ANDREW LEWIS: Hello. My name is Andrew Lewis, artistic director of Bella Voce Chorus and Sinfonia, coming to you from the dress rehearsal for our annual performance of Handel’s “Messiah” in Evanston, Illinois.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “MESSIAH, HWV 56: PART II, NO. 44 CHORUS ‘HALLELUJAH CHORUS'”)
BELLA VOCE CHORUS: (Singing) Hallelujah.
TAMARA KEITH, HOST:
Wow.
LEWIS: This podcast was recorded at…
KEITH: 2:25 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, November 19.
LEWIS: 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.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “MESSIAH, HWV 56: PART II, NO. 44 CHORUS ‘HALLELUJAH CHORUS'”)
BELLA VOCE CHORUS: (Singing) Hallelujah.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
KEITH: Well, there is no way we are going to be as awesome as that time stamp.
ASHLEY LOPEZ, BYLINE: I feel like we’re getting a lot of theater and, like, musical time stamps lately. This just shows where people are.
KEITH: It is pretty amazing. Hey there. It’s the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I’m Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.
LOPEZ: I’m Ashley Lopez. I cover voting.
STEPHEN FOWLER, BYLINE: I’m Stephen Fowler. I cover politics.
KEITH: 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?
FOWLER: 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.
KEITH: 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.
FOWLER: 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 a election postmortem. 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.
KEITH: They both saw each other as existential threats, depending on where you land it. 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?
FOWLER: 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.
LOPEZ: 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.
FOWLER: 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. 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.
KEITH: 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?
LOPEZ: 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 extensional usually. So, you know, that’s a small part of the electors, 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.
KEITH: 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.
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 are 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?
LOPEZ: Right. So what a lot of these ballot measures were proposing is eliminating party primaries – so partisan primaries, which is what most states have with 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.
KEITH: I like to think of them as, like, top-two primaries…
LOPEZ: Right.
KEITH: …Because you could end up with two Republicans or two Democrats, depending on the state.
LOPEZ: 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 going to 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 rank-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’re 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.
KEITH: Let’s dispense with the suspense. How did these measures do?
LOPEZ: 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 ranked-choice voting was on the ballot, and voters approved it. I will say advocates who were 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. Like, there were at least many states considering these changes and got enough signatures to put it on a ballot.
FOWLER: 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 and 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.
KEITH: Yeah. 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, you know, 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.
LOPEZ: 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; the system isn’t working for me – when presented with reforms, they were suspicious and, you know, especially at the state level, voted it down.
KEITH: All right. Well, let’s leave it there for today. We will be back in your feeds tomorrow. I’m Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.
LOPEZ: I’m Ashley Lopez. I cover voting.
FOWLER: I’m Stephen Fowler. I cover politics.
KEITH: And thank you for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
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