"Trump simply would not have won the election if third party candidates like Gary Johnson and Jill Stein had chosen to swing their support in behind Hillary Clinton." Image: Gary Johnson speaks to supporters. Flick/Gage Skidmore. Some rights reserved.As in the UK, the US presidential election actually hinges on a relatively small number of votes in a few ‘marginal constituencies’. In the US, these ‘marginal constituencies’ are states where the result could go either way. In this particular election, there were 16 states which were all but certain to vote Democrat (Clinton) and 24 states which were all but certain to vote Republican (Trump). That left only 10 which were actually up for grabs.
Because of the US ‘electoral college’ system, however, not all states are equal. Big populous states have many more votes than the smaller, less populous states. Florida, with 29 electoral college votes, was the most valuable ‘prize’ among the marginal states up for grabs in this election. As you may remember, in the year 2000, Al Gore lost this state — and thus the entire election — after numerous recounts and finally a Supreme Court decision that decreed George W Bush had won Florida by just 537 votes out of nearly 6 million votes cast in that state.
In that 2000 election, Ralph Nader ran as a Green Party candidate and got almost 100,000 votes in Florida (and nearly 3 million across the whole country). If Nader had not run as a third candidate, Al Gore would almost certainly have won in Florida, and thus in the country. It may be unpalatable for some on the left of the political spectrum to think about voting for the lesser of two evils, rather than for someone you can really believe in. However, given a world that finds itself so evenly divided between left and right, and a political system in which the largest party wins all, splitting the vote on the left will always mean that the right wins elections.
