History suggests Jill Stein and Gary Johnson will do worse than the polls say

[applegrove]

History suggests Jill Stein and Gary Johnson will do worse than the polls say

by Matthew Yglesias at Vox

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/10/7/13194518/third-party-polls

"SNIP...............


Current polls show Gary Johnson poised to secure 7.1 percent of the vote on Election Day, far better than his 2012 performance — or any third-party candidate of the 21st century. Jill Stein is far behind, at 2.4 percent, but that’s still about on par with what Ralph Nader did in 2000 and well ahead of subsequent Green Party bids in 2004, 2008, and 2012.

A strong third-party showing is about what you’d expect given two unusually unpopular major party candidates. But there’s good reason to doubt that the Libertarian and Green vote totals will really be that high. One reason is that as my colleague Tara Golshan has written, third parties tend to fade in the polls as Election Day approaches — something that’s happened to both Johnson and Stein last week — but more fundamentally the Roper Center’s historical analysis suggests that third-party campaigns tend to underperform their final poll numbers.

In the November 2000 Gallup poll, Nader was at 4 percent and Pat Buchanan 1 percent. In the end, Nader got 2.74 percent and Buchanan got 0.43 percent.

In the November 2004 Gallup poll, Nader was at 1 percent and he got 0.38 percent.


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[JoePhilly]

1. They should get a room already.

[guillaumeb]

2. Stein and Johnson are pure vanity candidates. No real reason to run other than media attention. eom