Pollster Emily Ekins said during an interview on Thursday that third party candidates they made it difficult for pollsters to predict the results of the 2016 presidential election.
“There were so many factors going on in the 2016 election, one in particular also were the extraordinarily high number of people who voted for a third party,” Ekins, polling director at the Cato Institute, told Hill.TV’s Joe Concha on “What America’s Thinking.”
“I think it was a quadrupling of what we had seen in the prior election,” she continued. “Evan McMullin, the Independent candidate, Gary Johnson, Libertarian, Jill Stein,” she continued.
“I think there was about eight million people who cast a ballot for a third party. It’s very hard to have precision and stability in your election forecast,” she said.
“I think in 2012 it was maybe one or two million people voted for a third party. Having that quadrupled to 8 million, that makes it very hard to predict accurately.”
Third party candidates played major roles in states considered safe for Clinton but ended up going for Trump.
Johnson and Stein took roughly 222,400 votes in Michigan, while Trump had carried the state by just over 10,000 votes.
They also played a major role in Florida, where Johnson, Stein, and two other took over 293,000 votes votes, according to NBC News.
Trump won Florida by roughly 112,911 votes.
— Julia Manchester
hilltv copyright