Third-party candidates giveth and taketh away from the Clintons, it seems. While political scientists have debated whether Ross Perot handed Bill Clinton the election in 1992, there’s no doubt that third-party candidates played an outsized role Tuesday night. Millions of Americans, dissatisfied with both candidates and unwilling to choose between the lesser of two evils, registered their protest by voting for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein, helping hand a number of critical swing states, and the presidency, to Donald Trump. For those who hoped to see Hillary Clinton back in the White House, the recriminations were swift. “Fuck Gary Johnson,” read a headline on Jezebel. “Oh, And Fuck Jill Stein Too.”
There are a number of reasons why Hillary Clinton lost the election. Latino voters didn’t turn out in sufficient numbers. Neither did African-Americans. She lost white men, and couldn’t win over white women. By just about every measure, Clinton underperformed Obama. At the end of the day, it wasn’t that Trump benefited from a surge of resentful white voters; it was that Democrats who voted in 2012 stayed home.
But it is also undeniable that third-party voters cost Clinton the election, too. Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate, won 3 percent of the popular vote and over four million votes—many of them in close states that could have swung the election for Clinton. Johnson won 25,000 votes in New Hampshire, for instance, where Clinton lost by just 4,000. Stein, the Green Party candidate who ran to the left of both Clinton and Bernie Sanders, played spoiler in Michigan, receiving 51,444 votes in a race where Clinton lost by 12,686. Stein also received about 1 percent of the vote in Wisconsin, potentially enough to have tipped the state to Clinton.
Several outlets had some fun imagining the scenarios in which the absence of a third-party candidate would have paved the way for a Clinton win: Combining Stein’s supporters plus half of Johnson’s would have put Clinton over the line in Pennsylvania and Florida, for example. But like every third-party spoiler—remember Ralph Nader?—neither of the also-rans are accepting any responsibility for having tilted the election to Trump. A Johnson aide told TMZ that Clinton’s supporters were “fundamentally flawed” in their thinking, while Stein told ABC that a poll found that 55 percent of her followers would have stayed home and only 25 percent would have voted for Clinton.
It’s impossible to know whether the millions of third-party voters wouldn’t have voted at all, if they had only Clinton and Trump to choose from, or whether they would have grudgingly given their vote to the less offensive of the two. Among those who thought a Clinton victory was too assured for their vote to matter, many may now be wishing for a do-over.
