Gaging the Third Party Vote

There’s been a lot of talk about Rex Rammell and whether he could be a spoiler in Jim Risch’s Senate campaign. Few have gone and looked back at the 2006 election. In 2006, right after the incidents Mr. Rammell is concerned with, William Charles Wellisch was the Constitution Party nominee and got 2.35% of the vote. Two third party candidates in the Brady-Otter race got 3.23% of the vote, and one left-leaning candidate, one centrist candidate, and one right-leaning candidate got 5.26% of the vote against Bill Sali in District 1.

Let’s take that 5.26% and as a reasonable high water mark for what the 3 candidates could accomplish, so that’s a gain of 2.91% over what William Charles Wellisch got. However, that’s not even the gain that LaRocco would get out of this. Party leaders on both sides imagine third party votes coming directly out of the hide of one party or another, but when surveys are done, they show a different story. For example, 47% of Nader’s voters would have voted for Gore, 21% for Bush, and the rest wouldn’t have voted. Thus it is with this third party gain.

One might wonder how people who would otherwise vote for Larry LaRocco would choose to vote for Rex Rammell.  If you’re mad at the Republicans (even if you’re not too happy with Democrats), if a Democrat is the only other choice on the ballot, your only option to express your disdain is a vote for a Democrat. However, Kent Marmon, Pro-Life (The Candidate formerly known as Marvin Richardson),  and Rammell provide voters three ways to express their disdain without voting Democrat.

However, lets be generous and assume only 20% of that 2.91% would vote for LaRocco if not for Third Party candidates and that 20% would skip the Senate line without third party candidates. By my calculations, the presence of three third party candidates instead of one would cut Risch’s margin by 1.16%. Now all LaRocco has to do is make up the other 17.5%.