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Third-Party Candidates Made Little Headway In NC 2020 Election

2020 Green Party presidential candidate Howie Hawkins, phoographed in 2018. Like most third-party candidates, Hawkins struggled to get traction in this year's North Carolina elections, garnering less than 1 percent of the vote. (AP Photo/Hans Pennink, File)

Third-party candidates hoped to capitalize on the expanded political divide this election. But as Hunt Wasden reports, that support didn't happen in North Carolina. 

In North Carolina, Libertarian party candidates took a hit in most statewide elections this year. 

The party's gubernatorial candidate Steven DiFiore only managed to capture 1% of the vote, which is half of the percentage point captured by the party's candidate in 2016. 

Similarly, at the top of the ballot, presidential candidate Jo Jorgensen lost two-thirds of the support enjoyed by her predecessor Gary Johnson in 2016. And while this cycle also saw the first Constitution and Green party candidates on the ballot, both fared even worse than Jorgensen. 

This discrepancy was not limited to North Carolina though, as Jorgensen captured barely more than a third of the percentage of the nationwide popular vote as Johnson in 2016. 

The best performance in a statewide race was by the U.S. Senate Libertarian candidate, Shannon Bray, who pulled about 3 percent. 

 

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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