Will a third-party candidate play a spoiler role in Wisconsin? Here are some reasons to doubt that

With this state’s peerless history of presidential nail-biters, the list of election “x-factors” in Wisconsin next year is a long one.

But somewhere near the top is the “spoiler” scenario.

That’s when an independent or third-party candidate siphons enough votes from one of the major party candidates to change the outcome of the election.

Imagine an independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. drawing enough support next year from would-be Joe Biden voters to propel Donald Trump to victory here.

Or vice-versa: Kennedy capturing enough would-be Trump voters to keep Wisconsin in the Democratic column.

Imagine a moderate “No Labels” candidate flipping this state from blue to red by taking votes from Biden, or a libertarian candidate ensuring a Democratic win by taking votes from the Republican ticket.

These aren’t insane scenarios, for the simple reason that Wisconsin has been decided by less than a percentage point in four of the last six presidential contests.

If the margin between the two major party nominees is skimpy enough, it doesn’t take a large independent vote to change the math.  And if there is one thing we’ve learned in this era of extreme parity and polarization, it’s that tiny shifts in tight battlegrounds have massive consequences.

“Spoiler” scenarios in 2024 are making people in both parties nervous right now, and they will command more and more attention going into next year.

Both Kennedy, a lawyer known for his anti-vaccine stance, and Cornel West, a socialist intellectual, have said they will run as independents. The centrist “No Labels” group has floated the idea of nominating a ticket of candidates from both parties.

Most of the “spoiler” talk ahead of ’24 assumes a Biden-Trump matchup, which is likely but not an absolute certainty.  And based on that matchup, there is more fear of spoilers among Democrats than Republicans, because Trump’s political base appears unshakable and because Biden in 2020 relied on a diverse coalition of anti-Trump voters that could suffer defections to a minor party candidate of the left or center.

Heightening the specter of a spoiler in 2024 is the fact that both Biden and Trump have high negatives; a sizable minority of Americans dislikes both men.

Combine that with the prospect of a very close race and it’s easy to see why spoiler scenarios seem so plausible in the handful of 50/50 battlegrounds such as Wisconsin.

A closer look casts doubt on a spoiler scenario in Wisconsin

But Wisconsin’s own history also reminds us how improbable true spoilers are in presidential politics.

Even in a state as closely contested as this one, it takes a very rare and special set of circumstances for a minor candidate to flip a state from one major-party candidate to the other.

In six of the last eight presidential races in Wisconsin, the combined independent and third-party vote has been bigger than the vote margin between the two major party nominees.

Yet when you really dig into the numbers, it’s hard to argue that any of the outcomes in these races were truly altered by the presence of minor candidates.  (In fact, you have to go back 100 years to 1924 to find a clear and convincing example of a third-party or independent candidate altering the presidential outcome in Wisconsin; in that case the third-party candidate, Progressive Sen. Robert LaFollette, didn’t just spoil Wisconsin for a major party candidate — he won his home state outright).

“It is a little more complicated than people assume,” political scientist Barry Burden of the University of Wisconsin-Madison says of the possibility of a spoiler candidate altering a presidential race.

A closer look at Jill Stein's impact on Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin

A great illustration of this point is 2016, when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin, a result that shocked the political world and ended a three-decade GOP losing streak in this state.

At first glance, this seems like a classic spoiler scenario.  Only six-tenths of a point separated Trump and Clinton in Wisconsin, a margin far smaller than the combined 6.3 percent won by third-party, independent and write-in candidates.

What’s more, left-wing Green Party candidate Jill Stein got 31,072 votes.  Democrats only lost Wisconsin by 22,748 votes. If you believe those left-leaning Stein voters would have voted for Clinton had Stein not been on the ballot, then you could argue (as some have) that Stein cost Clinton Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes.

But on closer inspection, there are some big problems with this argument.

Problem number one: it assumes that most or all Stein voters would have participated in the election without her presence on the ballot.

“Research shows these candidates often bring out voters who wouldn’t have voted otherwise,” Burden said.

If we assume that only a third of these Stein voters would have stayed home without her on the ballot, the case for her being a spoiler collapses. At that point, the remaining Stein voters aren’t enough for Clinton to catch Trump, even if she wins all of them.

Problem number two: the idea that Stein cost Clinton Wisconsin assumes that most or all Stein voters would have voted for Clinton in Stein’s absence, even though there was vast differences between these candidates. Clinton would have needed to win these Stein voters by 74 points had they all turned out without Stein on the ballot.  Had a small share of them stayed home in this hypothetical case, she would have needed to win them by 80 or 90 points or more.

None of this is plausible.

“When you do the math, it takes a pretty substantial percentage of a third-party vote to all go for the trailing candidate to flip the result from Democrats to Republicans (or vice versa), and a higher percentage than most people intuitively would think,” said political scientist and Marquette Law School pollster Charles Franklin, who has examined Wisconsin’s close elections for possible spoiler effects.

“And I think we have to ask whether it’s plausible that such large majorities would go to one of the major party candidates when the whole reason they’re voting for a third-party candidate is that they are not that excited about the major party candidates,” Franklin said.

Problem number three: Viewing Stein as the spoiler in Wisconsin in 2016 ignores the fact that there were other minor candidates on the ballot who occupied very different places on the political spectrum. The Libertarian presidential candidate got more than 100,000 votes in Wisconsin that year, more than three times Stein’s total.  Does anybody think the Libertarian ticket siphoned lots more votes away from Clinton than Trump?

The truth is the “independent vote” is often very mixed politically, making it hard to imagine it “robbing” far more votes from one major party than the other.

If you take the combined minor-candidate vote from 2016 in Wisconsin (Green plus Libertarian plus right-wing Constitution Party plus others), Clinton would have needed to win it by around 14 points over Trump to overtake him, and considerably more if you assume many of them would have stayed home without their favored candidate on the ballot.

This is a lot of math about just one election. But the same logic and the same caveats about 2016 apply to any competitive contest where there are minor party candidates on the ballot.

Consider 1992, when the third-party and independent vote was far larger than in any election since, thanks to Reform Party candidate Ross Perot.

That year Democrat Bill Clinton beat Republican President George H.W. Bush by 4.4 points and 110,211 votes in Wisconsin.  Perot finished third in the state with 21.5% and 544,479 votes.  Perot was blamed by some for Bush’s re-election defeat.

But in Wisconsin, Bush would have needed to win the Perot vote by more than 20 points — even assuming every Perot voter would have turned out without Perot on the ballot. Bush would have needed to win them by 40 points had only half of them turned out.

Neither scenario is credible. Burden and Franklin have both studied the Perot effect in 1992. Burden points out that Perot drew huge numbers of voters to the polls who wouldn’t have otherwise voted (producing a major spike in election turnout in 1992).  And Franklin points out that while many Perot voters were fiscally conservative, a large share of them had negative views of the incumbent Bush and were hungry for change.

Perot’s performance in Wisconsin in 1992 and 1996 is intriguing for another reason.

In both cases, the independent vote was bigger in Wisconsin than nationally.  In 1992, Perot got 21.5% in Wisconsin and 18.9% nationally. In 1996, Perot got 10.4% in Wisconsin and 8.4% nationally.

Wisconsin also had a bigger than average independent vote in 2000; the leading minor candidate, Ralph Nader, also did better here (3.6%) than he did nationally (2.7%).

Wisconsin is trending away from significant third-party votes

But in more recent elections, Wisconsin has had a smaller independent and third-party vote than most other states. In fact, almost all the tightest battlegrounds in 2016 and 2020 had a smaller than average independent vote, in some cases much smaller.

Burden thinks there’s a pattern emerging here in which minor candidates can have potentially greater impact in key battlegrounds, while they also have a less receptive audience because voters are more likely to think they are “wasting” their vote on those candidates.

“The balance between the two major parties has grown so close and the Electoral College always seems to be teetering and the differences between the parties has gotten so vast, voters are now less willing to gamble on minor party candidates,” he said. “There is kind of an irony for these non-major party candidates. They might feel like they have a particular leverage (in close battlegrounds). On the other hand, voters are less willing to give them the time of the day (in those states).”

In short, there are good reasons to be skeptical about the spoiler scenarios that keep some people up at night. Even in razor-thin states, it’s more improbable than you might think for a minor candidate to alter the outcome of a close contest between major party candidates.

But none of this is meant to dismiss the possibility it could actually happen here or in one of the other top battlegrounds. There is the unmistakable example of 2000, when Florida was decided by 537 votes in a disputed count, delivering the presidency to George W. Bush.  Nader got more than 97,000 votes in Florida. Had Nader not been on the ballot, Democrat Al Gore would have needed to win these would-be Nader votes by only a fraction to capture Florida (even if we assume that many of them would have stayed home).

What happened in 2000 still haunts Democrats. In Wisconsin, Democrats fought successfully in 2020 to keep rapper Kanye West off the ballot because they feared he could play a spoiler role that would cost Biden the state against Trump.

If there is another Biden-Trump matchup in 2024, there will be an even larger pool of voters with qualms about both men.

“All our data over the last year show somewhere between 20% and 25% of registered voters either are reluctant to choose Biden or Trump or who dislike Biden and Trump,” said Franklin of his polling at Marquette.

In the end, the possibility that a third candidate “spoils” Wisconsin for one of the two major party candidates will come down to how large the independent vote is and, above all, how tiny the gap is between the top contenders.

You have heard this before: if the race is close enough, it could matter.

Of course, so could 100 other things.

If the race is close enough, everything could matter.

Craig Gilbert provides Wisconsin political analysis as a fellow with Marquette University Law School's Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education. Prior to the fellowship, Gilbert reported on politics for 35 years at the Journal Sentinel, the last 25 in its Washington Bureau. His column continues that independent reporting tradition and goes through the established Journal Sentinel editing process.

Follow him on Twitter: @Wisvoter.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Will a third-party candidate play a spoiler role in Wisconsin?