The Surprising 2024 Third-Party Effect

There may have been a major third-party effect in 2024, but not the way you'd expect

I got a lot wrong in my analyses prior to the 2024 election. But I did get some things right. One of which is not something that was on my radar until I started to consider writing a follow up to one of my recent articles titled “The Myth of the Youth Vote Saviors”.

The Myth of the Youth Vote Saviors

This article is a favorite of mine, an enjoyable deep dive into the data of the previous two elections and how their demographic trends countered the popular narrative at the time that the youth vote saved Democrats, and the nation, in the 2020 election. I do still plan to write a follow up to this soon, an update to the youth vote trends that includes the 2024 election data.

But there was an aside I did in this article that turned out to be prescient, and possibly helps to explain, perhaps as well as anything else, why the 2024 election went the way it did. I wrote it as an interesting side note, not a precursor or predictor of what was to come. But looking back, I see that I could have easily applied its logic to the election and made an accurate prediction based on it.

This aside was about the “Third-party effect”, but not the one we usually think of. This effect is, in the way we typically think about it, how we weight the performance of third-party candidates on the outcome of the election. For example, if a third-party candidate had strong results, we would look at who their voters may have otherwise voted for and come to the conclusion that they “cost” that candidate the election. Such as in 2016, where Jill Stein had taken some blame for attracting voters that would have gone to Hillary Clinton in important battleground states, and therefore cost her the election.

But I’m talking about another type of “Third-party effect" that may be in play in a major way these days, and could be a very important factor going forward.

Below is the aside in full. It’s a longer quote than I would normally like for a mid-article reference, but I do think it’s important to include the whole thing to make my point. I highlighted the most important thesis statements near the end:

Why is the youth vote trending towards Trump?

Exactly why the youth vote is trending toward Trump is a tough question to answer, and is not really the point of this article, but I’d still like to address this question and offer an explanation.

First, consider that even though the youth vote share margin was lower for Biden in 2020 vs. Clinton in 2016 (24 vs. 30), the overall share of the youth vote was actually higher for Biden in 2020 than Clinton in 2016, 59% vs 58%, a gain of 1 point.

Then how can it be that Trump gained more net [youth] votes?

Well, Trump’s overall youth vote share went up by a lot more, from 28% to 35%, a 7-point gain. This means that there must have been a sizeable share of youth voters that didn’t vote for either candidate in 2016 that did in 2020. This is the key to the “why”, in my opinion.

In 2016 the total share of the youth vote that voted for Clinton or Trump was 58% plus 28%, or 86%. By definition, this means that 14% of the youth vote went to someone else in 2016. In 2020, the youth vote share voting for Biden or Trump was 59% plus 35%, for a total of 94%. Therefore, only 6% of the youth vote went to someone else in 2020. For some reason, youths decided to vote for the main two-party candidates at a much higher rate in 2020 than they did in 2016.

My take is that this is probably because there was a discernable lack of viable 3rd-party candidates available in 2020 vs 2016. Whether this was due to effects from the Covid pandemic or something else is hard to say definitively, but the third-party presence in 2020 just wasn’t as strong as it was in 2016.

It has been largely documented that younger voters tend to feel negatively about the two major parties, political parties in general, and tend to be more willing than other age groups to vote for third party candidates.

Since Trump’s share of the youth vote increased significantly, this suggests there’s something about Trump that satisfied them for the same reasons that a 3rd-party candidate would satisfy them. On a primal level, it does make some sense. Trump is the next best thing to a third-party candidate. He is into norm-busting, disrupting the system, challenging institutions, etc. These are the same kinds of things that a 3rd party candidate would do. And if young people had concerns about this backfiring, they likely believed the risk was worth it, and if things didn’t work out like they hoped, they would have time to right the ship.

In effect, Trump was somewhat of a surrogate third-party candidate in 2020, and benefitted from this among youth voters. As, effectively, the third-party candidate, Trump “sucked up” most of the excess energy the youth voters exhibited in 2020, which resulted in neutering their potential power for Biden.

It’s hard for me to think of a better overarching explanation for the youth vote’s continuing trend towards Republicans than Trump being a “third-party surrogate”.

What are the alternative explanations?

Was it really because they are on board with demonizing the trans community? They are anti-woke? They believe immigrants are eating our pets and “poisoning the blood of the country”? They are enraptured with the culture of Trump and love his dance moves?

All possible, but unlikely, explanations. Younger voters tend to be the least informed, most disgruntled, most socially accepting, and most risk-tolerant voting bloc in the country. Rather than voting for a set of policies, a party platform, or persecuting large swaths of the population, they probably were motivated by a desire to disrupt and change the system and suffer what they perceived as the temporary consequences.

Whereas older voters would perceive Trump as a risky option they were not willing to tolerate (and they trended away from him accordingly), younger ones were more likely to try him out and see what happens. And their awareness and memory of his previous stint as president are either nonexistent or distorted by lack of historical context. Even if they are aware of Trump’s behavior from 2017-2021, they may not have a good reference point to compare his behavior and that of other presidents before him, since those previous presidents were never a part of their lived experience. Therefore, they may not have realized how shocking and disturbing it all was.

“Change” and “Different”

In fact, at this time we do have pretty solid anecdotal evidence of this alternative “third-party effect” from the likes of Democratic candidates that won their elections with a large contingent of voters that voted for them and Trump, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Andy Kim. They took the time to conduct good-faith investigations into why these voters chose this path and the explanations can be summarized in some very basic concepts.

AOC provided quotes from her forum, and one word was very prominent among all of them: “change”.

Andy Kim had a Xitter thread where he quoted his split-ticket constituents and the word he emphasized the most was “different”.

The summaries of these sessions by these two Democratic lawmakers were thin on hard data, so we don’t know the ages of the people that responded. But we do know that young people aged 18-29 already tend to vote for these things—“change” and something “different”—and are tolerant of the risks of doing so [see the links in my quoted passage above for reference].

Plus, the sample populations of the open-to-the-public forums very likely expanded beyond the 18-29-year-old age group and therefore suggests a strain of sentiment that is not just confined to youth voters. This would mean that there’s stronger third-party tendencies out there than what is obvious, despite the fact that the actual third-party candidates’ performances were relatively weak.

I didn’t recognize this strength when I argued in my pre-election article, “Why ‘Hope and Joy’ is a Stronger Message than ‘Hope and Change’”, that “joy” is a better political aspiration in this era because people are probably more disillusioned by the lack of effective “change” while also being tired of the negativity and America-bashing of MAGA and Trumpism.

Turns out people are not disillusioned with change and feel justified in the bashing of America. Change in top leadership could equate to hope that something will be done to fix our problems. Since there will always be problems, and therefore the challenge to fix them ongoing, change may be a perpetual outcome desired by voters. And the intensity of the desire for change is likely higher during times of higher stress and discontent, as we seem to be living through right now.

The great swallowing up

It tends to be that when a popular movement arises, a major party swallows it up to take advantage. For example, the most recent strong libertarian political movement has been co-opted by a previously moderate Republican Party. First, legitimate libertarian Ron Paul ran an unsuccessful but noisy campaign for president in 2008 as a Republican, when he had previously run as the Libertarian Party candidate; then the Tea Party faction of Republicans gained steam. Now they are an established wing of the party called the Freedom Caucus.

It certainly is feasible that what we are seeing now is a strong “change at any cost” strain in the electorate that is being swallowed up by Republicans. This would normally be a more extreme third-party type of position. But instead of a separate movement getting 15-20% of the vote and tilting the election—as occurred in 1992 with Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, and Ross Perot as the third-party spoiler—Republicans have co-opted it to take advantage and have a larger coalition.

Democrats could benefit from the same thing in 2026, 2028 and beyond. After all, Bernie Sanders had very strong showings in the Democratic primaries of 2016 and 2020. His runs were powerful enough to need a coalition of moderates to keep him from winning. Sanders is a politician that definitely resembles a third-party type of candidate.

It very well could be that we are seeing weaker third parties as a result of the two major parties evolving in this way. For third-party advocates, this may not be a welcome change.

On the other hand, it more than likely means that third-party sentiment is in the mainstream, and upcoming political outcomes will be determined accordingly.

Therefore, a third-party advocate might consider this a long-awaited victory.