In a Tight Presidential Race, Third-Party Candidates Present a Wild Card

With a month to go before what is widely expected to be an extraordinarily close election, an extra element of unpredictability looms: In every battleground state, there is at least one third-party or independent presidential candidate on the ballot.

None of these candidates will come anywhere close to winning the presidency. Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee, is polling at about 1 percent nationally, according to New York Times polling released last week. Same with Chase Oliver, the Libertarian Party candidate.

But their presence on the ballot in just a few states could take just enough votes away from the major party candidates to tip the balance of the Electoral College and the election, in what is known as the “spoiler” effect.

To be a spoiler in the election, a third-party candidate would “either have to have a large amount of support, or the election has to be remarkably close,” said Bernard Tamas, a professor of political science at Valdosta State University who has written a book on third parties in U.S. politics.

“This may wind up being very, very close in these key swing states,” he said.

The Democratic Party and its allies have been more openly concerned than Republicans, in recent years, about the impact of third-party candidates, and this election is no exception. As they see it, every vote that is not for Vice President Kamala Harris is a vote for former President Donald J. Trump.

“The presidential race could very well come down to a few thousand votes in a handful of states,” said Rahna Epting, the executive director of MoveOn, a liberal activist group. “These third-party candidates — they still remain a big threat this cycle.”

Ms. Stein is the main source of concern for Democrats as the election nears. On Friday, the Democratic National Committee released a television ad against her in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the party’s first ad against a third-party candidate this cycle — saying that “A vote for Stein is really a vote for Trump.”

Ms. Stein is on the ballot in 38 states, including the battlegrounds of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona.

Party representatives have noted that allies of Mr. Trump have backed Ms. Stein’s efforts to get on the ballot in swing states, according to court records, social media posts and campaign finance filings.

At a rally in June, Mr. Trump praised Ms. Stein. “I like her very much,” he said. “You know why? She takes 100 percent from them.”

Media representatives for the Green Party did not respond to requests for comment. In an interview last week, Ms. Stein accused the Democratic Party of corrupting the ballot access system. “The system is complicated by design,” she said. “It is intended not to be understood. It is intended to keep competitors out and to trip them up over, you know, unforeseen, you know, trip wires, which are all over the place.”

Wisconsin has a particularly crowded ballot. In addition to Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris, voters will be able to choose among Ms. Stein and Mr. Oliver; Cornel West, the theologian and independent candidate; Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the former independent candidate who now backs Mr. Trump; Randall Terry, the nominee for the Constitution Party; and Claudia De la Cruz, the nominee for the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

Wisconsin, and Ms. Stein, are sore spots for Democrats. In 2016, Ms. Stein won 31,072 votes in Wisconsin — greater than the 22,748-vote margin by which Mr. Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the state — and many Democrats blame her for their defeat.

But Mr. Tamas said this was an overly simplistic view of the 2016 outcome, which he has studied. Many of the people who voted for Ms. Stein were unlikely to have voted for any other candidate. Some would have picked Mr. Trump if she had not been on the ballot. And the Libertarian Party — which has typically been more closely aligned with Republicans, with more likelihood of crossover votes — received 106,674 votes in Wisconsin in 2016.

The last real spoiler supported by evidence, Mr. Tamas said, was Ralph Nader, the Green Party nominee who in 2000 won 97,421 votes in Florida. Al Gore, the Democratic nominee that year, lost the state by 531 votes.

But in general, Mr. Tamas said, “A lot of third-party voters are people who would not have turned up if it were not for a third-party candidate.”

Julia Azari, a political science professor at Marquette University who studies elections, agreed that this year’s race looked like it could be “close enough that the third-party vote will exceed the margin of victory.”

But she said it was difficult to determine whether Mr. Trump or Ms. Harris will benefit most. “Any story we try to tell about that will be based on assumptions about what candidate they might have preferred as a second choice, or what they might have done without that third-party option,” she said.

Democratic groups had for months targeted outsider candidates by seeking to block them from the ballot or challenge their ballot applications, with uneven results.

Ms. Epting said her organization was now focused increasingly on one-on-one voter outreach to encourage people to support Ms. Harris.

“The more we engage the voters, especially hard to reach voters on this election, and talk to them about Kamala Harris’s agenda for this country, that is an incredibly effective strategy,” Ms. Epting said. But MoveOn is also criticizing Ms. Stein’s and Mr. West’s policy positions.

“They are not a safe place to park your protest vote,” she said.

Democratic groups have pointed to evidence of Republican operatives and Trump allies helping some of the outsider candidates with ballot access and legal challenges, in what they describe as a bid to splinter and undermine the Democratic vote.

The Democratic Party has accused Mr. West’s campaign, including in a complaint to the Federal Election Commission, of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work, without payment, from canvassing firms tied to Republicans, in Arizona and North Carolina.

Mr. West was ultimately blocked from the ballot in Arizona, because of missing paperwork and amid allegations of improprieties. In addition to Wisconsin, Mr. West is on the ballot in Michigan and North Carolina, as well as in 11 other states.

Edwin DeJesus, the ballot access coordinator for the West campaign, said the Democrats’ accusations were false. “The real issue here is the D.N.C.’s attempt to sidestep the broader conversation about how the two-party establishment fails to represent the needs of everyday people,” he said.

In Michigan, where support for the Democratic ticket has eroded among Arab and Muslim voters amid the escalating violence in the Middle East, both Mr. West and Ms. Stein could pose a threat to Ms Harris, Mr. Tamas said.

Mr. West was also mired in legal issues in Georgia, where the State Supreme Court upheld a lower-court ruling last month that he had failed to qualify. So even though his name appears on the ballot, votes for him will not be counted. Ms. De la Cruz, who had run as an independent in the state, was similarly disqualified.

Karla Reyes, the De la Cruz campaign’s manager, said the fact that tens of thousands of people signed petitions for her candidate showed that voters were hankering for a third-party option “beyond the red and blue.” Ms. Reyes attributed Ms. De la Cruz and Mr. West’s disqualification in Georgia to “infighting,” and lamented that state and court officials did not “let the voters choose, instead of choosing for voters, who they get to select on the ballot.”

Mr. Kennedy represents an unusual case. After mounting an extraordinarily expensive and time-consuming effort to appear on the ballot in all 50 states, he suspended his campaign in late August and endorsed Mr. Trump. Then, Mr. Kennedy tried to get himself removed from battleground state ballots, where he felt his presence might help Ms. Harris. Polls suggested that he drew support about equally from Democrats and Republicans, although Mr. Trump’s internal polling suggested that Mr. Kennedy posed a more direct threat to him.

But Mr. Kennedy was unable to get off the ballot in Wisconsin and Michigan, despite legal appeals. He has urged his supporters on social media to vote for Mr. Trump, even where he is on the ballot.

Before he dropped out of the race, Mr. Kennedy was polling at less than 5 percent nationally. The most recent New York Times poll, from early October, put his support at less than half a percent, the same as Mr. West’s.

Charles Homans contributed reporting.