As Kamala Harris and Donald Trump thrash it out for the presidency, there is another factor that could decide the election: the impact of third-party votes.
With the race expected to be extremely close, experts say that ballots cast for Jill Stein of the Green party, Cornel West or Robert F Kennedy Jr could potentially draw enough votes away from Harris or Trump to make a difference – a worrying development for both Democrats and Republicans.
In the swing state of Michigan, in particular, dissatisfaction over Harris’s stance on Israel’s war on Gaza has driven some voters towards Stein, who has been critical of Israel. In Michigan and also Wisconsin, unhappiness over Trump’s role atop the Republican party could lead to protest votes for Kennedy (despite him dropping out of the race earlier this year). Given Joe Biden’s narrow margin of victory over Trump in key states in 2020, any ballots cast elsewhere could be decisive.
“The vote right now is so close that a small amount of tipping in one direction or another could swing it,” said Bernard Tamas, a professor of political science at Valdosta State University and author of The Demise and Rebirth of American Third Parties: Poised for Political Revival?.
The third-party candidates most capable of winning away votes appear to be Stein and Kennedy, who, ironically, would rather not be in the election at all. Kennedy suspended his independent presidential campaign in August and endorsed Trump, but courts in Michigan and Wisconsin ruled that his name will stay on the ballot.
“I’m wondering whether or not with RFK if we’ll see a little bit of what I could call ‘the Nikki Haley effect’,” Tamas said.
“Nikki Haley dropped out of the primaries and was still gaining a significant percent of Republican votes. If you take the many Republicans who are unhappy with Trump as the candidate, and if they don’t want to vote for Harris, they might wind up voting for RFK, even knowing full well that he’s not even on the ballot. Just basically as a protest.”
Biden won Wisconsin by just 20,000 votes in 2020, and carried Michigan by about 150,000, meaning a small trickling of support from either Harris or Trump could be influential. In Michigan, a specific set of circumstances appears to have played into Stein’s hands, with the state’s large Arab American and Muslim American population unhappy with Harris’s stance on Gaza. These communities have tended toward Democratic candidates in the past, but there is evidence that they are divided over how to vote.
Stein, whose campaign has benefited from hundreds of thousands of dollars in spending by pro-Republican groups, has been a vocal critic of Israel and the Biden administration and has courted Muslim voters. She received an enthusiastic reception at ArabCon, the annual gathering of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, earlier this year, and has been endorsed by the American Arab and Muslim political action committee and the Abandon Harris group.
“The margins of Michigan have been so slim in the prior elections,” said Nura Sediqe, an assistant professor in American politics at Michigan State University.
“[Stein] could shave away votes from the Democratic party, particularly amongst young people from 18 to 40, and from specific ethno-racial backgrounds who are voting – Arab Americans and American Muslims – there’s been a lot of talk in these specific subsets of voters about voting third party, so it may take their votes away. These are all folks that are more likely Democratic voters that might end up switching.”
Polling on the issue has yielded inconsistent results. Last week, a national survey of Arab Americans conducted by the Arab News Research and Studies Unit found 43% supporting Trump, compared with 41% for Harris and 4% backing Stein.
A survey of Muslim Americans by the Council on American-Islamic Relations of American Muslims found that 42.3% plan to vote for Stein, 41% for Harris and 9.8% for Trump.
Stein’s growing appeal has yielded very different responses from her opponents.
“Jill Stein, I like her very much,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Philadelphia earlier this year. “You know why? She takes 100% from [Democrats].”
It seems that Democrats agree. The Democratic National Committee announced on Monday a series of ads that will run on Instagram and YouTube aiming to discourage people from voting for Stein and West, who has also been critical of Israel.
The ads feature Trump’s comments about “very much” liking Stein, along with Trump also praising West, while the pro-Democratic organization MoveOn announced a “seven-figure” ad campaign this week, which it said was designed to appeal to people who are yet to decide on a candidate and “third-party curious voters”.
There are 242,000 registered Muslim voters in Michigan, Sediqe said, 145,000 of whom voted in 2020. About two-thirds of all Muslims nationally voted for Biden that year – a large boost to the Democrat.
“Muslims are split. They’re not all voting third party, but let’s imagine a third are: then you’ve got up to 50,000 votes that had traditionally gone to the Democrats moving away. So if the margin is as slim as it was last time, it may affect the Democratic party,” Sediqe said.
Democrats in Michigan and elsewhere are scrambling to get out their message that a vote for a third-party candidate is a vote for Trump. But Sediqe fears that could lead to certain groups of voters being scapegoated if Harris loses the election.
“The thing to keep in mind from these folks that are concerned third party is they’re trying to send policy signals to the Democrats to not have their vote taken for granted,” she said.
“The reality is they’re very strategic voters: ‘I want something. Will you give it to me? No, OK, then I will move my vote elsewhere.’ It’s a rational choice they’re making. And so I think my only concern is this conception that it’s irrational. It’s very rational.”
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