.
If a candidate doesn’t earn the votes that she/he needs to win, that’s not the voters fault. Considering how low the bar is for a Democrat and Republican to earn votes, those that fall short aren’t even marginally decent candidates.
Why did DT work IA, CO, and WI? Other than those being potential swing states, because he lost the caucuses and primary. And unlike Clinton, he didn’t have the caucus/primary winner out there stumping for him.
Hillary, adding an exclamation point to her record, told the left that she didn’t need them. Well, until 11:55 when the standard brow-beat the DFHs began. I respect people that resist voting based on fear.
Coming from Vermont I have spent my political life around Nader types.
In 2000 there were conversations in the left press about strategic voting. If you were in a battleground state vote for Gore, if not vote for Nader. There is a singer I quite like – Ani Difranco – and I heard her talk about the Supreme Court and her dislike of Clinton. It was sophisticated, it was reality based. She lived in NY, she was voting for Nader. If she lived in Pennsylvania she was voting for Gore and she gave well thought out reasons for doing so.
I respect that. She was not an idiot, she had her view. She was aware elections had consequences.
I can in retrospect see an argument that the election of 2000 didn’t seem going in as consequential as it wound up being. The country was in pretty good shape in 2000, and both Gore and Bush were well liked. Clinton had certainly a complicated history with the left. Bush did not run a far right campaign.
It is forgotten now, but Gore actually moved left in his acceptance speech at the LA convention. I could make an argument the DLC decline actually began that night. The reaction in the Hall was better than it was for Clinton in Philadelphia. I remember a serious conversation afterward that Gore had ended the Party’s drift to the right. Al From was furious at the speech. This is forgotten in part because of extremely revisionist narratives about Lieberman (the pick moved Gore’s numbers and there is no doubt he helped in Broward and Dade).
The Clinton people knew they had a problem on their left pretty early in this race. They did attempt to make serious attempts to win Bernie people back: see the platform.
They just thought that running against Trump meant they couldn’t lose.
You know who else thought that: a lot of Democrats I have talked to at the two meetings I have been too.
I think the Stein people didn’t think Clinton could lose either.
Because unlike 2000 I think people very well understood what Trump was.
It is forgotten now, but Gore actually moved left in his acceptance speech at the LA convention.
Not forgotten by me. Nor forgotten that Clinton was furious with Gore for doing that. And while inconsistent with Gore’s political record, it was consistent with his family’s political roots.
Part of why the stakes seemed low in 2000 is that the effects of the Clinton supported policies had yet to mature and the ’90s good times were a function of low/stable oil prices (and a big boost to Detroit for high profit gas guzzlers), the tech sector finally kicking into the general economy, no high dollar foreign adventures, and businesses growing from mergers/consolidations and only beginning to offshore jobs. But all the bad seeds had been planted and were sprouting.
Everybody thought Clinton would win. Not because she was a good candidate with a good record, but because Trump appeared more dreadful than any nominee in living memory. More ridiculous looking and sounding, but not sure I agree that he was more dreadful than Reagan and GWB. It didn’t take much to recognize that Reagan was cognitively impaired and GWB is an idiot. While I don’t understand why any voter chooses based on “likeability,” I recognize that they do. In the abstract and in the public arena, not many politicians possess a high likeability quotient. It usually plays out comparatively.
FDR had it (and that was without the benefit of video). Ike may have as well. And it zings when it’s operational in both the public and private arena. Had it been as high for JFK as Democrats have convinced themselves, he would have received 50+% of the vote. Factoring in his handicap, I’d say that Obama has a higher likeability quotient than any presidential candidate since at least Ike.
In the public arena, this is one quality that GWB had over his father. Hillary is more like Nixon and GHWB; a backroom operator. Public likeability isn’t high for Trump either and he has virtually zilch in the private arena. It’s not so much that Trump is dangerous, it’s the far right wing Congress combined with a nincompoop that believes he’s a great dealmaker that’s the danger. What spared this country from the excesses of the “Reagan revolution” was the solid Democratic majority in the House and in his last two years the Senate.
If insider/power-broker Republicans had really cared about the WH as much as their voters do, they would have fielded and built up a couple of solid candidates for ’16. Why bother when they know how to get as much as is good for them from a Clinton. Let the Democrats continue to put all their eggs in the WH basket as they’ve done since ’08. Sanders scared them, but nominating a loser like Trump was okay with them. Now they’re stuck having to figure out which is worse for them, Trump or Pence. Both really can destroy the party when an opposition emerges. So far, that don’t have to worry about that.
Eh, forgotten by me, all that (save the Al-Tipper Kiss). 2000 was setting up already to be at least a minor change year after 8 years of Clinton and crazy scandalmongering, so W had that going for him. He also had the MSM in his pocket, while Gore, with a still getting started internet and no progosphere yet in existence, had a pitifully weak media support base, and the left media (such as it barely was back then) divided badly.
Recall the many personal attacks on Gore — he was Mr Smarty Pants Perfesser, vicious political infighter (The Atlantic), corrupt Buddhist Temple money-grubber, and slick political artist willing to say whatever was needed. All that by contrast with the Compassionate Conservative Bush who was “comfortable in his own skin” and someone, unlike the wine-sipping elitist Gore, who you could have a beer with. Etc.
The MSM pounded daily on Gore to remind people that Bush was a normal, good guy, like they were. The public was heavily propagandized to hate Gore and sidle up to the bar with Bush. Et voila — likeability made it to the top of “issues” central to that awful election year, and thus W won with these voters because they were told on a daily basis that Who Would You Rather Have a Beer With? was an important question.
Both JFK and FDR exuded charm, U-class style and a positive attitude (the latter definitely in contrast to their dull, dark and negative opponents) as opposed to strict “likeability.” 1932 was obviously a major Change year, and FDR could have just phoned it in and won easily. As I Like Ike was rather liked, 1960 was not such an obvious change year, and Kennedy had to work hard for it with a theme of Getting the Country Moving Again.
But his Catholicism was a major handicap back then — the U of Michigan post-election study showed he lost millions of Dem votes from Ike-voting Protestant Dems who failed to return to the fold.
As family patriarch Joe Kennedy said after the votes were in, If my son had been born Presbyterian, he would have won in a landslide. Charm or likability wasn’t strong enough to overcome deeply-felt religious bigotry.
Not so much cognitively impaired in 1980 as intellectually lazy, not appreciatively different than in his younger years as CA gov, similar to W in that sense. People liked RR because he was charming and positive with his Hollywood smile and exuded simplistic confidence, and wasn’t the grim, uptight moral scold that Jimmy was.
This is a response to both of your comments. I don’t necessarily disagree with what you’ve said. What we should remain mindful of is that every presidential election is multi-factorial and abstracted a couple of factors from one can easily distort the operational matrix in any one election. However, abstracting a couple to compare and contrast those specific factors across many elections can be illuminating.
I can’t pretend to assess the likeable quality of JFK in the 1960 election. Only those that were born around 1960 and were politically conscious in 1960 could possibly accurately assess that, but even they, like the rest of us today see JFK the myth and post 1960 election. My point is not that likeability in the abstract (LQ) alone wins elections but it does give a candidate an advantage. How much depends on the LQ of the opponent. Nixon’s LQ was low. I’d say lower than Romney’s (but not as low as Cruz’s), but even if one sets Romney’s and Nixon’s LQ at the same level, it can’t be overlooked that the high LQ and black man Obama received a majority of the vote. The Protestant Dem loss for JFK may not have been a net loss as Catholics were energized and even then there were Republican Catholics. Print media (more important back then) was evenly enough divided between the two, but TV most definitely favored JFK.
In 2000 the media pounded Gore for sport. It still stands out for me as the worst coverage for any D or R candidate for possibly a hundred years. Yet, somehow and with a mistake filled campaign (GWB’s by contrast was almost flawless), a majority managed to see through to the basic decency of the man. The enthusiasm for Gore among the AA community broke late in the race, but it was very real.
Reagan was a TV salesman or pitch man, but in his early political career, he wasn’t indifferent to policy and in broad terms studied and knew it. My point was that cognitively there was a huge difference between Reagan ’64-’70 and Reagan ’80 and it had nothing to do with laziness. He wasn’t all there in ’80 and he was progressively less there as the years went on.
Yes, Carter was all the things you cited, but in the end it probably hinged on whether or not he managed to get the hostages released. I don’t have much empathy for him on that (even if team Reagan worked a deal with the Iranians) because it would never have come to that if he hadn’t overthrown Vance in favor of Z-Big (another FP plight on US policy). (Throwing Anderson in the race as a fake liberal for discouraged liberals was a nasty but clever GOP trick. Didn’t change the outcome but did distort the final national popular vote percentages.)
I’d modify the charge that it’s Republicans that like and reward a tough guy authoritarian. What a majority prefers is a candidate that stands tall and doesn’t wimp out. They like clear and dislike mushy or parsed into meaningless. In general, they only like combative when it’s in the interest of good public policies and dislike it when the beneficiary is only the candidate or his special interest donors. Perot is a good example for the former.
Honest and close enough to middle class Bernie took a real hit when he couldn’t produce his tax returns. I could argue that there’s not enough there to be concerned about, but I knew that this was the hit he couldn’t survive and it still infuriates me that he didn’t take care of that before entering the race. So, why didn’t it take Trump down? First, it was the Democratic primary electorate and not the general electorate that Bernie was facing. Second, the tax return issue had been close to exhausted for the general electorate in the three prior elections. Kerry, McCain, and Romney had fudged on it and it hadn’t played much, if any, role in the general election. Romney could spout that he’d earned his wealth in business, but he wasn’t running against an incredibly wealthy man that had earned his wealth from giving speeches. Trump had an advantage over Mitt because he could tout that he had built things and that created jobs; whereas, Romney had destroyed businesses and jobs. Against a “Mr/Ms Clean” that didn’t talk down to the electorate and was committed to good public policies and Trump couldn’t have gotten away with hiding his tax returns.
(side note: A version of that last sentence appears to be controversial around here, but I don’t feel any need to defend it and therefore, am ignoring the controversy.)
I thought Trump didn’t release his tax returns?
He didn’t. Nor did Kerry and McCain’s wealthy wives and Romney only released his latest tax return that was prepared with an eye towards his second presidential run. At an emotional or kneejerk level, that blunted this as a general election issue.
Had Bernie been the Democratic nominee, his tax returns wouldn’t have been an issue in a general election against a Republican like Trump. Against a Republican that had issued his/her returns for the prior ten years, it would have been an issue because most people have short memories and are hypocrites.
It didn’t help tRump not to release his tax returns. May have hurt him but that can’t be measured and known. What we can know is that the Clinton Foundation handed him the means to blunt the issue. Had there been no CF or had it been fully transparent and not collecting fat checks from dodgy and/or wealthy dictators and monarchs and wealthy people with a primary loyalty to a country other than the US, it would have been far more difficult for tRump to dodge the tax return release issue.
When the winning margins are so small, every little bit can help or hurt. The Clintons may have mastered the art of selling access for personal profit and stature, but that doesn’t that voters can’t see it and for a small number, it’s totally unacceptable.
Citing the famous Sorensen book Kennedy on the election study, the author relates that Kennedy did in fact suffer a net loss of Protestant Dems failing to return to the D fold as would be expected, and his increased Catholic vote among Dems (Catholic R’s tended to stick with the R candidate) was not significant enough to offset loss of Ps. Voting results from 1948 with protestant Truman and 1958 cong’l election results by religion showed similar 3-1 results as obtained by Kennedy; in 64 , JFK’s successor, the protestant Texan, also received about the same proportion of Catholic votes (p. 217-8 hardcover edition)
Tv did have an impact for JFK, the debates for sure. Re print, I haven’t seen any study, but then most newspaper owners were conservative and R, reflexively, and I seem to recall a figure of 80% of newspaper endorsements going for Nixon. (But it’s a Sunday morning, I’m just waking up, and have already lost an hour, so I’ll maybe look this up later.)
Yep, just awful. Maybe only the Goldwater media coverage in 64 could be considered as bad. But a lot of that was self-inflicted — the perceived extremist (for the time) convention speech, and BG’s rhetoric about tossing a nuke into the Kremlin. By contrast in 2000, the media just made stuff up, or greatly misrepresented or exaggerated things wrt Gore. And like 2016, far too many lefties just assumed all that wouldn’t matter because our country couldn’t possibly elect an obvious nitwit like W.
I seem to recall a figure of 80% of newspaper endorsements going for Nixon.
If true, the relevant numbers would have been a) the number of traditionally Democratic newspapers that crossed over to endorse Nixon and b) the weight traditionally GOP newspaper endorsements carried with Democratic leaning readers. In general back then readers were more hip to the partisanship of the various local rags. Perhaps I under-rate Nixon’s LQ in real time (my bias?), but I note that you haven’t challenged that. The concerns within JFK’s team for his re-election and the 1960 numbers simply don’t support your position that JFK’s LQ was anything close to what you claim. And I’m not buying that anti-Catholic prejudice was more prevalent in 1960 than anti-AA prejudice in 2008 and thus undermined JFK’s LQ more than it did Obama’s.
Goldwater earned the coverage that he got. McGovern and Gore didn’t. Nixon’s (’68) was fair to more than fair (’72). Reagan’s (’84) and GWB’s (’00) were exceedingly generous. It’s rare in presidential elections for both the D and R nominees to get fair coverage, but that doesn’t mean that one gets unfairly negative coverage while the other gets unfairly positive coverage. One can be fair and the other candidate can get unfairly negative or unfairly positive coverage. I guess what I’m pointing out is that the unfair coverage divide in 2000 was extreme. Compared with 2004 when Kerry’s coverage was fair to slightly negative unfair and GWB’s was moderately positive unfair. Begs that question of why Gore did better than Kerry, but incumbent advantage may be the answer.
The 2016 media coverage will be one for researchers and writers to ponder for decades. Trump received a lot more screen time than the other candidates, but it was overwhelmingly negative (fair to not fairly negative enough). OTOH, the more coverage Hillary got (regardless if it was fair or biased in her favor), the worse she did. Trump didn’t do well enough to conclude that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. People do tend to prefer old soft shoes and new, fresh, and young. Don’t know that either as an advantage over the other because both don’t seem to be on offer in a single election.
Way over a rational line bashing lefties for the 2000 election outcome. First, technically Gore won. Second, voter turnout in both parties was low. The focus on the tiny proportion of committed lefties that decline to vote for a Democrat hostile to socialism and pro-war must be an “occupational hazard” of Democrats. Maybe the tens of millions of eligible voters that decline to vote at all would never turn out if an attractive and articulate Democratic socialist were nominated. Karl Rove fantasizes that there are tens of millions of non-voters just waiting for an extreme right wing candidate to appear. So far, with each shift right by the GOP nominee, Rove’s millions haven’t materialized. However, at least six million additional voters showed up in 2008 when rhetorically Obama sounded vaguely like a FDR Democrat.
Except for his reasonable, sane positions on Russia and Nato (still a puzzle why he was right on only those things), actually he was and is more dreadful than any nominee in living memory. Well, right on another thing: as he boasted, he could shoot someone in Times Square and get away with it.
How many times after Reagan 1966 and 1980 and GWB do the Dems have to learn the lesson that the GOP actually likes and prefers strong man, simplistic authoritarian types with a certain machismo or bravado style? Had the Constitution been amended a while back, Arnold the Gropenator would have run and won in 2000 or 2008 or 2016. And he would have won even if the public had the information on his poking the maid and producing out-of-wedlock children in front of Maria.
And THAT is what he is pounded for daily by Democrats frothing to revive the Cold war. Just look at the Front Page here.
Yeah, most days the front page resembles what one sees daily at Kos, just constant anti-Putin/Russia hysteria, as if Samantha Power or Victoria Nuland were running the show. Very strange how libs and progs are wrapping themselves tightly around unsubstantiated stories from people we normally consider untrustworthy spooks. The world is a bit upside down at the moment, and not in a good way.
Strategic voting. i.e. vote Green if it doesn’t matter, vote (D) if it does. I heard this crap and I just shake my head. If it doesn’t matter how can it have an effect. Of course, now that the (D) annointed one has lost, apparently it doesn’t matter at all, because they are blaming the voter not the candidate. sort of like Sears blaming the customers for not buying their merchandise instead of looking at the purchasing managers and asking them why they aren’t stocking what the customers want. The (D) party will ends like Sears.
The (R) party is e-bay.
Pathetic isn’t it? Bad enough that all but a small fraction of voters went ahead and voted for the lesser evil as they saw it. And the two parties can keep going with the lesser evilism routine as long as there is no third party candidate that is viable and a plurality wants to vote FOR. 90% of the electorate could opt out and as long as a D or an R wins, “they” aren’t going to change.
Thanks for this work.
I think that shaming third-party voters rarely herds them into the party from which they are disaffected.
And the data increasingly shows that wins and losses are mostly the successes and failures of the parties and candidates themselves, not some blameable group.
This data also shows how wide of the mark polls of intent actually turn out to be in different historic circumstances. The 2016 election seems to have a lot of voter’s uncertainty in it that allow a few compounded random circumstances to flip the electoral college to Trump.
I’m not sure how to read the Congressional data. It seems that a party that ran a guy named “Undecided” could do very well.
I was curious what they actually did.
As I said there is a segment that will not vote for Democrats in any circumstance and there are some that may or may not. The latter group are interesting and need to be understood.
I don’t think the Stein group is very large. It is easy to get frustrated with them in a close election. But they weren’t why we lost.