How Will Disaffected Voters Fracture?

Disaffected voters and swing states will decide the Presidential election. Staunch and diehard supporters of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are known factions with easily predictable votes — and they are a minority in 2016.

In Part 2, you will find an interactive spreadsheet where readers can look at how disaffected voters could impact which candidate wins the popular vote. But first, let’s look at how those disaffected voters may behave.

How disaffected voters will behave

According to the NY Times, only 9.26 percent of the United States (13.57 percent of eligible adults) were responsible for the nomination of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. These figures are 1 million votes lower on the Republican side from those available in the Green Papers. The NY Times has the rounded count at 13 million, while the Green Papers rounded count is 14 million. Also, Republican popular vote tallies are not available for the states of Colorado and North Dakota — though based on the Democratic numbers, that would only add another quarter of a million votes to the total of 31 million votes— not enough to round up Trump’s estimate above his 14 million votes.

The Green Papers put voter turnout for the Democratic Primaries at a total of 30,523,573 votes with Clinton at 55.20%, Sanders at 43.14%, and Other at 1.66%. For the Republican Primaries, the Green Papers put voter turnout at a total of 31,162,327 votes with Trump at 44.96% and Other at 55.04%.

But the Democratic Primaries carry a deep and compelling stigma of Election Fraud which according to mathematician and election analyst Richard Charnin is to the tune of 1 in 77 billion. Using the True Vote Model, Charnin’s analysis concluded that Sanders would have won the Democratic Primaries with 51.88% of the popular vote. Charnin is not alone in assertions of Election Fraud. Expert Greg Palast has been critical of the Democratic Primaries as well. Whether you are inclined to believe there was any fraud or not, for the purposes of evaluating how disaffected voters could split, it is important to look at both scenarios.

So who are the disaffected voters and how are they likely to vote? Gallup has partisan identification at near historic lows with Democrats at 29%, Republicans at 26%, and Independents at 42% with a margin of error at ±3%. Party identification alone can be misleading as most who identify as Independent still lean Democrat or Republican. Only about 12% are true Independents while 16% lean Democrat and 14% lean Republican. Those who still lean partisan tend to still express partisanship through their votes.

According to Dan Hopkins, a professor of government at the University of Pennsylvania, “independents who lean toward the Democrats are less likely to back GOP candidates than are weak Democrats.”

What is means in essence is that regardless of party identification, Democratic partisanship is at 45%, Republican partisanship is at 40%, and non-partisan Independents are at 12%.

The purpose of this article is to consider how disaffected voters will behave in November. Since partisanship is more informative than party identification, Independents who lean Democrat will hereby be called Democrats and those who lean Republican will be called Republicans. Partisanship will be assumed to hold a slight lead over alignment of values, but alignment will assume that Democrats will be more partial to Green party values and Republicans more partial to Libertarian party values.

So how will partisan leaning Independents vote in November if they did not vote for Clinton or Trump in the Primaries? That may largely be determined by how much they dislike Trump and Clinton, and given the record unfavorables and fear mongering of both candidates, that is likely to be a lot of people.

As Presidential elections go, there have been some strange developments in 2016. Hillary Clinton has been courting Republicans who cannot support Trump, she has been pushing rightward, and has been spurning progressives. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is courting Democrats who cannot support Clinton and insists that he is an outsider to the Republican party.

The cross-party invitations are working to a small degree with some Republicans defecting to Clinton and some Democrats so opposed to Clinton that they are willing to vote for Trump. But those votes may largely cancel each other out.

While 55% of Republicans did not vote for Trump in the Primaries, we must look at the other candidates and ask how their disaffected supporters will vote in November. The top four Republican runners up were Cruz with 25.07%, Kasich with 13.76%, Rubio with 11.28%, and Carson with 2.75%. All others got less than 1% and many subsequently endorsed Trump. The constituencies of the top four runners up represent the largest sampling of voters whose first choice was not Trump. But now that Trump is the standard-bearer for the Republican party, how many consistently partisan Republicans will leave? And if they do leave, will they head to Hillary Clinton, a Democrat that long-time Republican partisans have long reviled? Or will they look to third party candidates that better represent their values like third party Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson?

For Democratic runners up, everyone except Sanders got less than half-a-percent, while Sanders got either 43.14% or 51.88% depending on your school of thought concerning the allegations of election fraud. Among the disaffected voters that supported Sanders, either one-third (14.38% or 17.29%) or half (21.57% or 25.94%) refuse to vote for Clinton depending on the source. The problem with the polling figures on anti-Clinton attitudes among Democrats is that the only consistent thing about the polls seems to be that they contradict each other.

The original Bernie or Bust pledge promoted the idea of writing-in Bernie’s name or voting for Jill Stein. Now that Clinton is officially the Democratic nominee, they have begun promoting a Jill or Bust pledge abandoning the write-in Bernie option since Sanders is not running a write-in campaign. How many Bernie or Bust voters have pledged themselves to Jill Stein of the Green Party is unclear, but many have put their money where their mouth is by donating to Stein.

There do not appear to be any officious polls that asked Bernie or Bust voters who they would vote for between Clinton, Trump, Stein, and Johnson, but in an Internet poll of 253K respondents conducted by NJ.com, Clinton had 11.41%, Trump had 13.73%, Stein had 68.04%, and Johnson had 2.99%. While the poll did not intentionally target Bernie or Bust voters, it appears to have inadvertently gone viral with them. With a sample size of 253,466 and growing, the poll may well be anecdotal but it’s a large anecdote.

An Internet poll with very biased wording conducted by Edward Snowden had 51,435 respondents of whom 67% choose “Literally anyone else”. Is it mere coincidence that the percentages happen to match within 1 percentage point? This too is entirely anecdotal and you should resist drawing any conclusions from it, yet it certainly is interesting.

An Internet poll conducted by Democratic Sanders pundit Nomiki Konst with 2,162 respondents was 90% in favor of entirely abandoning the Democratic party for another. Whether such sentiment draws people to the Green party or leads to forming a new party for Progressives, only time can tell. Such anecdotal polls do not meet the scientific criteria to be statistically significant, but they do demonstrate how a certain group of people feel however large or small a group it may be.

There is also a complication to predicting Sanders’ voters. Some of them fall in the rare category of people that don’t always vote.

Disaffected voters are lamenting their available choices and looking into third party candidates who more closely resemble their partisan values. How many will cast votes for third parties is unknown. While third party support has been low in previous election years, it would be unwise to dismiss the total disdain for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump among disaffected partisans. Disaffected voters may well dislike or fear both major candidates enough to defect to third parties in record numbers.

— Antyal

Continue to Part 2 General Election Popular Vote Split Spreadsheet.

You can find Antyal Tennyson on Twitter under the handle @AntyalT.