Why Justin Amash Dropped Out

J ustin Amash, having left the Republican Party and suspended his House reelection campaign in late April to run for president as a Libertarian, dropped out of the presidential race Saturday. Amash faced challenges in getting the Libertarian nomination; a May 4 online convention of Michigan Libertarians had him behind Jacob Hornberger, founder of the Future of Freedom Foundation. His withdrawal is also a comment on the nature of modern third-party campaigns.

Amash’s statement on Twitter noted the particular partisan dynamics and pandemic realities of 2020:

This environment presents extraordinary challenges. Polarization is near an all-time high. Electoral success requires an audience willing to consider alternatives, but both social media and traditional media are dominated by voices strongly averse to the political risks posed by a viable third candidate. The new reality of social distancing levels the playing field among the candidates in many respects, but it also means lesser known candidates are more dependent on adequate media opportunities to reach people. Today, most Americans are understandably more interested in what life will look like tomorrow than they are in broader policy debates, and news coverage has reflected those priorities. At the same time, fundraising challenges posed by an idled economy will hinder advertising.

Amash received a lot of love from the most hard-core anti-Republican wing of “Never Trump” after voting to impeach Trump and leaving the party, but those same voices were caustically critical of his independent bid, and they cheered his withdrawal. Joe Walsh, for example, wrote in the Washington Post:

The best and surest way to beat Trump is to have only one alternative to him. To give all the disaffected Republicans, conservatives and independents only one alternative to Trump. Giving them a conservative alternative might be ideologically satisfying, but it increases the likelihood that Trump can pull off another narrow win.

This is actually more than a little questionable, as election analysis. Third-party presidential campaigns fall into one of three categories. At one end of the spectrum, you have charismatic, well-funded, well-publicized, or issue-driven third-party campaigns that actually win over voters who would otherwise have gone to the major-party nominees. The appearance of such candidates is a sign of a rupture within one of the two parties, or of a longstanding failure of both parties to address an issue or appeal to a constituency. H. Ross Perot was the last of these; other examples would be the regional Dixiecrat campaigns of George Wallace in 1968 and Strom Thurmond in 1948, the progressive and populist campaigns of Henry Wallace in 1948, Robert LaFollette in 1924, and James Weaver in 1892, and the campaigns of former presidents Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, Millard Fillmore in 1856, and Martin Van Buren in 1848.

At the opposite end are the candidates who appeal mainly to true-believer third-party voters: longtime Libertarian Party or Socialist voters, for example. These candidacies may look as if they cost someone an election, but realistically, they are drawing voters who are never going to support the major-party nominees.

In between are candidates who find themselves recipients of a protest vote. Amash was probably going to fall in this category and decided he did not want to spend a year pursuing those votes, because they were not going to be votes about him or his ideas anyway. But Walsh and others who were harshly critical of Amash are probably overrating the extent to which it really matters who the protest candidates are.

Consider the growth in the third-party vote between 2012 and 2016. Three third-party candidates got a significant share of the vote in 2016. Gary Johnson, running as a Libertarian, got more than 4.4 million votes, 3.27 percent of the national popular vote. Johnson cleared 5 percent of the vote in nine states, peaking at 9.34 percent in his home state of New Mexico. Jill Stein, running as the Green Party candidate, got over 1.4 million votes, 1.06 percent of the national popular vote, peaking at 3.2 percent in Vermont and otherwise topping 2 percent only in Hawaii and Oregon. Evan McMullin, running an independent campaign, got 0.53 percent of the national popular vote but drew 21.31 percent in Utah and 6.73 percent in Idaho, reflecting broad dissatisfaction among typically Republican Mormon voters with Donald Trump.

Johnson and Stein, however, both ran in 2012 and did far less well. Johnson got 1.2 million votes, 0.99 percent of the vote, and Stein got 0.36 percent. McMullin, for his part, was a complete unknown before 2016 and ran almost entirely on not being Trump. The reason they received so many more votes in 2016 was not because people were suddenly interested in their message, but because of the declining appeal of the major parties. Measured by share of the eligible voting population, Democrats declined from 29.9 percent of eligible voters for Barack Obama in 2012 to 28.4 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Republicans declined by less, from 27.6 percent for Mitt Romney in 2012 to 27.2 percent for Trump in 2016. Disaffected voters who didn’t stay home just chose from the menu of third-party options. But outside of New Mexico and possibly Utah, who those options were did not really matter very much. It reflected the fact that both parties picked bad, historically disliked candidates.

Consider Amash’s home state of Michigan, the most closely divided state in 2016. Look at the raw vote totals:

2012 D: Obama 2,564,569
2016 D: Clinton 2,268,839

2012 R: Romney 2,115,256
2016 R: Trump 2,279,543

2012 L: Johnson 7,797
2016 L: Johnson 172,136

2012 G: Stein 21,897
2016 G: Stein 51,463

2016 McMullin: 8,183

A hundred and sixty thousand people in Michigan didn’t suddenly get a lot more interested in Gary Johnson’s message; they wanted somewhere else to go. But with or without Amash, there will be a Libertarian Party candidate and a Green Party candidate. True, there would be some Michigan voters who are personally more familiar with Amash than another nominee, but for the most part, the dynamics of the campaign would be about Trump and Biden, not Amash.

As to Walsh’s argument, leaving aside the irony of the “binary choice” argument, how many potential Biden voters are pulling the lever for a small-government pro-lifer? Even on issues where Amash is outside of Republican orthodoxy, on foreign-policy and national-security issues, he’s far from Biden’s position. But that even assumes that people are paying attention to Amash’s actual message. Walsh seems to assume not, and Amash’s withdrawal is, even from reading his statement, a concession that his message would be buried, and the only thing people care about is “Justin Amash, he’s not Trump or Biden.”

The last major vote-getter before Gary Johnson who ended up garnering a large-scale vote mainly as a protest was John Anderson, a disaffected liberal Republican who ran in 1980. Anderson’s support was probably disproportionately drawn from people who might have voted, not for his own party’s challenger (Ronald Reagan), but for the incumbent. Either way, though, Reagan beat Jimmy Carter because of how voters reacted to Reagan and Carter, not because Anderson gave a home to people who’d had enough of Carter but weren’t ready for Reagan. If anything, candidates of this nature have a larger impact downticket, by giving people an excuse to show up and vote even when they don’t like the people at the top of the two major tickets.

Amash is an interesting, sometimes infuriating, idiosyncratic politician. But he wasn’t willing to run just as a placeholder. There will be placeholders anyway, and they will not decide the election.