Third parties could impact election day outcomes

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Glynda Perrotte is hard at work for a presidential campaign. While Obama and Romney staffers are hoping for a push in the tracking polls, she’s been fighting just to get her guy’s name on the polling surveys.

Perrotte is the Southern California director for the campaign of Gary Johnson, the former New Mexico Governor and Libertarian candidate for president. Perrotte and Fostore are Republican refugees to the Libertarian party. They joined its ranks five years ago—turned off by President Bush’s foreign policy approach.

"We were thinking, there’s no way we can be Democrats, becausewe know what they’re about," Perrotte said. "And there’s no way we support the Republicans ever again. Look at what they’re doing! So where do we go? We were, for a time, politically homeless.”

They found a home with the Libertarian Party—a group of just a few hundred thousand nationwide.

Their exodus story is not uncommon. More than 2.5 million voters have left the Republican and Democratic parties since 2008.

But that doesn’t mean they’ll vote third party. Perrotte says many people she talks with on the phone are afraid that a vote for Gary Johnson would be ‘a waste of a vote’.

“They tell me, 'Well he won’t do well enough. He won’t get enough votes,' said Perrotte. And I tell them, "Well, if everybody who claimed to be angry at the big two actually stood up and cast their vote differently, then he would win by a landslide.”

Another concern for some—certainly for the major party campaigns—is that a vote for a third party candidate could be the feather on the scale that tips the election one way or the other in swing states—the so-called spoiler effect.

"The spoiler phenomenon is very real," said Claremont McKenna political science professor Jack Pitney. "And if you’re going to support a third party candidate, it’s something you have to think about.”

Just look back at Florida in the 2000 election. Green Party perrenial candidate Ralph Nader got 90,000 votes. George Bush defeated Al Gore by just 537 votes.

“If nader had not been on the ballot, Al Gore would have been president of the United States,“ Pitney said.

If this year’s election remains close, Johnson could play a similar role. He’s thought to pull votes from romney in some swing states and from Obama in others.

Libertarians like Perrotte and Fostore could care less about spoiling things for the major players. They see little difference between Democrats and Republicans.

"When you have the two parties there who agree with each other more than not, then it becomes a problem," Perrotte said. "That means we have one party.”

This attitude makes sense to Professor Pitney.

"If you’re passionately opposed to military intervention, then you might see a limited difference between the two candidates," he said. "Mitt Romney’s talking about American strength, but then President Obama has a kill list.”

Foreign policy is a key issue for many Libertarians, like Fostore.

"I support our military," Fostore said. "I just don’t think we should use them every five minutes, every time we turn around.”

Johnson and his supporters are more concerned with pushing new ideas than they are with impacting election outcomes. The candidate talks about ending foreign wars and legalizing drugs—ideas that major candidates won’t touch.

Another new idea for many voters, Perrotte says, is voting outside the norm.

"One of the things I do the most," she said, "is explain to people: ‘You have a choice.’”

Photo by Gage Skidmore
(Flickr Creative Commons)