Third-party candidate may prove decisive in tipping the balance to Biden
Libertarian Jo Jorgensen is not destined to become the next president of the United States, but whoever does win might consider sending her a gift basket.
Relatively speaking, Jorgensen, a little known Clemson University psychology lecturer, hasn’t won a lot of support in her run for the Oval Office.
Right now, she has a total of about 1.7 million votes. Biden leads the popular vote nationwide with 73.8 million, with President Trump trailing with 69.8 million votes.
But the votes Jorgensen has garnered could be just enough to help out whoever does wind up winning. And right now, it’s looking more and more like that will be Joe Biden.
A look at the tallies in three key battleground states as of Friday afternoon shows the votes for Jorgensen more than cover the margins between Trump and Biden.
In Pennsylvania, Jorgensen has earned more than 76,000 votes. Trump now trails Biden there by 15,000.
In Georgia, she has about 61,000 votes. Trump is behind Biden by less than 2,000.
And in Arizona, the Greenville, S.C. resident has nearly 45,000 votes, about 5,000 more than the nearly 40,000 votes that separate Trump and Biden, who leads the state.
Whether her presence will affect the outcome of the race is impossible to know right now for sure, but it appears to already have had consequences in Georgia, where a recount looms because of the razor-thin margin that now separates Trump and Biden.
“If the vote differential between the two candidates is less than her vote total, then it lends credence to the idea that she had an impact,” said Baruch College political science professor Doug Muzzio.
Saying that definitively is another story, though, because there’s no way to tell who voters would have cast ballots for if Jorgensen had not thrown her hat into the ring, Muzzio added.
As a Libertarian, it’s fair to guess that she’s probably peeling more votes away from Trump, but that’s all it would be, a guess.
Jorgensen herself said that both Republicans and Democrats appeared sympathetic to her cause while on the campaign trail.
“They were their own spoilers, by not following through on their campaign promises,” Jorgensen told Reuters on Friday.
But she reserved particular scorn for Trump, who she said billed himself as “a political outsider who knew how to balance the budget and cut the deficit, and did neither.”
