Trump and Harris are the only two candidates who have a chance of winning, but officially there are also other candidates from different parties in the presidential elections. The main one is Jill Stein, of the Green party. She had already been a candidate in 2012 and 2016, however always obtaining marginal results, around 1 percent of the votes. This year Stein has criticized both Harris and Trump on various issues, including above all the management of the war in the Gaza Strip and the attitude adopted by both towards Israel, considered too favorable not only by Stein but by many Arab voters and Muslims.
Stein has no chance of winning this time either, and in the polls he is around 1 percent. In such a contested election, however, it could take away important votes from both parties and especially from Kamala Harris. In mid-October the Democratic Party also released an advert against Stein, where she claims that a vote for her is “actually a vote for Trump”.
Jill Stein (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
Robert Kennedy Jr., son of Bobby Kennedy, killed in 1968 while running for president of the United States, and nephew of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, assassinated in Dallas in 1963, was also a candidate in these elections. Kennedy Jr. has been supporting the various conspiracy and anti-scientific theories for years, and is one of the main exponents of the US anti-vaccination movement. After leaving the Democratic Party he ran as an independent, but the campaign was quite troubled: at the end of August he withdrew and gave his support to Donald Trump. Despite this, his name still appears on ballots in some states, including Michigan and Wisconsin.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
The candidate of a “third party” who obtained the most votes in the history of the United States was Theodore Roosevelt, a former Republican president who in 1912 ran for re-election with the Progressive Party and obtained 27.4 percent of the votes. More recently, independent Ross Perot won 18.9 percent of the vote in 1992 (the other candidates were Democrat Bill Clinton, who won, and Republican George HW Bush). In 2000, Ralph Nader, of the Greens, won more than 97,000 votes in Florida, where the result was announced after weeks of recounts and Republican George W. Bush won by just 537 votes. According to many, if Nader had not been the candidate the final result could have been different, and perhaps the Democrat Al Gore would have won.
