Charlie Cook: “The challenge for any independent no matter how bright, impressive, highly-successful, well-intentioned and amply-funded they may be is that there are not the 270 Electoral votes needed that are available for an independent to win. This is not high math, just basic arithmetic.”
“Let’s assume that any state where a nominee can draw 60 percent of the vote, is a safe state for that party… From this we can reasonably conclude that just about any Democrat would win D.C and between four and ten states that would total between 82 and 149 Electoral votes… We can reasonably safely assume that any Republican would win between five and ten states totaling between 23 to 59 Electoral votes.”
“That means that between 105 and 208 out of a total of 538 Electoral votes are simply not available to any independent candidate. How does an independent get 270 Electoral votes under that scenario? They don’t. The independent may well not win any states, but even if they did, and kept each major party’s nominee from getting to the 270 Electoral votes needed for a majority in the Electoral College, the election would get thrown to the U.S. House of Representatives with each state, regardless of population, getting one vote (California one vote, North Dakota one vote).”
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