I have never heard of Jill Stein until just a few months ago when I saw some article about her on the Lemmy homepage. Then I saw more and more articles about her. However, I don’t really know why the media is paying so much attention to her. She is just a third party candidate, right? There are other third party candidates that aren’t constantly popping up in the news. So why Jill Stein? I hear its something to do with Russia and a general sense of her goal being to take votes away from Kamala.
There is a meme going around blaming Jill Stein for “spoiling” the 2016 race. I was developing an relatively simple analysis to show how and why its ridiculous to propose that Jill Stein “spoiled” the 2016 election. Specifically, in no race did the green party candidate get more votes than the libertarian candidate. A great example is the headline meme that was up about a day ago here: https://lemmy.world/post/21038666?scrollToComments=true
https://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president/
So in Michigan, ~50k voters went to Stein. In that race, 170k went to Gary Johnson.
Pennsylvania, 48,912 to Stein, and for Gary Johnson, 142,653.
Wisconsin, 30,980 to Stein, and for Gary Johnson, 106,442.
So taking these three as an example, in none of these races, if you were to ‘remove’ the 3rd party candidates, would Hillary have won.
Likewise, the meme assumes that “all” of Green Party voters go to Hillary, and some how the Gary Johnson voters just evaporate.
It doesn’t really make sense at any level. Its part of a broader pattern of voter intimidation that seems to be mostly focused on defending a candidate that has been shown to be lacking, not at all different than what we saw in 2016. I didn’t bother finishing the analysis after a very brief look at the data, because it was so patently absurd to suggest that Jill Stein spoiled anything for anyone in 2016, when she literally did not beat Johnson in a single race.
Your argument is a false dichotomy.
Just because the Libertarians ran a spoiler candidate too does not magically make Jill Stein not a spoiler.
I mean the real comparison is just: did she get enough votes, in states that Clinton lost, where if those people had all voted for Clinton, then Clinton would have won that state. I don’t know the answer, but even if the numbers did cover the margin, I think saying Stein is therefore a spoiler is problematic for a few reasons:
Regarding OP’s argument: if Stein is a spoiler, than the libertarians are also spoilers. Since her being a spoiler assumes a majority of her votes would have gone democratic, we can take the same liberty and assume the libertarians would have instead opted for trump. If they had larger vote numbers than the Green Party got, as OP is saying above, then they cancel out greens spoiler-ness, and in fact represent a slight spoiler in favor of the democrats. I don’t really buy this read for the reasons I mentioned above, but OP’s point still kinda stands.
I’m not personally interested in voting for stein, I’ve heard enough weird stuff about her over the years that I’m not comfortable with her as a candidate. But I don’t buy the constant messaging that “third party votes are wasted votes”. My assumption with people that post these things is that they’re not suggesting it’s OK to not vote. And assumably, they also don’t want you to vote, but vote for the opposition. So it’s just the same old thing: vote the way I want you to.
Any unbiased “what if candidates had done things differently” evaluation must include the actions of all candidates that resulted in a Democrat loss. This means it should include how much Clinton herself screw her own chances, for example by comparing the votes she got on those states with the votes previous Democrat candidates got in those states.
(I strongly suspect that Clinton has a far larger proportion of the blame for her own defeat than all 3rd party candidates put together)
This focus on blaming everybody else but your own leaders is just the traditional tribalist mindset of “the chief is good, it’s everybody else whose a problem”. The decades long enshittification of the Democrat Party is mainly the product of its supporters acting as mindless tribalists rather the rationally, thus not holding their “chiefs” to same standards as they do everybody else.
Unsurprisingly we see the very same problem of the Democrat Leadership having carte blanche from the party fans to do just about everything and even damage their own electoral chances - with, as we see right here, the members of the tribe eagerly scapegoating it all as being the fault of 3rd party candidates - with their support for the Israeli Genocide.
Well said-I feel the same.
You should look up what a false dichotomy is. A false dichotomy is typically when someone presents two choices as the only possible options, ignoring other possibilities. My argument doesn’t do that. I’m arguing you have no-idea where Stein voters (or Johnson voters for that matter) would go if not for Stein. Also, you may not have noticed it, but you quite literally engage in false dichotomy in your response.
You are still making the assumption that voters only have two choices. No matter how much you’ve convinced yourself that’s the case; its not reality. Voters don’t have to vote. Voters can vote Republican or however they want. No candidate is owed a vote, however much Democrats want that to be a thing.
The entire rhetorical approach you are engaging in is why Kamala has been slipping in the polls, and its precisely why Hillary lost in 2016. If you want your proffered candidate to win, you actually have to convince people that they are worth voting for. And unlike Kamala, Trump is out there doing that. Stein is out there doing that. Chase Oliver is actually doing that (you don’t know who that is do you?), and guess what? Oliver is beating Stein in most swing states.
The claim that Stein is spoiling when they are polling at literally less than measurable numbers is so obviously idiotic, no one worth respecting would give it anything more than a cursory swipe.
Those votes would not ever go to Clinton, therefore there is no spoiler effect. Green party voters would sit out the election than support forever war (Clinton’s foreign policy) or genocide (Harris’ foreign policy).
Not correct. I voted green in a very, very blue state in 2016, because Stein–at the time–seemed like the best candidate to vote for to register my opposition to Clinton and the conduct of the DNC. I suspect that there were a fairly large number of people like me in the state that I lived in at the time, although the state still handily went blue.
So they were both spoilers.