They voted third party in 2016, but now they’ve settled on Biden
In Florida in 2016, J.C. Planas, a former Republican state representative, was uncomfortable with Hillary Clinton but detested Donald Trump, so he wrote in former Gov. Jeb Bush for president.
In New Hampshire that year, Peter J. Spaulding, a longtime Republican official, supported the Libertarian ticket.
And in Arizona, Lorena Burns, 56, also voted third party, seeing the choice between Trump and Clinton as a contest between “two bads.”
“I didn’t want to be responsible for either,” she said.
This year, all three of them intend to diverge from their Republican leanings and vote for former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee. They are among an emerging group of voters who disliked both majorparty presidential nominees in 2016, but who are now so disillusioned with Trump — and sufficiently comfortable with Biden — that they are increasingly willing to support the Democrat.
It’s a dynamic that could have significant implications in several of the most competitive battleground states, like Arizona and Wisconsin, where the third-party vote in 2016 was greater than the margin of difference between Trump and Clinton. Recent polling also shows that Biden has an overwhelming advantage over Trump among voters who have unfavorable views of both candidates — a cohort that ultimately broke in Trump’s favor in 2016, exit polls showed.
Burns of Guadalupe, Arizona, said she recently made her first political donation, to the Democratic National Committee. She said she agreed with many of Trump’s policies, but was turned off by his behavior. “Just the lying, just the craziness, the bullying — I’d rather pay more money than be with him for another four years,” she said. “I’m willing to pay more money in taxes just to be away from him. He’s corrupting the country.”
In Burns’ state of Arizona, Trump won by 3.5 percentage points in 2016. The Libertarian Party nominee, Gary Johnson, won 4.1% of the vote, and in other states where the race was even closer — including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida — he pulled in between 2% and 4%. The Green Party candidate Jill Stein took in roughly 1% in those states
— small but significant totals in contests that were decided by slim margins.
In any single poll, it is difficult for pollsters to reach a significant number of voters who supported third-party candidates in 2016, making it impossible to trace their preferences now. And Trump — who faced vocal opposition that year from some prominent Republicans and won anyway — remains overwhelmingly popular with Republican voters. While many centerright voters have distanced themselves from his party, there are others who initially expressed misgivings about him and have since come to embrace him, resistant to the leftward drift of the Democratic Party.
But in a year when swing voters are scarce, some of the voters who effectively stayed on the sidelines in 2016 are showing signs of political movement now — and there is evidence that Biden stands to benefit.
There appears to be far less interest in third-party candidates compared with the same point in 2016, pollsters say.
“Barring some unforeseen circumstance, there’s just not a lot of appetite for third party,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. “This is twoperson for nearly all American voters.”