You gotta love social media. It’s full of foodies, revelers and newly inspired political pundits filling our Facebook and Twitter feeds with memes that they haven’t even read.
I have no problem with social media; I was literally just distracted for 10 minutes looking @FactsAboutPigs, but lately I’ve seen a misleading message plastered on my feed —the idea that Third Party candidates are “spoilers” in a general election. This is a bigger lie than when I tell myself I’ll only eat half of the Papa Johns pizza I just ordered.
One of the most well-known examples used to back up the Third-Party-spoiler myth was an election involving another Clinton. When Bill Clinton took the White House in 1992, many Republicans believe Ross Perot took votes away from George H.W. Bush, costing him the election. It didn’t help that the whole campaign H.W. looked slightly less comfortable than a blasphemer being tortured in medieval times with the “Heretic’s Fork.”
The reality of the 1992 election is Perot pulled from both sides fairly evenly. Exit polls show Perot voters were 53% moderates, 27% Republican and 24% Democrat. For Perot to have “stolen” the election, Bush would’ve needed 66% of Perot’s support base. In other words, had the 19 million Americans who voted for Perot supported one of the two major parties, 58% of them would’ve had to vote for Bush and just 42% for Clinton. Ben Carson has a better chance of winning a rap battle than that happening.
In this election cycle, we don’t have the benefit of hindsight, but a recent CNN/ORC poll suggests history is already repeating itself with Third-Party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. The poll had Trump at 37%, Clinton at 45%, Gov. Gary Johnson at 9% and Jill Stein at 5%. When the same survey was conducted with only Trump and Hillary as choices, Clinton led Trump 52% to 43%, showing, once again, that Third-Party candidates do not pull enough from either side to make a definitive impact on a general election.
Too often we allow the political elites to use Third Parties as a scapegoat instead of claiming responsibility for the flawed candidates they promote. A great example of this is Democrats blaming Ralph Nader for costing Al Gore the election, when in reality if Gore just won his home state of Tennessee, the Supreme Court wouldn’t have weighed in and Florida would have never mattered. Even Goldwater and Mondale won their home states!
If a Third Party vote is against anything, it’s against the cycle of top-down governance that propagates the growing disconnect between politicians and their constituents. So don’t believe the Democrats or Republicans who say voting for a Third Party is a vote for Hillary or Trump. It’s a lie they reiterate every four years to maintain a monopoly on power that allows them to perpetrate the biggest fraud in American politics: the illusion of choice.
