DOT wrote:It's pretty consistent that the vast majority of 3rd party voters are people who would not vote for either of the main candidates if they only had 2 options. They would just stay home
People who vote Stein and West aren't people who would vote for Kamala if those two weren't running, essentially
But I do find it interesting that we talk about 2016 and Stein, but Stein finished 4th in that race. Gary Johnson who finished 3rd never gets talked about. We talk about the 51 thousand Michigan voters for Stein and not the 172 thousand Johnson voters. Stein got 31 thousand in Wisconsin, Johnson got 107 thousand. 50 thousand for Stein in PA, of which Hillary would have needed 45 thousand (90% of) to beat Trump, Johnson got 147 thousand
The reason we don't talk about Gary Johnson is cause he's a Libertarian. His voters came from Trump. If we're having a serious discussion about 3rd party candidates in the context of 2016, they helped Hillary more than they hurt. If it were just between the 2 of them and we assume literally every 3rd party voter voted for the candidate closer to them, Trump would've completely dominated the election
If you look at the polls, Johnson was at 4.8% the day before the election (according to 538), and he only got 3.3%. He underperformed by 1.5%, Stein got 1.1% of the vote. It's far more likely Johnson voters swinging to Trump last minute is what won him the election
Johnson was predicted to get 6.1% in Michigan, he got 3.6%. 4.9% in Wisconsin to 3.6%. 4.6% in PA to 2.4%. Now, some of that is due to more voters than anticipated diluting his share, but still. I think the real answer is that a lot of people were gonna vote for Gary Johnson until Comey's investigation into Hillary came out, at which point a substantial amount of them coalesced around Trump as the anti-Hillary vote. Mathematically, that's a more plausible reason than claiming the issue is leftists not voting Hillary, especially since the data shows that a higher percentage of Bernie primary voters in 2016 voted for Hillary than Hillary primary voters in 2008 did for Obama. But we can't blame the "moderate" Republicans, after all, it must be those damn leftists.
The numbers bear it out and are pretty clear. If all Stein voters or majority of Stein voters had voted for Hillary in the 3 battleground states the country wouldn’t be facing the nightmare of Donald Trump.
There are a lot of people to blame for 2016 but it stands to reason that Donald Trump was a racist, corrupt, wannabe authoritarian in 2016. Nobody should have voted for him Green, Democrat, Libertarian or Republican. However from a policy perspective, if you’re a Green voter and you know Jill Stein has zero chance of winning, you’re better off with a Democratic President because all of your rights and policy positions will go backwards under a Republican President. Libertarians have never been aligned with the Democratic Party, if they knew Johnson has zero 0% chance of winning then they’re more likely to vote for Trump (again they conveniently ignore the racism and authoritarianism). We know Left leaning voters are specifically targeted by foreign influence ops and the Green Party has admitted that they’re trying to play spoiler against Harris. You have lots of people trying to increase the Green Party votes because they know those votes would otherwise go to Harris.
It’s pretty simple. A vote for Harris is a vote against Facism and turning the country into a hellhole. Not voting Harris or sitting is admitting that you’re fine with Facism and the end of Democracy.
RIP mags
