I hope so. I just don't like third parties in general. Since most races boil down to the "lesser of two evils", giving someone an out with a "conscience vote" tends to favor the most evil by taking votes from the lesser evil. Remember Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, and Gary Johnson. Of course, that's just my out of my ass take on it. I'm sure there's data out there to prove I'm totally wrong.
I share your concern, but I'm not sure how warranted it is. There are some hopeful factors to point to,esp when you look at 2016...
First off Amash is going to be running on the Libertarian ticket, and they were going to nominate somebody anyway. They always do, and they never get that significant share of the vote. Even someone like Rand Paul who claims to BE a libertarian never endorses a libertarian candidate...
The other factor which came into play in battleground states in 2016 was the double haters. These are the people who internal polling from both Clinton and Trump showed as undecided, basically because they hated both candidates.
"During the last weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s data team was obsessed with a particular subset of voters: those who disliked both Trump and Hillary Clinton. As I reported in my book about the race, Devil’s Bargain, Trump’s analysts nicknamed this group “double haters.” They comprised about 3% to 5% of the 15 million voters the campaign believed were persuadable, but they were vexing because their intentions were difficult to discern. While their voting history indicated they would likely cast a ballot, many refused to answer pollsters’ questions or declared themselves undecided.
That is, until the final days of the campaign.
On October 28, then-FBI Director James Comey announced his intention to reopen the investigation into Clinton’s disputed emails. Immediately, the double haters made up their minds and started moving en masse toward Trump. “What we saw is that it gave them a reason to vote against her instead of voting for him,” Matt Oczkowski, a Trump campaign data scientist, said at the time. “They were finally able to admit that to pollsters without feeling any guilt.”
The Clinton campaign was also tracking double haters and, to its horror, saw the same thing. “We saw those fickle, Republican-leaning voters that we’d been successfully attracting off and on throughout the general election revert back to Trump at the end,” Brian Fallon, a top Clinton official, said then. The shift to Trump proved decisive.
Earlier this week, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found Joe Biden leading Trump 49 percent to 42 percent among registered voters—roughly the margin by which Clinton led Trump in 2016, once it was clear she’d be the Democratic nominee. NBC News shared data with me from the poll on voters who had negative opinions of both Trump and Biden: the new double haters. These voters were clear in their preference. Biden was winning them 60 percent to 10 percent."
At this point Trump has a record- in 2016 he was a theoretical unknown. I think at this point if people don't like Trump they are not going to risk his re-election just to throw a protest bone vote to Amash...
"John Anzalone, who was a pollster for Clinton’s 2016 campaign and now polls for Biden’s campaign, says that last election, the widespread expectation that Clinton would win caused many people to stay home or cast a protest vote for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson. The fact of Trump’s presidency, he believes, will change that. “You’re always going to have double haters because we’re a divided nation,” says Anzalone. “But it’s different this time because they’re not going to stay home or go third party with so much at stake, and a Trump presidency isn’t theoretical anymore.”
https://www.bloombergquint.com/businessweek/new-poll-shows-a-hidden-danger-for-trump-double-haters
