Joe Biden continues to gain voters around the edges in addition to HIS base, while Donald Trump is just pitching to his faithful base voters….
Added to this group are Republicans that are quietly slipping away from a guy who took over their party…
While some Republicans do Not care what Trump does?
So do…
And they are telling pollsters they will vote for Joe Biden….
In Florida in 2016, J.C. Planas, a former Republican state representative, was uncomfortable with Hillary Clinton but detested Donald Trump, so he wrote in former Gov. Jeb Bush for president.
In New Hampshire that year, Peter J. Spaulding, a longtime Republican official, supported the Libertarian ticket.
And in Arizona, Lorena Burns, 56, also voted third party, seeing the choice between Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton as a contest between “two bads.”
“I didn’t want to be responsible for either,” she said.
This year, all three of them intend to diverge from their Republican leanings and vote for former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee. They are among an emerging group of voters who disliked both major-party presidential nominees in 2016, but who are now so disillusioned with President Trump — and sufficiently comfortable with Mr. Biden — that they are increasingly willing to support the Democrat.
It’s a dynamic that could have significant implications in several of the most competitive battleground states, like Arizona and Wisconsin, where the third-party vote in 2016 was greater than the margin of difference between Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton. Recent polling also shows that Mr. Biden has an overwhelming advantageover Mr. Trump among voters who have unfavorable views of both candidates — a cohort that ultimately broke in Mr. Trump’s favor in 2016, exit polls showed.
Ms. Burns of Guadalupe, Ariz., said she recently made her first political donation, to the Democratic National Committee. She said she agreed with many of Mr. Trump’s policies, but was turned off by his behavior. “Just the lying, just the craziness, the bullying — I’d rather pay more money than be with him for another four years,” she said. “I’m willing to pay more money in taxes just to be away from him. He’s corrupting the country.”
In Ms. Burns’s state of Arizona, Mr. Trump won by 3.5 percentage points in 2016. The Libertarian Party nominee, Gary Johnson, won 4.1 percent of the vote, and in other states where the race was even closer — including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida — he pulled in between 2 and 4 percent. The Green Party candidate Jill Stein took in roughly 1 percent in those states — small but significant totals in contests that were decided by slim margins.
In any single poll, it is difficult for pollsters to reach a significant number of voters who supported third-party candidates in 2016, making it impossible to trace their preferences now. And Mr. Trump — who faced vocal opposition that year from some prominent Republicans and won anyway — remains overwhelmingly popular with Republican voters. While many center-right voters have distanced themselves from his party, there are others who initially expressed misgivings about him and have since come to embrace him, resistant to the leftward drift of the Democratic Party.
But in a year when swing voters are scarce, some of the voters who effectively stayed on the sidelines in 2016 are showing signs of political movement now — and there is evidence that Mr. Biden stands to benefit.
If the people in this piece stick to their stories come Election Day?
This IS gonna be a blow-out Democratic wave election….
Ya won’t have to worry about Trump trying keep his job…
An ass kicking THAT big is gonna have him gone without ANY friends…
Gonna have to work about his crazy shit from Nov 4th to Jan 20th
Third party and write-ins just aren’t cool this year.
I predict only 2-3% tops for the “other” vote in November.
Which poses a problem for Trump unless he can get higher than the 46% of the popular vote he received 4 years ago.
If it’s Biden 52%–Trump 45-46% it’s highly unlikely the Electoral College wall can stand for Trump.
Third parties and throwaway votes were the only avenue to get Trump a narrow EC win.
Third party votes can wax and wane. They were a negligible factor in the very close 1960 & 1976 elections but also in the landslides of 1956, 1964, 1972 and 1984.
However they proved important in (among other elections) 1948, 1968, 1980, 1992, 1996 and 2000.
Also 2016!
And Dave can certainly dive into some of those past elections but considering the third party vote in 1948 was split between a conservative Dixiecrat and a Progressive it may have evened out where Truman would have won by the same margin he did were it a two way race.
1968 was a turbulent year and while Wallace was a once and future Democrat at the time a good chunk of his vote would have gone to Nixon had he not been on the ballot that year. It’s likely Nixon would have won by a larger popular vote spread than the one-ish percent he received over Humphrey.
I continue to assert that a good chunk of Perot’s vote in 1992 would have gone to Clinton had it been a two person race. Polls during August and September when Perot was not in the race gave Clinton substantial leads then. It actually narrowed once the independent got back in.
2000 looked like it could have been another 1948 with a regressive right winger focused on race (Pat Buchanan) and a very liberal candidate (Nader) both getting equal shares of the vote. However nationwide Buchanan got far less than 1% of the vote while Nader was in the 2-3% range and affected more razor thin state margins. Even though mistake votes for Buchanan in Palm Beach County probably cost Gore the state and the White House
In 2016, those who voted third party would seemingly have been most likely to not have voted or to have voted Republican otherwise.
You did have a lot of “regular Republicans” who voted for Hillary and as well as Bernie supporters who voted for Trump.
Gary Johnson got a lot of younger more liberal voters too being a kindly ex governor who smoked pot.
I’m not saying they made up the majority of his 3.5% of the popular vote but they definitely accounted for a fair chunk of it.
Add to that the Jill Stein vote and it’s pretty clear most of the 6% who cast third party votes were frim center or left on the spectrum. McMullin got the center right but only at about .6% of the vote nationwide he was far below Johnson and Stein.
A lot of conservative anti-Trump people voted for Johnson.