One can imagine Democrats have greeted the news of Justin Amash’s third-party presidential run with concern, believing they’ve already suffered through one third-party nightmare and don’t need another, writes Keith Boag.
When news broke that Michigan congressman Justin Amash, an Independent, might suit up for the U.S. presidential race this year, a Never Trump Republican pundit, Tim Miller, fired off a dispirited tweet: “They are popping champagne in Trump Tower.”
A former Republican campaign operative, Miller says he loves Amash and would happily cheer his run for the presidency some other time, but not now.
Miller is all in for Democrat Joe Biden, the former vice-president and presumptive nominee in November.
Miller summed up his thoughts in a post on the conservative Donald Trump resistance site The Bulwark co-authored with publisher Sarah Longwell. They asked Amash to stand down.
“Could we be certain that a third-party campaign from a Constitutional conservative would not get Trump re-elected?” they asked. “The answer, unfortunately, is no.”
One can imagine Democrats all over the U.S. greeted the Amash news with similar trepidation — heavy sighs, anxious bites of the lower lip — believing they’ve already suffered through one third-party nightmare and don’t need another.
Suspicion of third-party runs
A big reason Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, goes a popular theory, is that she bled support to third-party candidates — mainly Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein — in the three states that Donald Trump took by a whisker (a combined 77,000 votes) to win the electoral college and the presidency.
There’s some evidence to back the theory, but not enough to prove it. The last election was not an outstanding year for “also-rans,” but they still won more than five per cent of the popular vote in an election with a razor-thin result.
If Amash can repeat that, and the race is narrow, he might be the spoiler who helps Trump to squeak back into the White House for another four years.
But that’s an enormous “if” in a political environment where since 2017, waves of anti-Trump voters have shown a single-minded determination to vote against Republicans in state and congressional elections.
Amash was elected to Congress in 2010 as a small-government Tea Party Republican from Michigan, and re-elected four times after that.
But he only began seeing his name in lights after he started publicly criticizing President Trump.
Amash once called him a “childish bully.” He quit the Republican Party in 2019 to sit as an Independent, and eventually cast a vo