| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Representative Justin Amash, former Republican and current independent from Michigan, has jumped into the presidential race as a Libertarian Party candidate. This follows news that Jesse Ventura, the former governor of Minnesota, may run for the Green Party nomination. The first question about such candidates is: As opposed to what? Both parties will be on the ballot in a lot of states, which means that if not Amash and Ventura, someone else will be filling those slots. Ventura (an erstwhile wrestler and actor) is, I suppose, moderately famous. Amash is unknown beyond his House district and the small number of people who follow politics closely — and the latter group tends to be filled with die-hard partisans who won't be voting for a third-party candidate. Neither man enters the contest with any real political following. Neither is likely to get significant coverage from the national media. In other words, there's no reason to expect either to have a chance to win even a single electoral vote. That said, they certainly could make a difference if the contest between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden ends up being a close one, just as fringe third-party candidates may have done in 2000 and 2016. I have no idea why Ventura is running. But Green Party candidates in recent cycles have mostly tried to help Republicans win; they have a model for that kind of campaign. If the party actually wanted to boost its membership, the best strategy would be to campaign only in states with lopsided party majorities, where voters concerned about (say) the climate could vote Green without having to worry about throwing the election to an incumbent who has governed by supporting as much global warming as possible. As for Amash? He's a principled small-government libertarian who thinks Trump is unfit for office. If his main goal is to defeat the president, he should run a campaign focused not on Trump's deficiencies but on policy questions that sharply divide the parties. Anti-Trump ads are unlikely to shake Republican voters. Even those who aren't big Trump fans may, given the effects of negative partisanship, move closer to the president when they see him attacked. Those attacks might also draw in some Democrats who aren't enthusiastic about Biden. Issue ads, on the other hand, could be designed to appeal to wavering Republicans but not to those who lean Democratic. After all, it's not likely that Trump's flaws will go unmentioned over the course of the campaign.
Again: We're talking about small numbers of voters here. Democrats will remember that the last Green Party candidate drew more votes than Trump's margin over Hillary Clinton in several key states and will be unlikely to stray this time. There's a precedent for that: Green Party candidate Ralph Nader went from 2.74% in the very close 2000 election to only 0.38% in 2004 as an independent (with the Green Party's unknown candidate doing even worse). On the other side, suspicions that Trump wasn't really a conservative, which delivered some Republican votes to third-party candidates in 2016, seem to have mostly disappeared. So while Amash might make the difference in a very close race, he probably won't get larger numbers of votes — say, 3% or more — unless Trump's support has collapsed and it's no longer a competitive race. 1. Remco Zwetsloot at the Monkey Cage on Chinese students studying in the U.S. 2. Rachel Bitecofer on the congressional elections. 3. Leah C. Stokes on Michael Moore's new climate film. 4. Amber McReynolds and Charles Stewart III on vote-by-mail. 5. Jane Coaston talks with Shana Gadarian and Bethany Albertson about anxiety, politics and the pandemic. 6. Stuart Rothenberg on how Arizona is voting. 7. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Tim Duy on the threat of deflation. 8. And House Rules Committee Chairman James P. McGovern on finding a way for Congress to work during the pandemic. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
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