It’s impossible for a third party to do that, because a runoff happens when no candidate gets >50% of the vote. Taking votes away from the other candidate wouldn’t impact that.
A third party’s purpose is to get a message out. If they can force a runoff, their voice gets that much stronger. They don’t change election outcomes in runoff states.
The spoiler is tailored well enough to pull one side
Enough people are removed from the voter rolls to impact percentages
Access to vote is hard enough in areas they want to be hard to vote in.
You dont deploy a single strategy. You leverage as many as you can.
Even if a runoff is triggered, if you pull enough away to start, you can get enough people to say “Well clearly we aren’t winning anyway” or the legal approach of “Well clearly the runoff was stolen!!”.
So your argument is that a somewhat popular third party would discourage people to vote in the runoff? Here are the votes for the general and the runoff:
general - 3,935,924 - Chase Oliver got 81,365
runoff - 3,541,877 - vote gap was 99,389
So ~400k people voted in the general that didn’t vote in the runoff, but only ~81k people voted for Chase Oliver, and the gap between the top two candidates in the final election was more than the total votes Chase Oliver got.
I don’t see any kind of causation here. Also, Oliver got fewer votes than the previous Libertarian Senate candidate in both of the two previous elections. He’s nothing special here.
Chase Oliver isn’t part of the problem whatsoever, turnout was fantastic in that election and any issues have to do with the governor.
It’s impossible for a third party to do that, because a runoff happens when no candidate gets >50% of the vote. Taking votes away from the other candidate wouldn’t impact that.
A third party’s purpose is to get a message out. If they can force a runoff, their voice gets that much stronger. They don’t change election outcomes in runoff states.
It absolutely works if…
You dont deploy a single strategy. You leverage as many as you can.
Even if a runoff is triggered, if you pull enough away to start, you can get enough people to say “Well clearly we aren’t winning anyway” or the legal approach of “Well clearly the runoff was stolen!!”.
Its all strategy for the same end goal.
So your argument is that a somewhat popular third party would discourage people to vote in the runoff? Here are the votes for the general and the runoff:
So ~400k people voted in the general that didn’t vote in the runoff, but only ~81k people voted for Chase Oliver, and the gap between the top two candidates in the final election was more than the total votes Chase Oliver got.
I don’t see any kind of causation here. Also, Oliver got fewer votes than the previous Libertarian Senate candidate in both of the two previous elections. He’s nothing special here.
Chase Oliver isn’t part of the problem whatsoever, turnout was fantastic in that election and any issues have to do with the governor.
OK buddy, enjoy your day.