Political junkies are paying a lot of attention to general-election polls matching Joe Biden and Donald Trump. But the reality is that this binary choice is not what voters will see on their ballots in November. Wildly varying ballot-access rules across the country will make for vastly different sets of candidate choices beyond the Democratic and Republican party lines. But some minor-party and independent presidential aspirants will be on the ballot in every state, and some will be eligible in the battleground states that will decide the election. So it’s a good thing when pollsters test the implications of a much broader landscape.
At this point, we know of three non-major-party candidates who have some hope of gaining significant ballot access. These are likely Green Party nominee Jill Stein (who notoriously might have hurt Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in 2016) in addition to independents Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (who briefly ran for the Democratic nomination) and Cornel West (who briefly ran for the Green nomination). There’s now enough public polling of a five-way race involving these candidates, along with Biden and Trump, to give us a sense of the dynamics.
The RealClearPolitics database currently includes 14 five-way national polls. Trump leads in 13 of them, and in the outlier (from Quinnipiac), a six-point Biden lead in the head-to-head matchup with Trump drops to two points when the other candidates are included. Overall, Trump leads Biden by 2.5 percent in the RCP averages of two-way polls and by 4.8 percent in five-way polls. There are also two sets of tracking surveys from Bloomberg–Morning Consult (one in November and another this week) examining two-way and five-way presidential contests in key battleground states. By and large, they show Trump doing a bit better when the non-major-party candidates are included (e.g., in the latest survey, a three-point Trump lead in Arizona in a head-to-head contest with Biden becomes an eight-point Trump lead in a five-way race; in Nevada, an eight-point two-way Trump lead balloons to a 12-point five-way lead).
There is one glaring problem with the five-way polls: A sixth candidate representing the Libertarian Party, the most successful minor party in recent years, will almost certainly be on the ballot in virtually every state. It’s unclear who that candidate will ultimately be; they will be chosen at a party convention in Maine, and there’s even some buzz now that RFK Jr. will seek the Libertarian nod. Speaking of Kennedy, there is also abundant three-way polling showing the ex-Democrat and anti-vaxx celebrity winning a significant share of the vote against Trump and Biden (19.3 percent in the RCP averages) and perhaps taking a bit more votes from the Republican than from the Democratic column (a Reuters survey in early January showed Trump with a five-point lead in a matchup with Biden that drops to a one-point advantage with Kennedy in the mix).
If that’s not complicated enough, there’s the possibility that the allegedly nonpartisan No Labels organization will run a candidate; the group has already secured presidential ballot access in 14 states, including battleground states Arizona, Maine, Nevada, and North Carolina. But it’s less and less likely that No Labels will put together a credible process for selecting a candidate, and it may succumb to complaints from Democrats that its efforts will simply help Trump.
All in all, there are a couple of abiding realities. The first is that because Trump has a more cohesive base constituency than Biden does — and needs the most help in transcending it to win a plurality of the popular or Electoral College vote — he likely benefits the most from an array of candidates. The second is that as the fundamental choice between the major-party candidates and the consequences of the results become clearer, and as marginal voters decide to stay at home, all the non-major-party candidacies are likely to lose ground.
Still, it’s worth remembering that Trump won in 2016 when the non-major-party vote was 5.7 percent of the total and lost in 2020 when that vote dropped to 1.9 percent. In terms of the number of candidates winning votes, the more could be the merrier for MAGA.
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