Among all the reasons Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in 2020 but Hillary Clinton didn’t four years earlier, one looms especially large for the coming presidential election: the share of the third-party vote.
In 2016, 6% of all voters cast ballots for third-party and write-in candidates, with Libertarian Gary Johnson getting more than 3% of the national vote and Green Party nominee Jill Stein capturing more than 1%.
But in 2020, that proportion fell to 2%.
The difference effectively changed the threshold the major candidates needed to reach to win key battleground states — from 47% and 48% in 2016 to 49% and 50% in 2020.
That, Democrats say, made it easier for Trump to win in ’16 but not in ’20. And the numbers illustrate why Democratic groups — eyeing a possible, if not likely, rematch between Biden and Trump — want to keep the third-party vote share as small as possible, including moving to keep the well-financed third-party group No Labels off the ballot in battleground states.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/stark-numbers-driving-democratic-panic-third-party-2024-bid-rcna85155
