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Article
Containing the
Third-Party Voter
in the 2016 U.S.
Presidential Election
Ryan Neville-Shepard
Abstract
Third-party candidates in the United States routinely see a decline in support in the
final weeks of presidential campaigns. While political scientists attribute this partially to
Duverger’s Law, many communication scholars have tied this collapse to media cov-
erage that frames third-party candidates as fringe outsiders, longshots, and spoilers.
This study extends these explanations of third-party failure by describing the rhetorical
containment of third-party voters. Based on a case study of the 2016 presidential
election and public debate about supporters of Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, the
essay suggests such voters face a form of marginalization that portrays them as
intruders in a two-party race, as immature and uninformed, and responsible for even-
tual victors, while presenting them a false choice of winning by sacrificing their cause.
Keywords
third parties, containment rhetoric, Duverger’s Law, voters, 2016 presidential election
Third-party hopefuls were predicted to have unusual success in the 2016
presidential election. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were historically
unpopular, as satisfaction with the major parties’ nominees hit its “lowest
point in 20 years” (Shalby, 2016, para. 3). Voters seeking an alternative to the
Department of Communication, University of Arkansas Fayetteville, USA
Corresponding Author:
Ryan Neville-Shepard, Department of Communication, University of Arkansas, 417 Kimpel Hall,
Fayetteville, AR 72701, USA.
Email: rnevshep@uark.edu
Journal of Communication Inquiry
0(0) 1–21
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DOI: 10.1177/0196859918824620
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mainstream parties were flocking to the Libertarian Party and Green Party, as
Gary Johnson at one point was averaging over 10% in national polls and Jill
Stein was pulling in around 4.5% (Malone, 2016). Moreover, Johnson was
favored over Trump by the nation’s largest newspapers, picking up endorse-
ments from the Chicago Tribune,Richmond Times-Dispatch,The Detroit News,
New Hampshire Union Leader, and many others (Borchers, 2016). Although
they were never predicted to win, such outsiders were projected to possibly tip
outcomes in several states and potentially influence the results of the election
(Huffaker, 2016).
Despite these predictions, third parties in 2016 “went out with a whimper,”
altogether receiving around 4% of the popular vote (Berenson, 2016, para. 1).
There were obvious reasons for the collapse of the Stein and Johnson cam-
paigns, chief among them that the candidates stumbled as they received more
media coverage. Berenson (2016, para. 15), for instance, stated that “support for
them began to crater” when Johnson appeared unfamiliar with the Syrian city of
Aleppo during an interview on MSNBC, and after another interview when he
was unable to name a world leader he respected. Making matters worse,
Johnson’s running-mate said he was more interested in keeping Trump from
winning the presidency than guaranteeing a win for his own ticket, adding that
nobody in the campaign was more qualified to be president than Hillary Clinton
(Levenson & Phillips, 2016). Johnson, however, suggested the cause of his
decline was clear, noting, “People will take the third party options more seri-
ously until the general election comes closer, and then they’ll be swayed by less
evil-ism” (Berenson, 2016, para. 24). As Johnson described it, he was doomed to
lose as soon as he announced his candidacy.
Political scholars writing about third-party campaigns agree with Johnson’s
perception that the sudden drop in third-party support toward the end of the
campaign is inevitable. Political communication scholars have suggested that
third-party candidates exhibit a rhetorical style that is too extreme to sustain
support (Harold, 2001; Neville-Shepard, 2017; Tonn & Endress, 2001; Zaller &
Hunt, 1995). Additionally, political scientists have described various cultural
and structural barriers to third-party success, ranging from political socializa-
tion that creates an allegiance to the two major parties, to restrictive ballot
access, single-member plurality districts, limited media coverage, and exclusion
from debates (Bibby & Maisel, 2003; Gillespie, 2012; Kirch, 2015; Rosenstone,
Behr, & Lazarus, 1996). While all of these factors play a role in third-party
shortcomings, the 2016 election also saw a distinct effort to dissuade voters
from casting ballots for the outsiders, suggesting yet another reason why third
parties are bound for defeat.
The framing of third-party supporters in the 2016 campaign became more
evident as the race got tighter, especially as news outlets began focusing on the
influence of young voters. Weigel (2016) wrote in September that “a wide range
of polls have found Clinton losing votes” (para. 8) to Johnson and Stein,
2Journal of Communication Inquiry 0(0)
especially in battleground states like Ohio. Illustrating the trend, a Quinnipiac
poll in September showed “millennial likely voters supported Clinton over
Trump by a 55-34 margin. But when Stein and Johnson were included in the
survey, Clinton received just 31% support” (Kohn, 2016, para. 4). The fear that
Clinton was losing younger voters led to “deep-pocketed” backers “[blanketing]
1.1 million households in battleground states with mailers warning millennials
that a vote for a third-party candidate only helps Donald Trump” (Seitz-Wald,
2016, para. 1). Such pressure came not only from mailers, though. This study
focuses on voters’ public engagement with other voters via online news sites,
applying social pressure to reframe third-party support.
Through an analysis of public arguments about third-party supporters in the
2016 election, this essay suggests that a possible reason candidates like Stein and
Johnson lose support at the end of the race is the rhetorical containment of
third-party voters. While previous scholars have described tactics employed by
the major parties and media elite to negatively frame third parties (Harold, 2001;
Kirch, 2013, 2016; Rosenstone et al., 1996), this study expands that scholarship
by focusing on how such attacks target third-party supporters themselves. The
study develops in several sections. First, I explain the concept of Duverger’s Law
to elucidate conventional understanding of third-party failure. Additionally,
after describing what other scholars have called the rhetoric of containment
(Anderson, 1999; Malkowski, 2014; Neville-Shepard, 2018; Smith, 2010), I pro-
pose a form of lateral containment where agents appearing to be of the same
power status or ideological disposition attempt to contain one another. After
describing how the containment of third-party voters functions to reframe the
nature of casting one’s ballot for an outsider, the essay explains how third-party
supporters were contained in the 2016 presidential election. Finally, I conclude
by discussing the implications of this study.
Third-Party Failure and the Rhetoric of Containment
Even the strongest third-party campaigns experience declining support in the
final months before election day. Often their shortcomings stem from their own
missteps. For instance, most third-party candidates struggle to raise enough
money to be competitive, they appeal to small constituencies, and they often
lose supporters by seeking ideological purity and rejecting compromise (Dwyre
& Kolodny, 1997; Harold, 2001; Neville-Shepard, 2017). Moreover, many third
parties nominate candidates who lack qualifications for the offices they seek
(Rosenstone et al., 1996), and their limited focus on issues means their positions
are easily coopted by the major parties (Hirano & Snyder, 2007; Lowi, 1999).
However, third-party shortcomings can also be explained by a psychological
challenge among voters, not only due to the structure of American democracy
but the culture it develops in enforcing loyalty to the two major parties. In tying
this problem to the containment of third-party voters, this section first explores
Neville-Shepard 3
Duverger’s Law. The section then turns to review what scholars have described
as systemic efforts to delegitimize third-party candidates. Finally, the section
expands understanding of these depictions of third-party candidates by arguing
that efforts may target voters more specifically, demonstrating what I call a form
of lateral containment.
Duverger’s Law and Third-Party Failures
Political scientists have summarized the tendency for voters to support one of
the two major parties as Duverger’s Law. Because the United States has a
plurality-vote-win system, which means third-party candidates could win a
high percentage of the popular vote yet no electoral votes, Duverger’s Law
says “some voters who prefer a candidate or party that they think cannot win
will cast a vote for their first choice among the major-party candidates”
(Abramson, Aldrich, Paolino, & Rohde, 1995, p. 353). Often called “strategic
voting,” the phenomenon is described as a “mechanical effect of the U.S. elec-
toral system” (p. 353), as if it naturally flows from the design of the plurality-
vote-win system. The evidence of the phenomenon suggests that it is remarkably
consistent. As Bibby and Maisel (2003) noted, “Only 57 percent of pro-
Anderson voters [in 1980] actually cast their ballots for him” (p. 74).
Moreover, 16% of George Wallace supporters jumped ship to the Democrats
and Republicans in 1968, 21% of Perot voters eventually supported a major
party candidate in 1992, and “more than 90 percent of those who rated either
Buchanan or Nader as their preferred candidate [in 2000] voted for someone
else” (p. 75).
The explanation that third-party supporters abandon their preferred candi-
dates as a “mechanical effect” of the electoral system unfortunately downplays
the significance of the public persuasion that shifts voters’ allegiances. Third-
party supporters are fickle, Collet (1996) argued, as their “antipathy toward the
‘system’ itself’” and their “desire for more choices at the polls” is usually out-
weighed by their “serious reservations about [third-party candidates’] abilities to
govern” (p. 436). The concerns about governing grow stronger as the campaign
progresses, due to public deliberation about the third-party candidate’s
strengths and weaknesses. Tonn and Endress (2001), for instance, argued that
attention to Ross Perot’s gaffes and odd decisions “pressed the citizenry into
more honest reflection and introspection about the challenges and obligations of
governing and being governed” (p. 282). By election day, they concluded, “most
Americans ultimately questioned [Perot’s] fundamental judgment,” and public
dialogue about his campaign caused “deeper appreciation of necessary political
leadership qualities and processes starkly at odds with the Texan and his anom-
alous run” (p. 294). Thus, the voters’ eventual rejection of third-party tickets is
not necessarily mechanical as much as it is a result of arguments about these
candidates’ weaknesses.
4Journal of Communication Inquiry 0(0)
The Cultural Delegitimizing of Third Parties
Many scholars have described a public effort, driven by the mass media and
major parties, to delegitimize third-party challengers. Zaller and Hunt (1995)
found that second thoughts about the Perot campaign in 1992 were partially
driven by “the barrage of media-initiated criticism of Perot’s character in the
spring” (p. 120). Rosenstone, et al. (1996) argued that the effort to delegitimize
third-party hopefuls is propelled by accusations that they are “‘fringe’ candi-
dates who stand outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse” (p. 44).
Ultimately, Harold (2001) suggested, the last-minute campaigns against third-
party candidates seek to build a “corruption of signification” (p. 595), framing
one’s ballot not as an expression of free will, but as potentially undemocratic
when cast for a fringe outsider. Altogether, Kirch (2016) wrote about the news
media’s tactics of delegitimizing third parties, they ironically work to
“essentially undermine the democratic process by systemically ignoring or
ridiculing alternative viewpoints that run counter to cultural and political
assumptions that are accepted as natural to American democracy” (p. 166).
Previous scholars have noted many ways that third-party candidates get dele-
gitimized by the news media and mainstream campaigns. Most often, third parties
are written off as a wasted ballot. Abramson et al. (1995) wrote that Socialist
Norman Thomas was marginalized by supporters of Franklin D. Roosevelt who
labeled his campaign a wasted ballot. Supporters of George Wallace in 1968 were
also scared off as Nixon’s surrogates warned “a vote for Wallace is a vote for
Humphrey” (p. 354). In this framing, Kirch (2013) argued, third-party candidates
are either “portrayed as inconsequential players who have little chance of
winning,” or they have the prospect of tipping “the election in favor of a
major-party candidate, leaving citizens with a sense that they will be wasting
their vote if they cast a ballot for anyone other than a Democrat or
Republican” (p. 40). Unsurprisingly, third-party candidates frequently get por-
trayed as “long shots,” “underdogs,” and “spoilers” (p. 47), treated as an
“abnormal phenomenon that [disrupts] rather than legitimately [challenges] ‘the
system’” (p. 50). Similarly, Harold (2001) found that the “last-minute offensive
against Nader” cast him as a “contaminating element in an otherwise well-
ordered political system” (p. 582). These attacks on third parties are “stock
arguments” (p. 595), Harold summarized, meaning they are frequently employed
against such outsiders. And as Harold noted, together the attacks are significant
in the way they do not challenge the positions of third-party candidates as much
as their “very right to participate in the electoral process” (p. 594).
The Containment of Third-Party Voters
Previous studies have illuminated the ways third-party candidates are delegiti-
mized by the major parties and news media, but little has been said about how
Neville-Shepard 5
those attacks are turned on the voters themselves. Kirch (2013) has gotten clos-
est to this observation, noting that the negative framing of third-party candi-
dates “suggests that citizens and voters who are looking for fresh perspectives
and alternatives to established political organizations are marginalized and
alienated from the political process” (p. 51). By performing as “one more cog
in the nation’s political power structure,” Kirch argued that the national media
creates “political storylines that automatically push aside viewpoints that
attempt to challenge fundamental assumptions about the American political
order” (p. 51). What Kirch suggested is that negative framing of third parties
has a way of at least implicitly marginalizing their supporters. This essay extends
Kirch’s argument, suggesting that third-party voters are explicitly marginalized
in this effort to corrupt the signification of a third-party ballot, especially
through the rhetoric of containment.
Containment rhetoric, according to Poirot (2009), is utilized by hegemonic
groups in an “attempt to tame the threat of alternative views through discipline
and confinement, clearly articulating the other as outside of the dominant values
and structures” (p. 266) of any given culture. While the term originates from the
Cold War era (Nadel, 1995), if not earlier (Anderson, 1999), De Hart (1999)
argued that it essentially describes the “systematic efforts to maintain traditional
gender, sexual, and racial boundaries, ideologically as well as behaviorally,
through cultural imperatives and social policy” (p. 352). When applied to pol-
itics, the purpose of containment rhetoric is to shut down deliberation. As
Singer (2011) argued, the containment narrative “attaches simplified meanings
to controversy, creates an appearance of consensus, closes off public involve-
ment in [political decision making] and preserves the inertia of system-wide
distortions” (p. 98). In other words, the purpose of containment rhetoric is to
undermine critical thinking and force conformity by reinforcing the values of a
dominant group, consequently preventing “consideration of other points of view
that might enrich and complicate those values” (Smith, 2010, p. 143).
While scholars have described tropes of containment rhetoric in a variety of
ways (Malkowski, 2014; Murphy, 1992; Smith, 2010), Neville-Shepard (2018)
recently united these models to provide a four-part framework for rhetorical
containment. Containment starts with “a dominant group identifying intruders”
(p. 5), rhetorically marking someone as outsiders and turning the public gaze on
them to divide them from the community. Second, the dominant group engages
in an effort to define “the outsider by values and goals in violation of the norms
of the dominant community” (p. 5), so as to create a sense of dissociation, or
what Malkowski (2014) called a “process of (dis)identification” that allows the
audience to join the dominant group as being in “an authoritative role over a
subgroup” (p. 214). Third, the dominant group creates a sense of victimage by
“portraying outsiders not only as violating norms of the dominant community,
but also as posing a threat” to the status quo (Neville-Shepard, 2018, p. 5).
6Journal of Communication Inquiry 0(0)
Finally, containment is completed through “appeals for normalization [suggest-
ing] that the best way to act is by restoring the natural order” (p. 5).
By analyzing public debate about the third-party vote in 2016, especially as it
surfaced on online news sites, this study expands previous scholarship that
describes the rhetoric of containment as driven by powerful elites. Of course,
many of the websites where this discourse was featured are owned by elites, but
the authors frequently adopted the role of a fellow citizen, a liberal reaching out
to other liberals, and a former third-party voter. Previous studies describe con-
tainment as being hierarchical since it is a tool used frequently to preserve
hegemony. For instance, Neville-Shepard (2018) called containment rhetoric a
response “designed to purify and defend elite institutions” (p. 3). Likewise,
Duerringer (2013) wrote of containment rhetoric as a way that “hegemonic
groups” maintain “relations of domination and oppression” (p. 321). De Hart
(1999) clarified that such “systemic efforts to maintain traditional” power rela-
tions were orchestrated by elite policy makers, public officials, and professionals
who essentially represent a class of “architects of domestic containment”
(pp. 352–353). Missing from this approach, however, is a recognition of how
groups appearing to be of the same power status, or those sharing an essential
identity like the same ideological disposition, attempt to contain one another; in
other words, overlooked is how such rhetoric may not always be hierarchical,
but exhibiting a form of lateral movement instead.
In the clearest effort to recognize this dynamic of lateral containment, Poirot
(2009) wrote that social movement scholars have been overly focused on how
containment functions as a “hegemonic [mode] of self-preservation,” while
ignoring how “social movements themselves engage in disciplinary rhetorics
that aim to confine or tame the threat of the outside other” (p. 267), including
radicals in the movement, competing social movements, or even forces of the
status quo. The key for Poirot is not that the forces of lateral containment are
necessarily of the same power status, but that they participate in a mode of
containment “that turns back on itself, not toward the other, to mitigate a
supposed threat” (p. 264). Even “social agitators,” she argued, “have stakes in
containing the threat of other rhetorics in order to preserve the rhetorical force
and terms of the movement’s own critique” (p. 267). Focused on the rhetorics of
radical/lesbian feminism in the 1970s, Poirot explained that such “identity polit-
ical movements” may unwittingly “engage in disciplinary processes and limit
change to what possibilities are known in advance,” meaning that “political
critiques with identity commitments seem to be confined at the outset as they
are moored to anything but the unforeseen” (p. 268). Consequently, she writes,
such “locales normalize and strengthen a supposed border between the move-
ment’s claims to radical authenticity and the status quo” (p. 268). Poirot hesi-
tated to apply the phenomenon to other social movements, declaring it as falling
“outside the purview” (p. 267) of her study. As such, this study picks up where
Poirot left off. By analyzing how progressive voters addressed other progressive
Neville-Shepard 7
voters in 2016 in a way that contained dissenting voices, this study further
elaborates on the nature of lateral containment, suggesting that two-party hege-
mony is enforced not only by elites such as party leaders and executives of major
media outlets (Neville-Shepard, 2018), but by lower level party members, acti-
vists, newspaper columnists, and rank-and-file party members who enforce a
fixed identity onto those who generally share their political ideology
and objectives.
The Containment of the Third-Party Voter in the 2016
Presidential Election
The Democratic National Convention in 2016 revealed that the party suffered
deep divisions. The primary campaign shed light on the unfairness of super-
delegates to party outsiders, possible corruption in a national party that seemed
enthusiastic to give the nomination to Hillary Clinton, and Clinton’s struggle to
appeal to young people, progressives, and White working-class voters. As many
backers of Bernie Sanders walked out of the convention, they told the news
media that his loss would not stop the movement he represented. Sanders sup-
porter Kshama Sawant, for example, told Time, “We are people who have for
years been angry at not being offered a real choice. We don’t believe that the
Dems are any answer for the Republicans” (Rhodan, 2016, para. 6). The scene
became more dramatic as Green Party candidate Jill Stein arrived at the con-
vention, promising “Bernie or Bust” supporters she would carry the torch that
he left behind with his endorsement of Clinton (Stein, 2016a). As the race
between Trump and Clinton grew tighter, these divisions and the threat of
Democrats bolting the party for Stein or Johnson led many Americans to
address these specific voters, forming a genre of public statements attempting
to persuade third-party supporters to commit to a major-party candi-
date instead.
In this section, I perform a close textual reading of these regular and guest
op-ed or opinion columns to understand how many Democratic voters con-
structed and contained the third-party voter in the 2016 election. My analysis
includes 43 representative examples of these statements printed in a variety of
popular traditional and online news publications. Altogether, the statements
came from 30 outlets, including The Atlantic,Chicago Sun Times,Chicago
Tribune,CNN,Cosmopolitan,The Daily Beast,Elle,Esquire,Huffington Post,
Los Angeles Times,The Nation,The New Republic,The New York Times,Paste,
Rolling Stone,USA Today,The Washington Post, and many others. While the
search for such columns spanned dates ranging from when Gary Johnson
announced his campaign around January 1, 2016, to the day of the election
on November 8, 2016, the majority of the articles were printed after July, when
it became clear that third-party candidates might play a significant role in the
8Journal of Communication Inquiry 0(0)
race. My reading of these statements traces the patterns of lateral containment
of third-party voters, essentially following McGee’s (1990) approach of con-
structing a text based on “dense truncated fragments” which together produce
a more complete picture of the discourse. As McGee argued, public rhetoric
is made up of various fragments across electronic media, meaning “nothing
in our new environment is complete enough, finished enough, to analyze”
(pp. 286–287). Consequently, critics in a fractured culture are left to “provide
readers/audiences with dense, truncated fragments which cue them to produce a
finished discourse in their minds” (p. 288). Adopting this approach, I suggest the
discourse I am describing follows the general characteristics of rhetorical con-
tainment described by Neville-Shepard (2018), but mitigates political threats by
turning within the progressive movement rather than toward the other, specif-
ically by identifying third-party supporters as intruders infiltrating the political
process, creating dissociation by marking such voters as young and naı
¨ve, por-
traying these supporters as a threat to democracy, and framing real “choice” in
the election as supporting the two-party system.
Identifying the Intruder: The Third-Party Voter as Infiltrator
For third-party voters to be contained, they first were marked as different from
other voters, ultimately depicted as outsiders even among the progressive move-
ment. Employing an extreme form of causal argument, those seeking to call out
third-party supporters described them as the decisive vote in America’s presi-
dential election. Such voters, like the candidates they represented, posed a risk
of spoiling the system, meaning that they were outsiders with too much clout,
and by their very nature represented what Harold (2001) called “a contaminat-
ing element in an otherwise well-ordered political system” (p. 582). Drawing the
gaze to these outsiders, journalist Jill Abramson (2016) warned, “Even with all
the self-inflicted wounds, Trump still starts out with a likely base of 170 electoral
votes” (para. 6). While getting 100 more votes was “extremely hard but not
impossible,” Abramson argued that Clinton needed “to win the swing states”
and could not “have too many votes siphoned away by fringe candidates” (para.
6). Similarly, Huffington Post contributor Paul Richardson (2016) claimed to
favor third parties, but stressed that the “latest polls have the race as a dead
heat” and a “swing of even 1-2 percent of third party voters to Trump or Clinton
may decide the election” (paras. 24 & 25). Further distinguishing third-party
voters as intruders, Richard Hasen (2016), professor at the University of
California-Irvine School of Law, clarified that the United States “could end
up with Trump as president . . . because a relatively small group of voters prefers
a third-party candidate” (para. 5). This framing reflects the stock argument
casting third parties as possible spoilers, suggesting their mere presence in a
race is problematic. By implying that third-party candidates could “siphon”
votes, that they represent only a “small group,” and that they are only
Neville-Shepard 9
“1-2 percent” of the voting public marks them as a foreign “other,” unnatural to
the system and potentially taking what did not rightfully belong to them.
This description marks the beginning of a rhetoric of containment by turning
the gaze on those who for some reason do not belong.
Continuing this criticism of third-party supporters, articles addressing this
small group of outsiders were quick to specify that they had a direct impact on
the outcome of the race. In short, a vote for third parties was said to be just as
bad as sitting out the election, thus eliminating any possibility of neutral ground.
In this sense, being a third-party supporter meant being an intruder, because
there was no way to avoid influencing the election. Political strategist Robert
Creamer (2016) argued, “While it is easy to understand the reasons that some
people might be inclined to choose a ‘protest’ vote – or decide to sit on their
hands” in a particularly nasty election year, “the fact is that either of these
actions will have one and only one result: putting Donald Trump into the
White House” (para. 4). After the election, public discussion about the results
focused on those who caused the race to be decided by razor thin margins. Paste
contributor Charles Dunst (2016), for example, argued that Clinton’s win in the
popular vote suggested “Democratic policy isn’t unpopular,” but that “young
leftists cost Hillary 80,000 votes, thereby losing her the election” (para. 2). While
Dunst added that “Democrats need to find a way to bring them into the fold”
(para. 3), the language depicts “young leftists” as outside the norm and respon-
sible for the electoral outcome. Even though White working-class voters were
equally likely to break from the party and cast ballots for Trump, it was third-
party voters who were marked as liable for Clinton’s loss.
Beyond analysis of the polls and election day data, critics drew heavily on
historical anecdotes to paint third-party supporters as infiltrators who were
responsible for flipping elections; in other words, they were voters with a history
of possessing too much influence and tipping elections based on the whims of a
recalcitrant minority. When accusing Stein voters of infiltrating the election and
swinging the results, even Hillary Clinton argued that this was “just like [what]
Ralph Nader did in Florida and New Hampshire in 2000” (Silverstein & Otis,
2017, para. 7). Many statements addressing third-party supporters reflected
Clinton’s criticism. Abramson (2016) remembered the “Green party zealots
who went for Nader because they said there wasn’t a dime of difference between
Bush and Gore” (para. 2). Reflecting on the 2000 race, Creamer (2016) wrote,
“History makes the results of third party ‘protest’ votes in modern American
elections crystal clear” (para. 6). Others criticized anyone who voted for third
parties in Florida in 2000. Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen (2016)
remarked that “More than 138,000 voters in the Sunshine State cast their ballots
in that election for third-party candidates . . . [including] Harry Browne, John
Hagelin, Monica Moorehead, Howard Phillips, David McReynolds and James
Harris” (paras. 13 & 14). The math from that race, Hiaasen concluded, showed
that “If only 538 of the 138,000 Floridians who threw away their votes on
10 Journal of Communication Inquiry 0(0)
no-chance, third-party candidates had chosen Gore instead, he would have won
the presidency” (para. 19).
Altogether, the causal arguments tying third-party ballots to some shocking
electoral outcome narrowly select one reason for a major party candidate losing,
while deflecting the reality that these candidates may have been able to adapt
their message to appeal to a wider base of supporters. Yet this focus on third-
party supporters marks them as intruders, agents to be tamed and contained.
Thus, attempting to explain a tight race, liberal voters turned their gaze not on
their own candidate or contextual factors that accounted for a surging
Republican candidate, but on a group of fellow progressives marked as out-
siders needing to correct their ways.
Dissociation and the “Millennial Voter”
After fixing the public gaze on someone marked as an intruder, containment
rhetoric defines the outsider by values, goals, and behaviors that violate the
norms of the larger community. Third-party voters in 2016 were panned for
their youthful naivete
´, as citizens and public figures took to the Internet to share
their own stories about being third-party voters in the past. While their con-
fessions were attempts to identify with young voters, they consequently marked
such citizens as self-obsessed and short-sighted, immature, and irresponsible.
Ultimately, what this discourse called the “millennial voter” used young
voters for Stein and Johnson as a synecdoche for third-party voters in general.
Public remarks about third-party voters began the process of dissociation by
portraying millennial voters as immature kids. The characterization commonly
came in the form of personal anecdotes from “reformed third-party voters,”
people with stories of their own impact in past elections who had now grown
up enough to realize the harms of their youthful indiscretion. Many of the
anecdotes stretched far back in time. Law professor Henry Weinstein (2016)
of the University of California, Irvine, remembered that he “cast [his] first
vote for president” in 1968, and was an “angry Berkeley law student active in
a variety of causes, including the civil rights movement” (para. 1). When he cast
a ballot for comedian-activist Dick Gregory, Weinstein remembered, “My emo-
tions prevailed” (para. 7). Other reformed voters explained they were third-party
supporters when they were too young to know better. News columnist Neil
Steinberg (2016) described how he “threw away my first presidential ballot by
registering a protest vote,” adding he “was 20 and worldly as a tadpole” (paras.
1 & 2). Columnist Donna Blankenship (2016) of The Seattle Times emphasized
that she, too, was a third-party voter when she was younger, when “I was a
19-year-old college student” and voted for John Anderson in 1980, joining other
voters “in a disaffected huff” (para. 1).
Warnings to millennial voters were most often issued through stories of deep
shame and regret from former Nader voters in the 2000 election. These reformed
Neville-Shepard 11
voters, too, cast their third-party vote as immature kids. After claiming that
“younger voters” would not remember the 2000 election and Bush’s disastrous
presidency “because they were kids,” actor Wil Wheaton (2016) identified him-
self with third-party voters because “I was *exactly* that kid in 2000 when
I voted for Ralph Nader, because George W. Bush was an a—hole and Al
Gore was a terrible candidate” (para. 5). Similarly, Elle contributor Rachael
Combe (2016) portrayed her vote as an act of foolish rebellion, stating that she
was a liberal Democrat who had voted for Bill Clinton in 1996, but was “young”
and “unhappy” and wanted “big changes” without “time-intensive, slogging-
through-it, compromising, incrementalist crap” (para. 5). Confessing that she
“was an idiot, but [not] delusional,” Combe added, “It was like smoking: I knew
it was dangerous, but it felt good” (para. 6). Likewise, psychology professor
Darby Saxbe (2016) of the University of Southern California wrote that she
voted for Nader in 2000, but that she was “young and idealistic and wanted
political revolution” (para. 5), just like the “college students who are feeling the
Bern” (para. 8). While attempting to identify with these voters, these statements
further marked third-party voters as intruders in American democracy since
they wielded tremendous clout but could not comprehend their self-absorbed,
short-sighted, and impatient ways.
The confessions of former Nader voters came with a warning to all third-
party voters, suggesting that impulsive decision-making would come with a life
of regret. Filmmaker and Quartz contributor Michael Kang’s (2016) confession
treated his past support of Nader as something he had long been guarded about,
writing, “It feels good to get that off my chest. For years, my voting record has
been a shameful secret” (para. 2). Even though John Kaufman (2016), a writer
from Wisconsin, was voting in a state where Nader did not make a difference, he
stated, it was “a vote I now regret” (para. 8). Expressing that same remorse,
Saxbe (2016) remarked about Bush’s electoral victory, “I share the blame . . .
I jumped on the Nader bandwagon and bought into a set of beliefs that seemed
right to me at the time but were proven wrong over the eight years that
followed” (para. 3). These citizens were not only identifying themselves with
younger radical voters, they were coming clean to warn about the deep guilt one
would feel for rejecting mainstream candidates. Ending his plea to younger
voters, essayist John Stoehr (2016) concluded, “I hope young voters, especially
idealistic millennials, won’t repeat the mistake I and other idealists made in
2000” (para. 21).
Beyond portraying third-party voters as overly idealistic and immature, those
addressing Stein and Johnson supporters continued to create a sense of disas-
sociation by playing into harsher stereotypes of millennials, emphasizing the
point that there was something unnatural about such a small group wielding
so much influence. Telling young Americans to realize “your vote matters, so
please take it seriously,” economist and New York Times columnist Paul
Krugman (2016, para. 3) spoke to third-party sympathizers as aloof teenagers
12 Journal of Communication Inquiry 0(0)
who needed a lecture about their behavior. Complaining that it was “hard to
believe that young voters who supported Bernie Sanders” would think it was a
“good idea” to support Gary Johnson, Krugman added that “voters have no
idea what [third-parties] stand for” (para. 7). The logic for supporting them was
overly simplistic, he added, “their names sound nice: who among us is against
liberty?” (para. 7). Other critics addressing third-party voters also attacked them
for lacking seriousness. Jim Newell (2016) of Slate suggested that “the youngs”
know nothing about Gary Johnson, but “that a good number of them sure seem
to like him” (para. 1). Adding that young voters were immature, journalist
Morgan Brinlee (2016) argued that Johnson being the “one presidential candi-
date you’d most like to chill with” (para. 16) is not enough of a reason to
support him. Other critics went further, telling millennial voters they had not
“done their homework” if they gave third parties their vote (Rampel, 2016, para.
26). The stereotype of millennials in these attacks is hard to miss: They do not
work hard, and they think only about themselves and their feelings. Krugman
(2016) further admonished young voters for acting out, stating, “don’t vote for a
minor-party candidate to make a statement. Nobody cares” (para. 12). Like
parents reprimanding their kids, others said voting for Johnson or Stein was
“naı
¨ve and dangerous” (Blankenship, 2016, para. 4), while others called it a
“self-indulgent waste of time” (Gran, 2016, para. 1). To all the third-party
supporters who seem to make “the loudest complaints” while not demonstrating
the “time and energy and attention span” for developing a movement, Paste
columnist Ben Gran (2016) advised, “Grown-ups have to make hard choices and
accept less-than-thrilling results every day in life, and democracy is no different”
(para. 7).
With millennial voters symbolically standing in for all third-party voters,
these last-minute pleas constructed such citizens as emotional, intellectually
immature, overly idealistic, self-indulgent, lazy, and loud. While such rhetoric
was addressed to younger voters, using millennials as a synecdoche had a higher
goal of portraying a vote for Stein or Johnson in simple language: Third-party
voters belong at the kids table.
Victimage and the Dangers of the Third-Party Vote
As the rhetoric of containment turns the gaze to the intruder and builds dis-
identification with their cause, it continues by portraying intruders as a danger
against the natural order. In terms of the containment of third-party voters, the
dangers were linked to the election of the less desirable major party candidate.
The argument emphasizes causal claims, implying that intruders who risk tip-
ping an election are not only responsible for the “greater evil” being elected, but
they are also liable for the evil they eventually accomplish. In essence, third-
party voters are not only marked as immature and short-sighted outsiders, but
an actual danger to society.
Neville-Shepard 13
Examples of the dangers of the third-party vote stemmed largely from the
lingering discomfort of Nader’s possible impact on the 2000 election.
Expressing her regret as a former third-party voter, Combe (2016) argued, “My
failure to take the 2000 election seriously and make my vote and voice count had
serious consequences that we and all of our children – and the children of mothers
in Iraq, Afghanistan, and all over the world – will be feeling for decades or maybe
even centuries” (para. 14). Focusing on Nader voters in Florida, political analyst
Jill Filipovic (2016) remarked, “Think of how different things would have been if
those voters supported Gore instead: No Iraq War, which almost surely means no
ISIS; probably no great recession” (para. 13). A vote for a third-party was not
simply a protest vote, according to this logic, but an endorsement of everything
accomplished by the eventual victor. Matthew Levinger (2016), professor of
International Affairs at George Washington University, listed Bush era decisions
that could be attributed to Nader voters, including massive budget deficits, the
fabricated evidence that led to the Iraq War, the 2001 Bush tax cuts that “put our
federal government on a glide path to insolvency” (para. 7), and the corporate
corruption of politics through the Citizens United decision. In corrupting the
signification of a third-party vote, these warnings to Johnson and Stein supporters
suggested that Bush was sent to the White House with only 537 votes, linking a
third-party ballot to murder, the violation of civil liberties, and economic collapse.
Linking the disaster of the Bush administration to the threat of a Trump
presidency, other critics warned that the world may never recover from a third-
party vote that enabled the rise of Trump. Kang (2016) argued that progressives
seemed too willing to “burn it all down,” cautioning, “If Trump is elected pres-
ident, we could very well see the dismantling of our country” (para. 12).
Entertainment attorney Miles Mogulescu (2016) similarly warned, “With cli-
mate change advancing so rapidly, the planet may not survive four or eight
years of inaction and sabotage by a President Trump” (para. 15). Just a few
days before the election, Filipovic (2016) wrote, “Donald Trump threatens
American democracy and the country as we know it.” She continued,
“Whatever you think about Hillary Clinton – that she’s dishonest, that she’s
craven, that she’s wrong on the issues, that she just bugs you – she’s not going to
subvert American democracy or jail reporters or bar immigrants based on their
religion” (para. 15). Thus, the containment of third-party voters continued by
tying a ballot to crimes against humanity, and arguing that the sins committed
by Trump would be committed by his enablers, too. In this framing, third-party
voters were not just immature outsiders, they posed real dangers to
American democracy.
Moral Culpability and the Return to Normalcy
Completing the process of rhetorical containment requires the restoration of a
natural order by calling for unity against the threat posed by those infiltrating
14 Journal of Communication Inquiry 0(0)
the body politic. As this requires self-enclosure, in the context of third-party
voters, this entails eliminating dissent by scrapping plans for a protest vote and
recommitting to the natural order of the two-party system.
Central to the call for returning to normalcy in the context of party politics is
the notion of the spoiler charge. Critics of third-party voters in 2016 explained
that “voting is zero-some game: There are a certain number of votes cast, and if
you vote for one person, you are taking a vote away from someone else”
(Filipovic, 2016, para. 2). Cautioning those considering a protest vote, even
Bernie Sanders told his supporters they should assume “either Clinton or
Trump will become president,” that there is no middle ground since there is
no parliamentary system (Rampel, 2016, para. 6). As Kang (2016) explained,
even resisting Clinton “in solid blue states only emboldens and legitimizes those
voters in vulnerable contests” (para. 2). Moreover, Kang continued, “it gives the
hardcore progressive a false sense of righteousness, making engagement and
productive discourse increasingly difficult” (para. 11). This elimination of neu-
tral ground emphasized the effort to contain third-party supporters, as they now
faced a crucial ethical dilemma.
Aside from the pragmatics of third-party support, critics added that support-
ing the two-party system was an issue of morality. This point, too, borrowed a
stock argument against third-party campaigns, claiming that voters had an obli-
gation to vote for the “lesser of two evils.” Political scientist Julia Maskivker
(2016) wrote that rejecting Clinton if she was the lesser evil of the two candidates
was unethical, especially since everyone was called to be good Samaritans, and
because societies occasionally need to “be rescued from unaccountable, corrupt,
ineffective or indifferent leaders” (para. 9). Sitting the election out was prob-
lematic, Maskivker explained, because “If our vote is part of a set of votes that
will contribute to the defeat of the realistically electable ‘lesser evil’” (para. 20),
then maintaining a clean conscience would come at a high price for the rest of
society. This point was less about marking third-party candidates as outsiders,
and instead limiting voters’ options as they attempted to resolve this ethi-
cal dilemma.
If Clinton represented the status quo, which by its definition is a sense of
normalcy, then third-party sympathizers were given an uncomfortable “choice.”
As Kaufman (2016) argued, in the face of “political buffoonery right out of a
satirical novel, the only sane, democratic thing to do is help elect our first female
president” (para. 5). Critics addressing third-party supporters not only asked
them to return to the two-party system, but suggested they were obligated to
defend it. Wheaton (2016) explained, “We’re going to need every single vote we
can get to defeat and utterly demolish and humiliate Donald Trump and every-
thing he stands for” (para. 3), even if that meant supporting a Clinton campaign
that stood against the values of die-hard progressives. While sold as a choice, it
was clearly a false choice for third-party voters. Wheaton stated, “If you, like
me, wanted Bernie Sanders to be our president . . . then your choice in this
Neville-Shepard 15
election is Hillary Clinton” (para. 8). Ironically, this call to defend democracy
meant forming a coalition where sacrifice was one-directional. Framing the
options, Quartz editor Paul Smalera (2016) suggested, “The choice in front of
Americans today could not be starker. A vote against Hillary Clinton is a vote
for demagoguery, for racism, for inequality, for xenophobia, for white suprema-
cism, and for hate, no matter who else you mark your ballot for” (para. 17).
As Daily Beast correspondent Michael Tomasky (2016) emphasized, voting for
Hillary Clinton is “serious politics. Everything else just isn’t” (para. 18).
Conclusion
American politics has occasionally seen the rise of third-party candidates who
appeal to a wider swath of voters than anyone initially expected. Candidates like
Henry Wallace, George Wallace, John Anderson, Ross Perot, and Ralph Nader
all generated headlines for potentially spoiling an election. However, third-party
candidates always see a decline in their support by election day. This essay has
contributed another reason for their shortcomings, grounded in the mediated
debate about what it means to cast a ballot for an outsider. Shaped around
Neville-Shepard’s (2018) four-part framework of containment, and thus con-
firming the utility of that approach, this essay has suggested that third-party
voters are subjected to a form of lateral containment where they are portrayed
as the decisive vote in a presidential election, as immature citizens who are too
short-sighted to understand the consequences of their self-indulgent choices, and
as citizens who are responsible for the bad policies of unpopular victors in close
elections. These voters are encouraged, if not coerced through guilt, to return to
mainstream politics for at least a day.
This essay has several implications. First, in the context of third parties,
lateral containment is obviously closely connected to hierarchical notions of
containment rhetoric. Ultimately, lateral containment may be best understood
as a consequence of the effects of hegemony rather than its alternative. After all,
those targeting third-party supporters are likely just enforcing hegemonic norms
that are products of the structure of the party system and framing and priming
effects of news media. In this sense, lower level progressive activists may not be
intentional and independent agents in containing third-party sympathizers, but
another consequence of the systemic influences traditionally linked to the short-
comings of such fringe hopefuls. If traditional forms of containment are elite-
driven, those norms are ultimately enforced by lower level defenders of
the hierarchy.
Second, in corrupting the signification of a third-party ballot, the rhetorical
containment of third-party supporters is clearly a perversion of the burden of
proof in campaigning. Traditionally, representative government requires aspir-
ing leaders to appeal to the electorate to receive their support. Conventionally,
the burden of proof in political communication falls on the campaign,
16 Journal of Communication Inquiry 0(0)
as candidates prove they can deliver on the change they promise, that such
change improves the country, and that support will be reciprocated with results.
In the case of third-party voters, however, defenders of the two-party system
insist that a candidate’s persuasiveness does not always matter, and that citizens
have an obligation to support people they dislike in a competition between two
parties they may even despise. As Barkan (2016) noted about how Johnson and
Stein voters were addressed, “The command to fall in line behind Clinton . . .
shifts the burden from the candidate to the voter” (para. 4). As Jill Stein (2016b)
complained, “No candidate owns anyone’s vote – votes have to be earned”
(para. 5). This case study suggests that in corrupting the signification of a
third-party ballot, third-party containment corrupts the signification of democ-
racy itself.
The way that prospective Stein and Johnson voters were portrayed also
suggests that democratic deliberation in the United States is greatly limited by
the hegemony of the two major parties. Even without winning, third parties
have contributed greatly to American politics by focusing on neglected issues.
Abolition, women’s suffrage, workers’ rights, and the national debt were all
forced into the national political conversation by third parties (Gillespie,
2012). However, the rhetorical containment of third-party voters disrupts this
system of influence. Such containment sends a message that being different and
thinking differently is okay, as long as it does not interfere with the interests of
the two-party hegemony. As an alternative, the major parties assuming the
burden of political campaigning by coopting issues may not be good for the
longevity of a third party, but it certainly benefits deliberation by remaining
open to the concerns of the minority and adjusting a dominant ideology
when necessary.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.
ORCID iD
Ryan Neville-Shepard http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7110-9797
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Author Biography
Ryan Neville-Shepard is an assistant professor of Communication at
the University of Arkansas, where he teaches classes in rhetorical criticism,
argumentation, and political communication. He received his PhD from
the University of Kansas. His work in the area of modern American political
rhetoric has been published in journals such as Communication Studies,
Western Journal of Communication,Argumentation & Advocacy,Southern
Communication Journal,Communication Quarterly, and American
Behavioral Scientist.
Neville-Shepard 21
