Third Party Candidates Lost the Election for Clinton?

Welcome!

I've been seeing a flurry of posts claiming that it's the Third-party candidates who lost the election for Clinton, and handed it to Trump on a platter. I suspected that this was not the case so I decided to play with some numbers. Source: http://www.cnn.com/election/results/president Accessed 11/9/2016 ~0700 CST.

We'll start with every state that Trump won:

Informations!

As we can see, there are 6 states in which the vote gap could, potentially be filled by Third Party votes.
Next step is to break apart the Third Party votes into candidates. The most popular was Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate. According to google(via AP), he amassed 4,006,387 votes total. The other candidates did get respectable amounts of votes, but for the sake of this discussion, we'll stick with Mr. Johnson.

Let's see how they stack together(overall):
Donald Trump - 59,041,250
Hillary Clinton - 59,177,303
Gary Johnson - 4,007,782

If you added Johnson's votes directly onto Clinton's, you could argue that the election could have gone much differently. However, this assumes that people voting for Johnson were "taking" votes from Clinton.

Let's look at if Johnson could have swayed the electoral votes in individual states.

Firstly, Evan McMullin performed admirably in Utah. His supporters outvote Johnson by a whopping 130,023 votes! (153,772 for McMullin vs 23,749 for Johnson.)

Next, we see that Johnson's votes went to Hillary, she could have closed the gap in every state. However, this is where things get a little murky. The oft-used rhetoric is that if you don't vote for Candidate A in favor of a Third-Party Candidate, it's the same as voting for Candidate B. The main theme I was witnessing was "If you voted for a third party, you let Trump win."

This assumes that supporters of Johnson would have voted for Hillary if she was the only alternative to Trump. In light of this, we need to see if we can identify the likely-hood of who else Johnson's supporters would have voted for given the two major candidates only.

This is a breakdown of data obtained by the Pew Research Center. (http://www.people-press.org/2016/08/18/1-voters-general-election-preferences/) The article states: "A majority of those who support Johnson are Independents (62%) and they are divided roughly evenly between those who lean toward the Republican Party (28%) and the Democratic Party (24%), while 14% decline to lean toward either party.

The full document (http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2016/08/August-political-topline-for-release.pdf Page 8, Q.14a) shows us that of those who do not support or lean toward a major candidate only 33% would vote for Clinton. For the sake of argument, let's add in the other 35% from the "Other Candidate" and "Don't know/Refused" categories, with a grand total of 68% of the Third Party voters.

When we apply 68% against the 85 Electoral votes that were possible to switch to Clinton based solely on Third party candidates that gives us 58 votes, still short of the 71 needed minimum.

Conclusion

It comes down to who the third party candidates would have been likely to vote for only given the two major candidates. The assumption that I have witnessed is that these voters would have voted for Clinton. However this ignores the options of voting for Trump, or simply abstaining (or writing in your pet's name.) The data I found shows that an insufficient amount of votes would likely have gone to Hillary.

I'm not a statistician, and tried to find sources for what I could. I'm open to feedback and constructive criticism. This project was more informative than I thought. I had thought that even with the third-party voters they wouldn't overturn enough states to change the outcome of the election. This is not the case.

There are limitations to this project. It doesn't take into account changes in campaign money and energy put behind Clinton's campaign. I don't know how that could be factored in, and would be interested to find out.
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