Fear of a Third Party
The Electoral College is holding a nation of millions back.
There’s a surprising amount of consternation surrounding the possibility that some candidates who will likely get a minuscule number of votes in the 2024 Presidential election will hand the election to Donald Trump.
Steven Shepard, POLITICO’s senior campaign and elections editor and chief polling analyst, gets right to the chase with the headline, “The Electoral College is the big factor in a third-party nightmare for Democrats.”
Democrats are rightly spooked by the prospect of credible third-party candidates this cycle.
Third-party candidates tend to get the most traction when there’s greater-than-usual dissatisfaction with the major party presidential candidates — like in 2016, when Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump had favorability ratings of just 43 percent and 38 percent, respectively.
If 2024 is a rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden, third-party candidates could get even more traction — with both holding nearly identical 39-percent favorable ratings, according to RealClearPolitics’ average.
This comes just as the bipartisan group No Labels is set to host Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and former Republican Utah Republican Gov. Jon Huntsman at an event in New Hampshire next week. And No Labels isn’t the only one: Academic Cornel West is jockeying for the Green Party nomination.
But “No Labels” (which, as we are required to note every time we mention them, is itself a label) has been “Fighting the extremes since 2009” and losing badly. And, while I’ve grudgingly come to admire West over time, it’s not at all clear who thinks he should be President of the United States.
Indeed, Shepard points to evidence for how little minor party candidates matter.
But there is one point of solace for Democrats: Voters in battleground states have been less likely to vote third party in recent elections than those in less competitive states.
According to a POLITICO analysis, none of the top 20 states for third-party voting in the past two presidential elections is broadly considered a swing state, and only three of the top 20 were states where the winning candidate’s margin in 2020 was within single digits: Minnesota (No. 11, Biden +7), Maine (No. 13, Biden +9) and Iowa (No. 19, Trump +8).
Which makes sense, right? While voters aren’t known for being super well-informed, those who care enough about politics to even know there are candidates on the ballot other than the two major party nominees are likely to also know that the Electoral College is a thing and whether their state’s delegation is truly up for grabs.
So, if, like my co-blogger Steven Taylor, I still lived in Alabama, I wouldn’t hesitate to vote for a Manchin-Huntsman ticket to send a message—or, hell, West just for fun—because there’s simply zero chance that the Republican nominee won’t carry the state by a landslide. Virginia, where I now live, was a solid red state when I moved here twenty-one years ago but it’s now voted Democrat in four straight elections and the margins haven’t been all that close. Still, I’d be more reticent to “waste” my vote here. If I lived in a true swing state, say, Pennsylvania or Ohio, I would always vote for the major party candidate that I least disliked.*
That doesn’t mean well-funded third-party candidates with significant or universal ballot access don’t pose a major threat to Biden. Analysis of way-too-early polling by FiveThirtyEight suggests that those third-party candidates currently draw more voters away from Biden than Trump.
But that’s only because Trump’s floor and ceiling are essentially the same. Further, not only do the theoretical candidacies of Joe Manchin, Larry Hogan, and Cornel West have negligible impact in the linked polling but the margins shown are for a national race, not the state-by-state contests that would actually happen.
Indeed, Shepard agrees.
But the Electoral College — which has otherwise favored Republicans in the Trump era — could blunt those effects.
Since the formation of the two-party system in the 19th century, no outside candidate has ever won the presidency — or even come close. In the past 100 years, only three third-party candidates have even carried a single state in the Electoral College: progressive favorite son Robert La Follette won Wisconsin in 1924, then-South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond carried four Southern states as a segregationist “Dixiecrat” in 1948 and former Alabama Gov. George Wallace won five states in the same region on a similar platform in 1968.
In more recent years, Ross Perot set the high-water mark for independent candidates: 18.9 percent in 1992. Other than Perot’s 1992 and 1996 performances, only one other third-party candidate has won more than 3 percent of the national popular vote: Libertarian Gary Johnson in 2016.
Ah, but there are the two oft-cited cases where these negligible votes possibly mattered:
But third-party candidates don’t need to have large magnitudes of support to swing an election. Ralph Nader, the Green Party nominee in 2000, may have tipped that election away from Al Gore and toward George W. Bush by earning 2.7 percent of the national vote. And while the Green Party’s 2016 candidate, Jill Stein, only received a little over 1 percent, her share of the vote in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the three decisive states Trump flipped that year — exceeded Trump’s winning margin over Clinton.
There is, of course, no evidence that Nader voters in 2000 or Stein voters in 2016 would have bothered to show up to cast a ballot for Gore or Clinton, respectively. Still, it’s reasonable to assume that those who voted for the progressive third-party candidate would have preferred the Democrat to the Republican if offered a chance to change their vote knowing that it would have affected the outcome. (It’s also true that the 2020 analysis conveniently ignores that Libertarian Gary Johnson, who had been a Republican governor of New Mexico, garnered three times more votes than Stein.)
After quite a bit more exploration of the variable tendency among the states to vote for third-party candidates, Shepard offers,
West could be more formidable, however. He’s a longtime public figure who could harness some of the liberal dissatisfaction with Biden’s presidency so far — particularly among otherwise solidly Democratic voting blocs.
Note that he’s comparing West to non-entities Stein and Howie Hawkins, not Johnson or Nader.
That dissatisfaction is real, and it’s one reason why a 2024 rematch could look more like 2016 — when third-party candidates combined exceeded 5 percent of the vote — than 2020. Both Biden and Trump have average favorability ratings hovering below 40 percent, roughly equal to Trump’s 2016 measurement but trailing Clinton in 2016 (43 percent), Trump in 2020 (46 percent) and Biden in 2020 (52 percent).
In 2016, 18 percent of voters viewed both candidates, Trump and Clinton, unfavorably. They broke largely for the first-time candidate, 47 percent to 30 percent, with nearly one in four of those voters, 23 percent, supporting other candidates.
In 2020, only 3 percent of voters said they had an unfavorable opinion of both Biden and Trump, limiting the appetite for other candidates.
But a lot has happened since November 2020: The Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. Twin Trump indictments — so far — which may be solidifying Trump’s base in the primary at the expense of voters he’d need to win a general election. Biden’s job performance is viewed negatively by most voters, and a majority says it’s concerned about his ability to serve another term at his age.
Biden and Trump won’t necessarily stay at 39 percent if they face off in the general election, as both campaigns will attempt to boost their standings. But as Democrats fret about third-party candidacies seemingly engineered to draw from the two ideological ends of their party, the ingredients are there for another volatile race beyond just the top two names on the ballot.
In the above-linked poll, FiveThirtyEight’s senior elections analyst Geoffrey Skelley likewise points to “Why A Third-Party Candidate Might Help Trump — And Spoil The Election For Biden.” After preliminaries rehashing ground already covered above, he explains,
Initial evidence suggests that, in a rematch between Biden and Trump, a No Labels and/or West campaign could pull marginal support from Biden and subtly shift the election toward Trump. Whether this would actually make for a potential spoiler, though, is a different question: History — and common sense — suggest that these possible third-party candidates would be most likely to affect the outcome if the overall race were close. But in our deeply divided political era, close elections have been the norm, which makes a spoiler candidacy a live possibility.
[…]
Across the polls, Trump tended to more firmly hold on to Republicans than Biden did Democrats, while the shifts in preferences among independents were inconsistent. Data for Progress’s poll examining Hogan’s possible impact found that Trump benefited from Biden’s reduced advantage among independents, while Echelon Insights’s survey testing Manchin found more Democrats broke away from Biden to select Manchin than Republicans left Trump. Meanwhile, polls from Emerson College and Echelon Insights measuring West’s impact found the progressive mainly cutting into Biden’s support among Democrats, although the Emerson survey also showed more independents shifting away from Biden than Trump.
Now, we should be cautious about reading too much into these surveys. After all, we are talking about small overall movements that lie inside the margin of error for each poll. That consideration also applies when trying to analyze who shifted, given that margins of error are larger for subgroups within a survey’s overall sample. More broadly, surveys conducted this far out from the general election historically have had little predictive value. Additionally, third-party candidates often poll better farther away from Election Day, when the stakes of the election are lower — and millions of dollars in general election advertising have yet to be spent. And finally, not every third-party voter would vote for a Democrat or Republican if their preferred candidate didn’t run, so we can’t assume that, say, a Green Party voter would back a Democrat or a Libertarian would vote Republican.
Nevertheless, these early polls demonstrate how a third-party option could affect the election and potentially boost Trump in a rematch against Biden. Let’s look at a hypothetical scenario using the 2020 election. Biden won the national popular vote by about 4.5 percentage points, but he carried Wisconsin — the “tipping-point state” that gave him a majority in the Electoral College — by just under 1 point. We can’t know precisely how a national swing to the right of the magnitude found in these early surveys might’ve played out in each individual state, but suffice it to say that a shift of 1 to 2 points in margin toward the GOP could have handed Trump victory via the electoral votes in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all of which were decided by margins under 1.2 points. Given that recent presidential elections have been close — we live in an era of intense partisanship in a pretty evenly divided country where five of the past six had a national popular vote margin smaller than 5 points — there’s ample evidence to suggest that 2024 will be another close election, by historical standards.
Look, I’ll almost certainly vote for Biden again come 2024. But it’s frustrating how much the artifact of the Electoral College—which Steven and I have noted time and again in no way functions in the way the Framers envisioned**—impacts our discussions of Presidential campaigns. I get why that’s the case, of course, but there’s something fundamentally wrong about a situation where the voters overwhelmingly dislike both the sitting President and his odds-on challenger and the fact that other candidates might emerge to offer voters an alternative they like better is considered a problem.
Indeed, Skelley backhandedly concedes as much,
To be clear, third-party campaigns don’t have to care one iota about how their presence might affect an election. They want to offer something they believe the major parties aren’t giving voters, in this case an unambiguously progressive platform (West) or a bipartisan and centrist-minded approach (No Labels).
before shifting back to the standard “spoiler” framing:
No Labels in particular has found itself mired in conversations about how it might potentially help Trump. Some former friends of No Labels, such as the centrist Democratic outfit Third Way and moderate Democrats on Capitol Hill, have criticized its efforts because they might benefit Trump. No Labels’s connections to some GOP donors have also prompted accusations that the group’s presidential campaign is a vehicle aimed at — wittingly or not — helping Trump win, a claim No Labels rejects.
In an interview with FiveThirtyEight, Ryan Clancy, No Labels’s chief strategist, pushed back against the notion that a No Labels ticket would act as a spoiler. “What is a spoiler?” he asked rhetorically. “One, it’s a candidate who isn’t going to win. Two, it’s a candidate whose votes would come almost entirely from one side.” Clancy argued that unlike, say, a Green Party candidate pulling mostly from the left, a No Labels ticket would seek to attract similar shares of support from independents who lean toward either party by offering a truly viable third option — a rarity in most presidential elections. Clancy cited Ross Perot’s campaign in 1992 as precedent for how No Labels hopes to broadly appeal to the electorate. Back then, exit polls suggested Perot’s voters would’ve split evenly between incumbent Republican George H.W. Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton, and around one-fifth would’ve voted for a different third party or wouldn’t have voted at all.
[…]
Clancy explained that the group’s initial polling in December suggested that around 3 in 5 voters would consider backing a “moderate independent” candidate for president. If the group could win 3 in 5 of that universe of voters, it could get to 270 electoral votes. But if that ceiling of support becomes significantly lower in the next six to nine months — before the group’s April convention — then No Labels would take that as a “warning sign” that its ticket can’t win. “There is absolutely an outcome where we may not offer our ballot line to anybody,” Clancy said.
While No Labels understandably pointed to the Perot example, a potential centrist ticket isn’t guaranteed to take roughly the same from each major party. In the 1980 election between Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter and Republican Ronald Reagan, moderate independent John Anderson won roughly 7 percent nationally and may have cost Carter victory in some Northeastern states, as the ABC News exit poll suggested Anderson’s supporters would’ve split for Carter 49 percent to 38 percent over Reagan. To be sure, Anderson didn’t “spoil” the election for Carter (Reagan won easily), but he did take more from one side and likely affected the outcome in a few states.
While I wasn’t old enough to vote in 1980, that was the first election to which I paid serious attention. It’s notable that Anderson was a sore loser candidate who ran as an independent after failing to secure the Republican nomination.
Regardless, it’s amusing that No Labels is simultaneously rejecting the “spoiler” label and yet recognizing that it could be a spoiler. While there’s a vague Perot-style “If the voters in all 50 states put me on the ballot . . .” feel to this, it’s interesting to both be putting together a platform and possible presidential slate and yet being willing not to run if they think the result is to help Trump.
It’s also somewhat amusing that yet another group, which apparently actually does lack a label, is forming to stop No Labels.
Former House Democratic leader Richard A. Gephardt is planning to launch a new bipartisan group next week [This report is five days old -ed.] to oppose the No Labels third-party presidential effort, according to people familiar with the plans.
The new group has already commissioned private polling showing that a generic “moderate, independent third-party candidate” would pull more votes away from President Biden than former president Donald Trump in a hypothetical three-way race, all but assuring the Republican wins back the White House.
“No Labels equals Trump,” said Greg Schneiders, a former aide to President Jimmy Carter whose firm Prime Group has conducted the polling for the Gephardt group. “It is going to affect the race and it is going to affect it negatively for Biden, and it is probably going to elect Donald Trump.”
Stuart Stevens, a Republican consultant who has worked for the presidential campaigns of Bob Dole, George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, has also joined the effort, along with former senator Doug Jones (D-Ala.). A person familiar with the plans said the nascent effort is working to sign up more political leaders, will disclose their donors and plans to formally release their polling, which includes samples in seven swing states.
Not surprisingly, No Labels isn’t happy.
No Labels founding chairman Joseph Lieberman, a former U.S. senator from Connecticut who ran for office both as a Democrat and independent, said the effort to stop the No Labels project was an effort to deny Americans options.
“They are really working overtime to prevent the voters from a choice,” he said. “We feel that the voters in this country deserve a third choice, a bipartisan choice. And I will also repeat that we will not be spoilers in this.”
Former Maryland governor Larry Hogan (R) and former House member Fred Upton (R-Mich.) also issued statements voicing continued support for the No Labels effort.
“Panicked Washington insiders in the Democratic Party who claim to oppose voter suppression are actively working to suppress the vote and to deny choice,” Hogan said.
Both things can, of course, be true. In an ideal world, I would vastly prefer other alternatives. While I would vote for Cornel West if the only alternative were Trump, his presence on the ballot wouldn’t lure me away from Biden. But, in a different political system, I might well be enticed by a ticket with some combination of Huntsman or Hogan and a moderate Democrat. (Joe Manchin seems the obvious choice since he’s the Democratic co-chair. The possibility of him running seems to have some fearful. But he’s not exactly popular and, at 77 come Election Day, he’s too old given that one of the reasons people want a third choice is that Biden and Trump are geriatric.)
Because our system is in fact our system, though, voting for your preferred ticket is consider “wasting” your vote and has the potential of electing your least-favorite of the viable candidates. And that’s not a problem with either No Labels or Cornel West but of the system.
_________________
*As a matter of actual practice, I’ve voted for a major party candidate in every presidential election since becoming eligible to vote in 1984, either because I genuinely liked the candidate or because I felt like I needed to actually choose among the prospective winners. So far as I can recall, the only time I ever voted third party was in a House race where the incumbent was essentially unopposed.
**See, for example, Steven’s 2010 post “Against the Electoral College II: Not As Framers Intended” or my 2021 post “Stop Blaming the Framers for Everything.”
Have you seen the No Labels “platform”? Meaningless pablum constructed either by wishy-washy ditherers who think Solomon’s “cut the baby in half” solution was wisdom rather than cunning or, and this is more likely, a con job assembled from whatever discards were at hand by political consultants otherwise shut out of the Democratic or Republican gravy trains.
@MarkedMan:
I’m waiting for the Republican Party to be renamed The Trump Party.
@MarkedMan: I haven’t paid much attention but, yes, there seems to be some triangulation going on in trying to find compromise positions on issues where there’s really no middle ground. But, even if they were viable as a party, it doesn’t much matter until we get to the point where they have candidates. Candidates matter a whole lot more than platforms.
When they tell you who they are …
What’s the influence of news outlets writing scare pieces to get views?
I suspect that prior to 2000, a lot more voters weren’t aware the president isn’t chosen by popular vote.
Also, the very concept of battleground states has narrowed over time. In 2020, I’d say there were eight core battlegrounds (PA, MI, WI, NC, GA, FL, AZ, NV) and a handful of marginal/potential ones. In historical close elections like 1960, 1976, and 2000, the number was much higher—typically around 20 or so. And they used to change from one election to the next much more often than they do today.
In 1992, the Perot factor probably increased people’s feeling that all or most of the states were up for grabs. And we know now that was a major realigning election—it ended a 20-year streak of Republican domination of the presidency broken only briefly by Carter’s 1976 win, and it was the election when a bunch of historically Republican states solidified into Democratic strongholds. It took some time before these shifts were recognized as long-lasting and not simply a fluke (as late as 2000 Republicans were still investing campaign resources in attempting to flip California). There’s been an increasing stability in which states are viewed as battlegrounds, which makes it easier for voters to digest the concept.
But that doesn’t mean people are always guessing correctly—in 2016 think about how many voters there may have been in states like Michigan or Wisconsin who voted third party or didn’t vote at all because they assumed they were part of the so-called “blue wall.”
@gVOR10: While they’ve had next to no impact, they’re clearly a mix of Democrats and Republicans. Indeed, your two quotes demonstrate this: Lieberman was the Democratic nominee for VP in 2000. Charitably, they’re centrists who think the two major parties have been taken over by the ideologues. More cynically, they’re has-beens who don’t appeal to their former parties and are looking for a new avenue to power. These are not mutually exclusive positions.
@Kylopod: The reason “they used to change from one election to the next much more often than they do today” is that parties have sorted over the last 30ish years. The Southern Democrat of the 1960s, 1970s, and even well into the 1980s became a Republican and the Northeastern (“Rockefeller”) Republicans all but ceased to exist. Hell, California was a reliable Red state through the 1988 election.
@James Joyner:
While I agree, this was reflective of trends that had been going on for at least half a century—the Democratic Party’s adoption of a civil rights plank in 1948, followed by Strom Thurmond’s third-party run that year, is basically when it started.
And even just a couple of decades before that, the Great Depression and the rise of FDR scrambled the political alignments of that time and in some ways laid the groundwork for the North-South swap. (FDR maintained hold of the Dixiecrats, but there was already tension building, and the newer voters from the North would eventually reshape the entire party.) You really have to go back to the period between the end of Reconstruction and the 1930s to see the kind of state-level partisan stability that even superficially resembles what we see today—and even then, it was different in a lot of ways. The Democratic control of the South was due to enforced disenfranchisement of millions of voters. And politics wasn’t nationalized in anything approaching the way it is today. If anything, the states’ partisan leanings were heavily the result of local factors and issues. That’s why I think the situation we see today, where the vast majority of states are either overwhelmingly Republican or overwhelmingly Democratic, and the handful of swing states are simply states where the partisan numbers are roughly evenly divided, is highly unprecedented—and presents unique challenges in terms of how unrepresentative the EC really is.
@James Joyner:
Lieberman has been on a mission of spite ever since he lost the Democratic primary in 2006. He stayed in the Democratic caucus, but he not only endorsed McCain for president in 2008, but spoke at the convention, trashed Obama on the campaign trail, and was the leading contender for McCain’s running mate before McCain’s aides talked him out of it. He then spent the rest of his Senate tenure being a thorn in the side of the party he left behind.
Lieberman began his Senate career by defeating Lowell Weicker in one of the last elections where the Democrat was seen as being to the right of his Republican rival—he was endorsed by Buckley and given significant backing from the Republican establishment even though it stood in the way of their attempt to recapture the Senate. But this soon coincided with the rise of the DLC and Bill Clinton, where the moderate/maverick branding was welcomed in the party and was given fawning media coverage. (Remember when Lieberman was dubbed “the conscience of the Senate”?) That all started to collapse after 9/11 and Bush’s War on Terror, where Lieberman’s politics became increasingly out of step with the party, leading his own former running mate to endorse Howard Dean over him in 2004 (which he was reportedly very angry about), and leading eventually to his primary loss in 2006. He lost his cherished place at the table, and he’s been on a mission of vengeance ever since.
And supported McCain in 2008, even being considered for McCain’s veep, refrained from endorsing Obama in 2012, was reelected in 2006 as some sort of independent after losing the D primary, and then retired facing low poll numbers. My point isn’t to claim that Lieberman is a Republican, but that he isn’t a D, being loyal only to Joe Lieberman. And as such indicative of what No Labels is.
Charitably indeed. Or perhaps fairly applied, but only to a few innocents among them. And this is clearly not a path back to power for the opportunists. Only a way to keep the grift going.
The fact is, as you say, the system is what it is and they can accomplish nothing but be a spoiler. So the only relevant question is on whose behalf will they spoil. Will that decision be driven by the money men or the naïfs?
You’re assuming that the third party voters are reasonable people.
“Corporate Democrats are the worst, etc.” is a hallmark of the third party left. They will hold their nose while voting a few times, but then stop.
And an awful lot of them will go from “people would support our policies if given a chance” to “well, maybe a dictatorship of the proletariat would be ok” to “Putin makes a pretty convincing argument for just a plain old dictatorship.” They get involved in BDS for the principled stand, but stay for the antisemitism.
I don’t trust the far left, even some of the Democrats*. They’re often just Tankies, or will be soon.
——
*: AOC seems pretty genuine and grounded, not sure about the rest of the squad. I’d put the dividing line between AOC and 2008 Dennis Kucinich. (2023 Kucinich is campaign manager for RFK Jr)
This makes me wonder why RFK is talking about running now. To me he is a total crackpot but in polls, I know it’s early, he gets a surprising amount of support. Who talked him into running now and from where is he getting his financial support?
Steve
@MarkedMan:
I always look at the energy and the environment policies. The No Labels policy is basically “Yeah, many Americans are concerned about climate change, and some green energy jobs would be nice, but… America’s real energy problem is it’s too damned expensive! So we need to keep burning fossil fuels, and drill and mine and build new nukes.
@steve: There’s a fair amount of reasonable speculation that RFK was encouraged to throw his hat in the ring by none other than Steve Bannon.
https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannon-has-spent-years-promoting-rfk-jr-and-his-crackpot-anti-vaccine-theories
@Gustopher:
I’m sure that’s true for the majority of Green Party voters. Most of them aren’t potential Democratic votes, they’re people who otherwise wouldn’t have voted. But it only takes a small number of defections to make a difference.
As I’ve said before, I don’t believe Jill Stein singlehandedly threw the 2016 election to Trump, whereas I do think that was the case for Nader and Bush in 2000 (though not 2004). So basically I think the third-party threat is a real concern, but often overblown.
I think Stein was part of a larger problem which was the lack of a sense of urgency. Various people on the left and right claimed to disapprove of Trump, but they didn’t treat the possibility of him winning as an impending catastrophe we needed to do our utmost to prevent. This “meh” attitude was reflected in the relatively high third-party voting that year, but I think the larger impact was in people who simply didn’t bother to vote.
You are spending entirely too much time and thought on these losers.
They are not third parties, they are Republican ratf**ks.
@Jen:
I assume just to create havoc.
The only Democrats who are spooked by No Labels are the ones who are required by their profession to pay attention while reading articles about No Labels.
According to the NoLabels collection of old out-of-touch white guys cosplaying as serious people, bipartisan centrist means Republican economic positions, mouth noises on everything else, and personal vendettas all presented with no conviction.
This thread includes a far more detailed analysis of them than their own candidacy has done of any issue ever, and we are all dumber for steelmanning their arguments.
@Gavin: I want more thumbs for this comment.
Despite significant reservations about his age, I will almost certainly vote for Biden, but I have no sympathy for partisans and the two major parties here. The best thing they could do to prevent people from voting for third parties is to nominate popular candidates that a majority of Americans like. That’s what normal parties do. So I do not at all blame people who, looking at their choices, decide that neither is acceptable and vote for a candidate who “can’t win.”
@Andy:
I used to think this way too Andy , but I’ve steadily come around to blaming the voters and our structural problem (the Electoral College).
The two came together ignominiously in 2016 when a sufficient number of voters in 7 pivital states decided to force the nation to take a swim in the Trump cesspool.
People had a choice, maybe not a great one Hillary and Trump, but they decided to go with the malevolent idiot who wanted to tear it all down, and he nearly did. And Trump is now well on his way to getting another chance to burn it down.
So, should I blame Republicans? Maybe for 27% of this, but the rest falls to the voters who elect idiots and nihilists to Congress and in 2016 to the White House.