3rd Party Candidates Did Well This Year

Lately on social media I’ve read a lot of people express big disappointment with the 2 party system. I had a feeling voter turnout for 3rd parties would be higher in this election cycle as compared to others in recent years. So far both Gary Johnson and Jill Stein of the Green party have grabbed roughly about 5% of the vote. Additionally, that number could rise higher since a few states are still counting ballots. While that percentage is not near enough to obtain electoral votes, the norm for 3rd party candidates is usually less than 1%.

 

I’ve have an interesting article copied down below that echoes and elaborates on some of the things I wrote about in my last blog.

 

Gary Johnson ran an impressive campaign during the presidential election, attracted a strong number of independent voters who felt disenfranchised by the establishment. Gary Johnson did sometimes get featured unfavorably in the news, such as with his now notorious Aleppo comment. And at times, his running mate Bill Weld seemed to almost encourage people to vote for Hillary Clinton instead.

But despite all of this, Johnson ran a strong campaign and got a lot of votes. Exactly how well did he do?

According to the latest results, Johnson brought in 4,042,291 votes. That’s a huge jump over his 2012 campaign, when he brought in 1.2 million votes. Unfortunately, his current number of votes comes in at 3.2 percent, just shy of the 5 percent he needs to qualify the Libertarian party for federal funding in the next election. He did not get any electoral votes.

 

His highest percentages were in New Mexico at 9.3 percent and North Dakota at 6.3 percent. He also had a few states coming in at over 5 percent.

Johnson may not have gotten 5 percent, but he’s demonstrating that the Libertarians are on an upward trend. And as some supporters have pointed out, with 4 million votes, if every person donated $5, they’d have $20 million in donations and wouldn’t need federal funding for the next presidential election.

 

Source:

http://heavy.com/news/2016/11/how-many-votes-electoral-did-gary-johnson-get-in-the-presidential-election-libertarian/

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