The unpopular pair of presidential candidates is sending Ohioans in search of alternatives.
And nothing will deter voters, not even the argument that a vote for a third-party candidate is a wasted vote.
“I used to buy into that ‘wasted vote philosophy.’ But we keep getting lousy candidates,” said John MacWherter, a retiree from Hudson who wants more information on other candidates.
“The reason I went looking for an alternative is because I was so upset with both candidates. And I couldn’t live with myself ethically if I voted for either one of them,” said Madalyn Overton, a 63-year-old financial adviser who has retired in Medina and can’t stand the election mudslinging.
Ninety days before the November election, most registered voters who plan to cast a ballot for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump have told pollsters they will do so not to support either candidate, but to stop the other from winning. Voting the lesser of two evils — a byproduct of record-setting disapproval ratings — has reached unprecedented levels this election.
A poll of 983 registered voters released this month by McClatchy-Marist found that, among Clinton supporters, 53 percent younger than 45 and 40 percent 45 or older are voting primarily to oppose Trump, not to genuinely support Clinton. Manufactured support for Trump is even greater. Majorities of his older and younger voters (62 and 54 percent, respectively) say they care more about stopping Clinton than supporting his candidacy. The poll had a 3.1 percent margin of error.
Eschewing the urge to simply block the more loathsome choice, some likely voters say they’ll support a third-party or independent candidate who more closely shares their personal beliefs.
“A third-party candidate was always something for me to consider,” Josh Wherley, 19, of Green, said of his distaste for the remaining Republican and Democratic candidates after Rand Paul, his choice, dropped out.
“I never discounted the idea. I always thought it was more about getting your opinion heard,” said Wherley, whose father and grandfather supported Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader. With support from progressives, Democrats criticized Nader for giving the 2000 election to Republican George Bush. Something similar could happen in this election year, ripe for a third-party uprising.
A sad lesson
If there’s a political lesson Lauren Copeland dislikes teaching, it’s the one where college students learn that voting third party can backfire.
Copeland, the associate director of the Community Research Institute at Baldwin Wallace University, argues if a voter supports a candidate with little chance of winning, the major party candidate who otherwise would have received the support suffers. As a result, the other party, which likely has less in common with the voter, wins.
Effectively, it’s a betrayal of one’s own political interests, Copeland said.
But that’s not the way democracy is supposed to work, said Wherley, a communications student at the Firelands branch of Bowling Green State University in Huron.
Politics is not what turns us away from one another, he argued. Nor should picking a president be a compromise.
“I agree with millennials, including all my students, that it shouldn’t be like that,” Copeland said. “We should be able to vote for the candidate who most closely aligns with us ideologically. But that’s just not the way our system works, unfortunately.”
The U.S. Constitution and American system of democratic representation would require a “complete overhaul” to achieve multiparty political systems, Copeland said.
But even with record-high voter dissatisfaction and increasing numbers of young Americans ignoring major party affiliation, “I don’t think we’ll ever see it in the U.S.,” Copeland said. “It’s really a bummer to teach in the classroom.”
The wasted vote
Nonetheless, Wherley — a fiscal conservative and Christian who agrees with liberals on gay marriage, abortion and legalizing marijuana — plans to vote Libertarian.
He’s casting what some might call “a wasted vote.” Wherley couldn’t disagree more.
“A wasted vote,” he said, “is when you vote for someone who doesn’t represent you.”
Such quixotic voting has real-world implications.
Consider how independent candidate Ross Perot helped hold George H.W. Bush to a single term. Perot appealed mostly to conservatives, who might have otherwise supported Bush in 1992.
In a hypothetical rehash of the three-way election, scholars have debated whether Bush could have captured enough of Perot’s votes if the Texas businessman had never entered the race. In reality, Perot took 18.9 percent of the vote and Bush lost to Bill Clinton by fewer than six points.
Overton was a financial adviser working in Akron when she voted for Perot. She liked his economic platform, which included an anti-trade position akin to that of political outsider Trump.
Eyeing her options this fall, the choice appears as easy now as it was then.
“I’ve said for years and years, why don’t [the major parties] put up a candidate like I am: fiscally conservative and socially tolerant,” said Overton, who has joined the ranks of disaffected voters who say they’ll support Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate polling at 8 percent.
Careful voting
How many freely support third-party candidates this fall may depend on how tight the race is.
MacWherter, 69, supported Ohio Gov. John Kasich in the primary. But he hadn’t ruled out Clinton, especially with Trump sweeping most primaries.
“Today, I know I’m not voting for Trump,” MacWherter said Wednesday. “If it’s close, I’ll probably vote for Clinton just because I don’t want Trump to get in … I think he’s the worst of all options. Trump would be a disaster in my mind. Hillary would be less of a disaster, I guess.”
MacWherter wants to know more about Johnson. But remembering how a few hundred votes and a controversial Supreme Court decision decided the 2000 election, he’s only willing to vote for a third party if it appears Trump has no chance of winning. So he’s holding on to his fail-safe, never-Trump vote.
“That’s exactly where I am. But how do you know when Clinton has it locked up? Hopefully that will be fairly clear if Trump keeps shooting himself in the foot and the mouth,” MacWherter said, hoping to be free by the fall to vote for a third party and send Republicans and Democrats a clear message to “get serious about their candidates.”
Doug Livingston can be reached at 330-996-3792 or dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow on Twitter: @ABJDoug.