The Atlantic has this analysis by Russell Berman and Andrew McGill, using data to show that minor party and independent presidential candidates in the modern era do better in states in which there is no doubt which major party presidential candidate will carry that state.
This is a common-sense observation, and demonstrates that many U.S. voters are aware of the electoral college and (except in Maine and Nebraska) its winner-take-all rules.
True. Although, I am not sure that it is all strategic voting on the part of the voters. There are two other factors that I think contribute to this:
1. The independent and third party candidates often focus their efforts in the non-battleground states and the major parties ignore them. So these voters are not seeing the same commercials and are not being targeted by the major parties. Also, the third party campaigns make more appearances there.
2. The makeup of those states. The reason they are not battleground states is they tend to have a strong ideological bend. So the Green Party should be able to do better in states with a more liberal electorate. Similarly, conservative third party candidates will do better in states that are so conservative that they are not battleground states.
I predict, then, that Darrell Castle will do quite well in West Virginia which is a solid Trump state where the Democrats despise Hillary for her anti-coal position (and for the same reason won’t vote Green Party) and the so-called “conservatives” will be looking for other options. Of note is that the Libertarians here overwhelmingly preferred Austin Peterson whose gift of a classic firearm was thrown in the trash by Gary Johnson. West Virginia became a constitutional carry state this year. It is up to the Castle campaign to capitalize on these things.
Richard, I don’t know how to make corrections to prior posts. I think the man’s name is Austin Peterson, not Cassidy.
Two important qualifications, both from the article itself:
“Granted, this alignment [correlation] was relatively weak.”
“This correlation also disappears when the third-party candidate is a recognizable or compelling figure.”