Ross Ramsey reminds us there is a third person in the Texas Senate race.
Neal Dikeman
Libertarians and other third-party candidates have never won state elections in Texas and rarely make a meaningful difference in election results, with one big exception: As spoilers.
If recent indications of a close U.S. Senate race between U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican, and U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat, prove valid, a third candidate’s voters could spell the difference on Election Day.
“It will be the Libertarian voters who win this race,” says a hopeful Neal Dikeman, the Texas Libertarian candidate for the U.S. Senate.
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Most polls have Cruz ahead of O’Rourke — but only by single digits. The most recent survey, from Quinnipiac University, had Cruz ahead by 9 percentage points among likely voters. Dikeman wasn’t included in that one, and none of the respondents said they would vote for someone other than the two major-party candidates.
For what it’s worth, covering a nine-point spread would be a big reach for a Libertarian candidate. Most of the time, in races with both Democrats and Republicans, third parties do well to get half that amount. Their mileage varies: Mark Miller and Martina Salinas, a Libertarian and a Green, combined for 8.6 percent in the 2016 race for Texas Railroad Commission; that same year, the presidential candidates from those parties, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, combined for 3.9 percent.
But several late summer polls in the Texas race for U.S. Senate are closer than Quinnipiac’s latest, raising at least the possibility that support for Dikeman could amount to more than the final difference between Ted and Beto.
This was written before that Ipsos poll came out, but that doesn’t change the main point. The two points of interest is that there is a Libertarian candidate, which will affect the win number in this race, and that the polling we have seen so far has not really taken this into effect.
On point one, by “win number” I mean the actual minimum amount needed to finish first in the race. It’s not fifty percent because there are more than two candidates. I did a broad look at this before the 2014 elections, so let’s revisit that here. Each Senate race in recent years has had at least three candidates in it. What percentage of the vote was actually needed to win those races? Here’s a look:
Year Lib Green Else Total Win
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2014 2.88% 1.18% 0.02% 4.18% 47.91%
2012 2.06% 0.86% 2.92% 48.54%
2008 2.34% 2.34% 48.83%
2006 2.26% 2.26% 48.87%
2002 0.79% 0.55% 0.03% 1.37% 49.32%
“Win” is the minimum amount that would have won that year. There were write-in candidates in 2014 and 2002. The third party vote hasn’t amounted to much in these races, but it’s not nothing. As you can see, in each year after 2002, 49% was enough to win, and in 2014 48% was enough.
What about this year? Obviously, that depends on how much support Neal Dikeman ultimately attracts. History suggests that will be in the two to three percent range, but it’s at least possible it could be more. Given that nobody likes Ted Cruz, it may be that the number of Republicans who refuse to vote for him but won’t vote for a Democrat is higher than usual. If that’s the case, then Dikeman will be the beneficiary of that. It wouldn’t shock me if he got more like three or four percent.
We might get some feel for that if pollsters specifically included Dikeman in their candidate choices, especially now if everyone is switching to a likely voter model. Not because polling for third party candidates is particularly accurate – they almost always overstate third party support – but because it might give a clearer picture of the gap between Cruz and O’Rourke. I have to imagine that the Quinnipiac poll would have Cruz at something lower than 54 had Dikeman been named as a choice. Yes, the polls have included “don’t know” as a choice, but it’s not the same as an actual person. It’s my hope we’ll see polls like that going forward. After all, that 47% support Beto got in the Ipsos poll may be closer to a win than you might think.