The easiest way to interpret this year’s third party insurgencies—their resiliency in polls, their appeal to some newspaper editorial boards—is to attribute their unusually strong showings to the historic unpopularity of the major party candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

This is practically a truism, but it’s also too generalized to provide an accurate sense of how the voting public views this election. A significant majority of voters, after all, believe that Trump, unlike Clinton, is unfit for the presidency. Attributing third-party strength this year to the fact that both candidates are unpopular requires collapsing that distinction, or assuming many third-party voters don’t consider the possible victory of an unfit candidate as an urgent threat.

A more nuanced picture emerges if you burrow down into the data, but one that still points to short-sighted thinking on the part of many Clinton skeptics. If she wins the election in November, as she’s forecasted to do, but only manages to eke out a narrow victory, which most forecasts suggest is likely, it will be partly because her vote margins are self-limited by a widespread assumption that she can’t lose.

Obviously people who don’t support and won’t vote for Clinton cite a variety of objections, some better than others. But some people clearly view Clinton’s persistent polling lead—Trump’s inability to overtake her in polling averages—as a kind of liberation. As long as she’s on course to win, some number of people who despise Trump, but don’t care for Clinton—millennials who believe she’s too corrupt or scripted; anti-Trump conservatives who can’t abide her liberalism; others laboring under a quarter century of hate debt—will feel freed to abstain from voting, or to register a protest vote for Green Party nominee Jill Stein or Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson. As YouGov pollster Will Jordan noted recently, 12 percent of Trump voters believe he’ll lose. Only three percent of Clinton voters have the same thought about her. By further contrast, only a tiny minority of third-party and undecided voters believe Trump will win. About half believe Clinton will.

12% of Trump vtrs support him & believe he'll lose. Only 3% for HRC. Only 15% of 3rdParty/undecided expect Trump win pic.twitter.com/W3P0mD4wkH — Will Jordan (@williamjordann) September 15, 2016

The notion that the outcome of the election is in little doubt—that protest voting is a no-risk proposition—might ultimately prove to be more pronounced in states like California than in swing states like Florida and Ohio. But it is real. The editorial board of the Chicago Tribune embodied the phenomenon when it explained that “Republicans have nominated Donald Trump, a man not fit to be president of the United States…. Democrats have nominated Hillary Clinton, who, by contrast, is undeniably capable of leading the United States,” before throwing its endorsement to Johnson.

