There’s good news and bad news for both the #NeverHillary and #NeverTrump camps. The bad news is that there’s really not enough of them to start a strong third party capable of winning the White House. The good news is that their efforts to derail the mainstream candidates makes this election a very close race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
A new Public Policy Polling report released on Tuesday showed the numbers were tightening in a four-way race between Trump, Clinton, Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson, and Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein.
Clinton leads the pack with 42 percent, followed by Trump with 38 percent, Johnson has 4 percent, and Stein has 2 percent.
Those are significant gains for both the Libertarian and Green Party candidates who received 1 percent and .36 percent in 2012, respectively. If these numbers hold, Johnson and Stein could be looking at amassing a combined 7 million votes in the general, the largest number for third-party candidates since 1996.
Their largest share of the vote comes from disenfranchised independents, 15 percent of whom support either the Green Party or the Libertarian Party.
They still don’t have a chance at actually winning the presidency, but they make the race more competitive for Trump and Clinton. In a two-way race, the Democratic front-runner dominates the presumed Republican nominee, but all four candidates running puts the result within the margin of error.
Trump wins Republicans and independents and receives more crossover support from Democrats than Clinton does with disenfranchised members of the GOP.
With third-party candidates performing so well, many potential swing states could go either way. It could be 2000 again without the hanging chads.
