Sick of Clinton, Trump, some SC voters looking to third-party candidates

Eric Jones will sleep well the night of Nov. 8, knowing he did not cast a vote to send Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump to the White House.

The 45-year-old Mount Pleasant resident plans to vote for Gary Johnson, even though he knows the Libertarian Party candidate does not stand a chance of becoming America’s next president.

“Even if the person you voted for does not win, you are still sending the message you want to send,” said Jones, an information technology network engineer. “Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil.”

Disdain for both major parties’ candidates likely will give third-party candidates a boost in South Carolina this fall. Some voters see Democrat Clinton as crooked and Republican Trump as a maniac – and fear putting either in charge of the free world.

Rather than accept the offerings of the two political parties, some S.C. residents say voting third party is a principled alternative – one they hope sends a message that the U.S. political system is broken.

Third-party struggles

Despite the lack of excitement among many for Clinton or Trump, Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein stand little chance – in South Carolina or elsewhere.

For now, the state has more “undecided” voters than Johnson or Stein fans, polls show. And both third-party candidates trail far behind Clinton and Trump.

South Carolina has voted for a third-party presidential candidate only once. That was in 1948, when the tremendously popular Strom Thurmond, then S.C. governor, ran as the candidate for the segregationist States’ Rights Democratic Party.

Longtime Alabama Gov. George Wallace came close to winning in South Carolina as the American Independent Party’s candidate in 1968. Running on a pro-segregation platform, Wallace captured 32.3 percent of the S.C. vote, finishing second behind Republican Richard Nixon’s 38.1 percent.

But third-party candidates have struggled in the Palmetto State lately.

Not one has gained even 1 percent of the S.C. vote since 1996, when 5.6 percent of the Palmetto State’s voters picked Reform Party candidate Ross Perot.

This year, “protest voters” will change that, Winthrop University political scientist Scott Huffmon said. He predicts Johnson and Stein both will land a single-digit percentage of the S.C. vote in November.

“It’s more about who they are running against than what ideas they stand for.”

A more reasonable alternative

Frank Rodgers, a 26-year-old University of South Carolina School of Medicine student, said he will cast his vote about as much for Johnson as he will against the two major-party candidates.

Like many millennials, Rodgers, a Republican from Columbia, is fiscally conservative but liberal on social issues.

Rodgers shares with the former New Mexico governor a concern about the rising national debt and a belief that immigrants should have a simpler path to entering and working legally in the United States.

But he thinks Johnson’s drug policy – the Libertarian has talked about a future where all drugs are legal – is a “bit too extremist.” And Rodgers says Johnson’s plan to establish a flat consumer tax and abolish the Internal Revenue Service is far-fetched.

Still, Rodgers said he has been turned off in recent years by “oppositional” GOP rhetoric and sees Johnson as an alternative for reasonable voters sick of political gridlock.

“There’s a lot of people in the middle that we’re leaving out,” Rodgers said. “That’s a niche that isn’t being filled right now.”

Disaffected voters far left of the middle are jumping ship to Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

Marie Craig, a 56-year-old registered nurse from Aiken and former Bernie Sanders supporter, landed with Stein after Clinton won the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention.

Craig said she likes that Stein supports universal health care, the environment, raising the minimum wage and providing a free college education while opposing war. She also says Clinton and Trump are “evil 1-percenters that don’t understand real people.”

“They’re in it for what they can get for themselves and their elite donors,” Craig said. “There’s just nothing about them that I like.”

Bert Cutts, a 49-year-old stay-at-home dad from Irmo, said his vote for Stein will be his first principled vote in years. He said he voted for President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 out of fear of the GOP nominees.

“The bottom line is I am tired of the politics of fear,” said Cutts, an environmentalist who worked for Greenpeace in his early 20s. “I just refuse to have my vote manipulated by fear peddlers.”

Change on the horizon?

Cutts and other S.C. third-party voters reject the idea that they are wasting their votes. A vote still sends a message, they say.

Some say strong showings for Johnson and Stein can signal a groundswell of dissatisfaction with the two major parties and incite debate about the U.S. political system.

“We have to start somewhere telling the establishment that we’re not happy with the way things are,” Craig said. “I don’t think voting for my values is throwing my vote away.”

Johnson supporters Jones and Rodgers said they hope third-party support will persuade the presidential debate commission to review its requirements for allowing third-party candidates into future debates.

“There is no justification for excluding a candidate who is on the ballot in all 50 states and D.C., especially one who is polling around 10 percent,” Jones said, referring to Libertarian Johnson.

Others, like Cutts, want an end to the two-party system itself. “We need more voices, and we’re getting them,” he said.

However, Winthrop political scientist Huffmon says a sea change is highly unlikely.

Election rules that award districts to the winner of even only a plurality – such as the electoral college system – tend to favor a two-party system, he said, adding third parties can rise up only by killing off one of the two in power.

Also, the criticisms of the existing two parties are not new, the political scientist added.

“All of that is said the exact same way in every cycle by all of the third-party supporters,” Huffmon said. “None of that rhetoric is new. The only new thing, perhaps, is who is saying it and who is listening.”

This story was originally published September 25, 2016 at 7:01 PM.