The NPR Politics Podcast - Third Party Candidates & Nonpartisan Voting Initiatives Falter

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

Even though many voters said they didn't like Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, very few who voted decided to cast their ballots for other candidates. Then, a look at why many ranked choice voting & nonpartisan primary ballot initiatives struggled at the polls this November.This episode: senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political correspondent Ashley Lopez, and political reporter Stephen Fowler.The podcast is produced by Jeongyoon Han and Kelli Wessinger, and edited by Casey Morell. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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Wow. This podcast was recorded at 2.25 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, November 19th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but live performances of Messiah will always need audiences to sustain them. So go out and hear a concert near you. Alleluia! Music Well, there is no way we are going to be as awesome as that time stamp. I feel like we're getting a lot of theater and like musical timestamps lately. This shows where people are.

It is pretty amazing. Hey there, it's the NPR politics podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover voting. I'm Stephen Fowler. I cover the White House. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover voting. I'm Stephen Fowler. I cover politics.

And today on the show, voters had an opportunity to chip away at the stranglehold that the Democratic and Republican parties have on American politics, or at least send a strong signal. In many places, voters had a chance to vote on how to vote, and they also could have voted for third party candidates for major office. But by and large, they really didn't go there. Stephen, let us start with you and the third party vote. During the campaign, there were a lot of people who said they didn't like either Joe Biden or Donald Trump. And that held true, although to a lesser degree when Biden dropped out and Kamala Harris replaced him.

But there was a time when there was this thought that third party candidates could be a real factor in this race. So how did it land? Well, it did not land well for third party candidates, Tam. First, obviously, Donald Trump got just under 50% of the popular vote. Kamala Harris got 48 ish percent of the popular vote. In third place, with about half a percent of the vote, we had Jill Stein. Then Robert F. Kennedy Jr., even though he dropped out of the race, even though he told his supporters, please don't vote for me, and even though he used the legal system to get off the ballot in several key states. He had about 40,000 fewer votes than Jill Stein. Then we had Other. Other got more than RFK, but less than Jill Stein. And last in total

votes for if we're counting Other as a category, Chase Oliver, the Libertarian nominee, had about 637,000 votes or 0.42% as of this podcast. And that's a pretty notable decline for the libertarians considering when you think third party and third party campaign, they're the ones that usually come to mind. And just to note, Jill Stein was the Green Party nominee. She was also the Green Party nominee

in past election cycles too. So why didn't they do well? I mean like I think they did less well than they've even done in the past. As we are still waiting on the final ballots to be counted in California, the third-party vote share is just under 2%. So the third-party vote share is lower than it was when Donald Trump first ran for office in 2016. It's fewer votes this time than in 2016 and in 2020. And for the Libertarians, you would have to go back several election cycles

to find that few votes that they've earned. I actually spoke to Chase Oliver, the Libertarian presidential nominee, for an election post-mortem. He says when talking to people on the campaign trail, that concept of voting for a third party as a protest vote or a way to voice displeasure with the Democrats or the Republicans or both didn't really have the same weight because the two parties were seen as existential threats and in all honesty, one of them is going to win.

They both saw each other as existential threats depending on where you landed. So historically third party candidates have been seen as spoilers like in the year 2000 and in 2016 when the Green Party presidential candidates Ralph Nader and then Jill Stein, were blamed by some for preventing the Democratic presidential candidates, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, from winning. Are those spoiler effects still being seen? You know, that was one of the fears that people had this go around that RFK or Jill Stein or the Libertarians would be the difference maker in the margin in some of the battleground states. That did not ultimately pan out to be the case. But there were some internal dynamics in play. Chase Oliver, one of the reasons that the libertarians didn't do as

well, his own party worked against him. Once he got the nomination, some party leadership, including the libertarian party chair, Angela McArdle, kind of openly campaigned for Donald Trump because they thought that they could get concessions from him and they didn't like how progressive he was compared to the option of Donald Trump who was more conservative. So it really underscored the dynamics of this race where even though there are more than two options out there, even for libertarians, it felt like a binary choice for them to choose Donald Trump

in this case or Kamala Harris. Correct me if I'm wrong, Stephen, but I think like this might be a different conversation if Kennedy had stayed in the race because compared to everyone else, he was the only candidate that had even like, you know, semi-favorable ratings compared to Jill Stein and some of the other candidates who had also very low name recognition

comparatively. But because he got out of the race and you know even took himself off of the ballot in key battleground states, like I think you know we're talking about like third-party candidates who were already not doing very well and now like the main person who was doing relatively well, an independent candidate is out of the race pretty much. Yeah. Kennedy had the money. He had the name, he had the ballot access, and he had a message that by and

large on paper appealed to people that previously voted for Democrats and previously voted for Republicans. that previously voted for Democrats and previously voted for Republicans. So when he left, he took the wind out of the sails with him and ultimately even with the candidate swap to Kamala Harris instead of Joe Biden, there just wasn't an appetite for anybody else. Ashley, you have spoken to a lot of voters and you know I'm wondering how they thought about third party candidates. You know, way back in the day, I covered green party candidates having surprising success winning city council races in California. But generally speaking, that's sort of where

third party candidates have maxed out. There isn't much of a chance of a third party candidate becoming president, you know, unless something dramatic happens. So if you're a voter, what would their motivation be to pick a candidate who won't win? A lot of it is casting a protest vote against a party you regularly vote with. During the primaries, we heard this a lot. Democratic voters were looking at third party candidates because they were really unhappy with Joe Biden staying in the race. You know, issues related to the war in the Middle East came up a lot, but also just general frustration with the two-party system. I don't think people's concerns are that as existential usually, so you know that's

a small part of the electorate is people who are like, I think I don't like being trapped in this two-party system. I would prefer like, you know, representational or proportional representation. Like that is a very like small slice of the electorate. Although I do think those are conversations that I don't know, possibly could be had in the years to come as more frustration builds with the way things are right now.

But I think what you guys are getting at is right, which is like negative polarization is a bigger force in politics. And I think, you know, the fact that each side doesn't want the other to win is motivating a lot of voters still. And so regardless of how upset people are with their party, I think when, you know, it's a game-time decision, people will vote for their party. If they vote at all, because I do think that's worth saying it is not surprising that third party candidates did worse when in general there were just

fewer votes cast in this election compared to last. All right. Well, we are going to take a quick break. And when we come back, a change to voting that could in theory help third party candidates find more success and how that fared at the polls. You care about what's happening in the world. Let State of the World from NPR keep you informed. Each day we transport you to a different point on the globe

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you there. And you can make this journey while you're doing the dishes or driving your car. And we're back. Ashley, as we said at the top of the pod, Americans in a lot of places voted on big changes to how elections are run. There were ballot initiatives in many places that would have gotten rid of partisan primary elections or added rank choice voting, mostly for general elections. Can you explain how this is different than the way voting works now in most places? Right. So what a lot of these ballot measures were proposing is eliminating party primary, so partisan primaries, which is what most states have for the exception of about five, and replacing it with what is sometimes called blanket primaries where everyone appears on the ballot regardless of party, and all voters, regardless of their political affiliation, get to vote and weigh in on whatever party.

So basically like a Democrat could vote for an independent, a third party, or a Republican in that case. They aren't sort of held to just voting for members of their own party in a primary. I like to think of them as like top two primaries because you could end up with two Republicans or two Democrats depending on the state. Right. And what a lot of these measures were proposing is actually a top four, which is why they paired it with ranked choice voting, because in the general election, they were gonna end up with four candidates and a more efficient way of dealing with a lot of candidates.

And also a way to sort of keep in the spirit of depolarizing their politics through election policy is having ranked choice voting. And so that changes how elections are run in pretty big ways, but mostly what advocates for these policies have said is that it really does change who candidates have to appeal to. So if you are fighting it out with independents and third party voters, you know, in the same ballot in a primary, it sort of forces

you to appeal to voters who aren't just like the base of your party. Let's dispense with the suspense. How did these measures do? So when we're looking at the statewide ballot measures, this was in roughly six states, mostly out West, they did not do well. They failed on every state level where we saw them. Where we look at probably more success was on the city level. A good example of this is Oak Park, Illinois, where rank choice voting was on the ballot and voters approved it. I will say advocates who are pushing for these ballot measures on the state level do see

this as a big setback, even though it was a really positive sign for them that it did end up on the ballot in so many places. There were at least many states considering these changes and got enough signatures to put it on a ballot? You know Ashley, I live in a state in Georgia where there are open primaries for example and if we were to close the primaries and make it only for people who register as a Democrat or a Republican it wouldn't necessarily change some of the more high-profile primaries that we've had, but that ability to have people choose and choose from kind of the full menu of options, you get a better idea of where voters are. You know, after the 2020 election,

when there were all of the false claims of election fraud, there was a slate of Republicans that ran on those false claims trying to unseat the incumbent governor, the incumbent secretary of state. We had an open primary. There were a number of people that previously voted in Democratic primaries that voted in Republican primaries for those candidates that defended the election. And it was kind of a sign to come in the later results in November that they were going to do a lot better because people that weren't just Republican primary voters expressed their support,

as one example. I can think of some other reasons why it may have been easier to get these things through at the local level than at the state level, including that there's just a lot more money spent at the state level to raise awareness and also to trash ballot measures that people don't like than there is at the local level where people may not be following things quite as closely and where there just isn't as much

money involved in politics. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that in at least some cases, the major parties strongly advocated to their voters that they not support these measures. Yeah so I did get to ask voters what they thought about these changes and most of them believe it or not didn't know practically anything about what these measures would actually do but they did have a lot of suspicion about it and I think a lot of that came from the fact that the parties where they get a lot of their messaging on stuff that's a little

more complicated was against it. So I think this was an interesting test case for how reforms land even at a time when voters are clamoring for change. You know I will say like I don't think that this is the end of these kinds of ballot measures and reforms and pushes But in this case in this election, even though voters were like I hate how everything is running This system isn't working for me when presented with reforms They were suspicious and you know, especially at the state level voted it down. All right. Well, let's leave it there for today We will be back in your feats tomorrow. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover voting. I'm Stephen Fowler. I cover politics. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics

Podcast.