Charles Riggs has a habit of backing losers: John Lindsay in ’72; Michael Dukakis in ’88; Ross Perot in ’96. It wasn’t until he went all in on former President Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primaries that he got a taste of victory (after his first pick, John Edwards, dropped out, naturally). “For the first time in my life, at the tender young age of 54, my candidate for president finally won,” Riggs said.
This year, Riggs, a retiree based in New York, is disenchanted with both frontrunners, like many Americans. He considers former President Donald Trump the worst president the country has ever had, but doesn’t believe President Joe Biden can beat him again. So, as he has so many times throughout his life (and despite considering himself an avowed liberal), he’s been considering the possibility of backing someone outside of the mainstream: former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley.
Haley suspended her campaign for the GOP nomination after Trump summarily trounced her on Super Tuesday, but buzz around her as a potential independent candidate continues. So convinced was Riggs that Americans needed a third option on the ballot, he and two friends pooled some funds to sponsor a poll to see how Haley would do in a three-way race. “After she lost New Hampshire, I said to myself, ‘Where is the survey of a three-way presidential race?'” Riggs said. “At that point, I said to myself, ‘Well, fuck it. I’ll do it.'”
But the results were not what he had hoped: In Riggs’s poll, Haley drew just 13 percent of the hypothetical vote.
The fantasy of Haley, or any other candidate, coming to save us from the inevitable — a rematch of 2020, something a majority of Americans have said they don’t want — has been a popular one this election cycle. It’s been especially in the air with the well-funded campaign of No Labels, the group aiming to put forward a slate of moderate candidates as a third-party option. And while the circumstances of this election make it unusual (we haven’t seen a former president run for a nonconsecutive term since Herbert Hoover), the armchair punditry around a third-party candidate is nothing new. And as it has been so many times before, this time around, a third-party candidate will be at best a mirage and at worst a spoiler.
Around this point in the election cycle, interest in a potential third-party independent candidate often builds, according to Lee Drutman, a political scientist and senior fellow at the New America Foundation. “Support for third parties tends to decay as the election gets closer and closer,” Drutman said. “People go back to their traditional parties, even if they’re dissatisfied with their candidates.”
This is true even in years with particularly strong independent candidates. In 1980, independent John Anderson was polling around 20 percent over the summer, but come Election Day, he garnered just 6.6 percent of the popular vote. In 2016, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson was averaging just under 10 percent support in July before dropping steadily ahead of the election, finishing with 3.3 percent of the popular vote. Even Perot, who in 1992 won the highest share of the popular vote for a third-party candidate in nearly a century, also bled support over the course of the campaign, dropping from leading Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush in polls the summer before the election to winning less than 20 percent of the popular vote and not a single electoral vote.
The fact that Haley, and other, non-hypothetical independent candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., can scrounge up double-digit support in some polls at this stage in the campaign is neither particularly unusual nor impressive. If history is any indication, that support will drop off as the reality of the November matchup sets in. This is partly because Americans are not nearly as independent as they may seem at first glance, but also because of negative partisanship: Particularly in a close race like we have this year, voters start to worry…
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