Among all the reasons Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in 2020 but Hillary Clinton didn’t four years earlier, one looms especially large for the coming presidential election: the share of the third-party vote.
In 2016, 6% of all voters cast ballots for third-party and write-in candidates, with Libertarian Gary Johnson getting more than 3% of the national vote and Green Party nominee Jill Stein capturing more than 1%.
But in 2020, that proportion fell to 2%.
The difference effectively changed the threshold the major candidates needed to reach to win key battleground states — from 47% and 48% in 2016 to 49% and 50% in 2020.
That, Democrats say, made it easier for Trump to win in ’16 but not in ’20. And the numbers illustrate why Democratic groups — eyeing a possible, if not likely, rematch between Biden and Trump — want to keep the third-party vote share as small as possible, including moving to keep the well-financed third-party group No Labels off the ballot in battleground states.
Comparing the results from 2016 and 2020, what stands out is that Trump’s vote share (nationally, in key battleground states and in key counties) stayed virtually the same — even as he won one election and lost another. What changed is that Biden grew the Democratic Party vote share by 2 to 3 points across the board, while the protest vote for other candidates dropped.
Take battleground Pennsylvania, for example: Trump defeated Clinton in the state in 2016, 48.2% to 47.5%. But as the third-party vote declined in 2020, Biden won it, 49.9% to 48.7%.
The same situation played out in Wisconsin. Trump captured the battleground state in 2016, 47.2% to 46.5%. But in 2020, it was Biden 49.5%, Trump 48.8%.
Another way to look at the third-party effect: The 2020 NBC News Exit Poll found 5% of national voters saying they cast ballots for third-party candidates in 2016, and those voters broke for Biden over Trump by more than a 2-to-1 ratio.
That was in an election in which Biden beat Trump by just 20,000 votes in Wisconsin and by about 10,000 votes in Arizona and Georgia.
“There is no doubt at all that Stein and Johnson cost Clinton the election in 2016, and a credible third-party vote could do the same to Biden in 2024,” said Matt Bennett, the executive vice president of public affairs at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group opposing No Labels’ effort to enter next year’s presidential contest.
But No Labels and other third-party groups say there should be more choices for voters, especially when polls show supermajorities don’t want either Biden or Trump to run.
“Two-thirds of the public doesn’t want the election we’re probably going to get,” said Ryan Clancy, No Labels’ chief strategist.
It all raises important questions for the 2024 presidential election: Will the size of the third-party vote be closer to 2016’s? Will it look more like 2020’s? And could that affect the outcome of another presidential election?
‘Either you’re for democracy or not’
The strategists behind No Labels believe there is a hunger for an alternative to Biden and Trump, and they’re spending $70 million to launch an independent unity ticket (featuring a Democrat and a Republican) that could have ballot access in all 50 states — and that could win, they say.
Getting a non-major-party candidate on the ballot can be complicated, time-consuming and expensive. But the group already has ballot access in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado and Oregon.
According to a poll No Labels commissioned and released in March, 59% of registered voters nationwide said they would consider voting for a moderate independent candidate if the choices were Biden and Trump, including more than half of Democrats and Republicans, as well as 7 in 10 independents.
What’s more, the No Labels poll found that in a three-person race, an unnamed moderate independent candidate gets support from 20% of all voters, compared with 33% for Trump and 28% for Biden.
No Labels’ leaders stress that if they don’t have a path to victory, they ultimately won’t put forward a 2024 ticket.
They also dismiss complaints that their third-party bid would disproportionately take votes away from the Democratic ticket, saying their own polling showed an equal share of Democrats and Republicans supporting an unnamed moderate independent candidate over Biden and Trump.
“To sit where we are and say we know exactly how an independent ticket would impact a race, it’s cherry-picking,” said Clancy of No Labels.
Democrats disagree, pointing to No Labels’ own survey, which showed Trump’s lead over Biden increasing from 1 point in a two-person contest to 5 points when it included that moderate independent candidate.
And No Labels’ strategists decry Democratic efforts to knock it off the ballot, such as in Arizona, where the state Democratic Party has sued to deny it ballot access.
Clancy said Democrats portray themselves as “protectors of democracy,” but he argued that efforts to keep No Labels off the ballot — and limit the presidential choices to just two parties — runs contrary to democracy.
“Either you’re for democracy or not,” Clancy said.
‘This is one of the easiest ways for Donald Trump to become president’
Democrats opposed to No Labels argue that the third-party group has no chance of winning in 2024.
“No third-party candidate has ever come remotely close to winning, including Theodore Roosevelt, running on a Progressive Party ticket just four years after leaving office as an enormously popular Republican president,” wrote leaders of Democratic groups from the centrist Third Way to the more left-leaning MoveOn.
Instead, they believe a No Labels ticket poses a real danger to Democrats — given the razor-thin margins of today’s elections and the record of what happened in 2016.
“I think this is absolutely one of the easiest ways for Donald Trump to become president,” said Navin Nayak, the president of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, another Democratic-leaning group opposing No Labels. Nayak also worked on Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
(That having been said, third-party candidates — especially from the Libertarian Party — have helped past Democratic campaigns. When Biden won all-important Wisconsin in 2020 by 20,000 votes, the Libertarian nominee got nearly 40,000 votes.)
Despite polls showing dissatisfaction with Biden and Trump as the nation’s two choices in 2024, Nayak believes the third-party vote next year will look more like it did in 2020 (when it was at 2%) than in 2016 (when it was 6%).
One reason is that Biden, even stuck with relatively poor approval ratings, doesn’t produce the same level of voter opposition Clinton did in 2016.
Another is that fewer Americans, Nayak said, are willing to roll the dice with Trump now than they were before he became president.
“I think a lot of people thought they were casting a non-consequential third-party vote in 2016,” he said.
But No Labels isn’t the only third-party group that could be on the ballot next year.
Richard Winger, the editor of Ballot Access News and an expert on third-party politics in the U.S., expects the Libertarian Party to be on the ballot in most states, and he expects the Green Party to qualify in about half the country.
But he said it’s impossible to estimate — at least at this early stage — how big the third-party vote will be in next year’s election.
“It’s really impossible to predict,” Winger said. “There’s so much time, and so many things could happen.”
