Posts misleadingly blame third-party votes for Republican victory

Donald Trump secured a clear victory in the 2024 presidential election, but some online posts claimed Kamala Harris would have won several key states if not for ballots cast for third-party candidates. This misrepresents available data — preliminary totals show that even with all the non-Trump votes in the seven biggest battlegrounds, the vice president would not have secured an Electoral College win.

“4 key swing states red entirely because of third party voters,” a November 5, 2024 post on X.

Since the November 5 election, similar claims — primarily targeted at Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and Libertarian Chase Oliver — sought to pin the Democrat’s loss in several swing states to third-party votes.

“The lefty degenerates have been threatening to vote third party or not at all for the entire year and *now* they’re urging the Biden-Harris administration to ‘do something’ before Trump takes over? Babes, the election was the time to ‘do something’ and you opted out. Enjoy!,” said another widely shared X post.

But the claims are not supported by available data.

Based on votes counted through November 18, Trump had nearly 3 million more votes than Harris (archived here) — a still-to-be-certified lead that puts him on course to be the first Republican president in 20 years to win the popular vote.

NBC News reported that third-party votes totaled around 2.7 million (archived here) as of November 18.

“The Republican victory in 2024 cannot be explained by the existence of third parties,” Northwestern University’s Data Science faculty director Thomas William Miller (archived here) said on November 6.

Atiba Ellis, a professor of law at Case Western Reserve University specializing in voting rights, agreed (archived here).

“President-elect Trump won squarely because he out-performed Vice President Harris with his traditional constituency, white male and white female voters,” he said on November 6.

Trump also “improved his performance with Latino voters and made some small gains across other demographics.”

AFP examined how both candidates and major third parties scored, in the seven battleground states of the 2024 election, according to preliminary results.

Pennsylvania (19 electoral votes)

Trump appealed to rural voters to take the win with a margin of some 129,000 votes  (archived here).

Third-party votes, collectively, accounted for about 109,000 votes.

Georgia (16 electoral votes)

Preliminary results for third parties represented about 39,000 votes — not nearly enough to make up for the 115,000 vote gap between Trump and Harris (archived here).

North Carolina (16 electoral votes)

Trump also won by a comfortable margin in North Carolina, distancing himself from his Democratic opponent by some 186,000 votes, as preliminary results show.

The rest of the votes in the US presidential race add up to 85,000.

Nevada (6 electoral votes)

In Nevada, the race was significantly closer with a gap of some 46,000 votes between the two main parties, in favor of Trump, as preliminary results show.

Yet only 28,000 voted for third-party candidates.

Arizona (11 electoral votes)

Trump won Arizona by 185,000 votes, while third parties accounted for about 36,000, preliminary results showed.

Wisconsin (10 electoral votes)

Wisconsin was an exception, with results reported by NBC News showing the Republican candidate won by about 30,000 votes. In this case, it would have been possible for Harris to win the state if she secured a large majority of third-party votes.

Some 50,000 voters in Wisconsin chose third-party candidates, most of them selecting Stein, Oliver or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — nephew of the assassinated president John F. Kennedy and a long-time conspiracy theorist — who dropped out of the presidential race in August and endorsed Trump.

Michigan (15 electoral votes)

Trump won Michigan with a margin of nearly 80,000 votes — a gap that in theory could have been closed without third-party votes, although Harris would have required nearly all of the 87,000 cast for other candidates. 

Speaking to AFP after polls closed in Michigan, Stein pushed back against those branding her a “spoiler.”

“This is self-serving propaganda,” said Stein at a watch party in Dearborn on November 5. “They’re basically trying to blame and shame voters for exercising their values and for participating in the competition that elections are supposed to represent.”

Electoral college victory

Trump swept all seven swing states as he secured the Electoral College victory.

“There were only two states in the nation where the margins between Trump and Harris were close enough such that, if all third-party voters cast ballots for Harris instead, it would have flipped the state: Michigan (worth 15 electoral votes) and Wisconsin (worth 10 electoral votes),” sociologist Musa al-Gharbi said in an analysis (archived here) published on his blog on November 11.

However, even if every non-Trump vote in those two states swung to Harris, it would not change the outcome of the election. Harris needed 270 electoral votes to win the White House but fell far below that at 226.

“Third parties didn’t ‘spoil’ this race for Harris. She lost the race cleanly and decisively — both at the electoral college and popular vote levels — with or without third parties,” al-Gharbi concluded.

Experts said the Democratic Party failed to convince its electorate to show up at the polls in traditionally liberal strongholds such as Philadelphia and Detroit.

Exit polls showed Trump also got a boost from Latino voters, while Biden had largely beaten him with that part of the electorate four years ago.

Political scientist Larry Sabato (archived here) told AFP on November 6: “Some people wouldn’t have voted at all without their preferred choice as an option, others would have (believe it or not) picked Trump or perhaps RFK Jr. — if he were still on the ballot, as he was in a few states.”

AFP has debunked other false and misleading claims about the 2024 election.