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September 17, 2024 - 8:30pm
Old grudges die hard, and Democrats still blame the Green Party for two elections in which Democrats won the popular vote but lost the presidency: 2000 and 2016. In both cases, the vote total for the Green Party was more than the Republican margin in the states that determined the presidential election in the Electoral College. Ralph Nader got almost 100,000 votes in Florida during the 2000 election — far more than George W. Bush’s 537-vote lead in the Sunshine State. In 2016, Jill Stein also got more votes than Donald Trump’s victory margin in the trifecta of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that ended up delivering him the presidency.
Whether Stein really played a spoiler in all those states is up for dispute. Consider Pennsylvania. Hillary Clinton lost the state by roughly 44,000 votes, but Stein only racked up around 50,000 votes. There’s a strong likelihood that some of Stein’s voters wouldn’t have voted at all if Stein weren’t on the ballot — and some of them could have even voted for Trump (perhaps because of trade policy or his outsider appeal). In that case, Stein’s presence on the ballot in 2016 might not have tipped the scales in Pennsylvania after all.
Nevertheless, Democrats remain worried that Stein’s 2024 presidential run could cost them, and their allies have mounted a legal campaign to keep her off the ballot in many states. In the 2020 presidential election, the Green nominee was confined to write-in status in many swing states, including Wisconsin, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. But this year, Stein’s campaign says that it has qualified for the ballot in almost all battleground states. One exception is Nevada, where the state Supreme Court recently removed Stein from the ballot, but the Green Party is petitioning the Supreme Court to intervene.
In part because of the closeness of recent swing-state battles, the Green Party’s star has fallen. Stein got about 1% of the vote in the 2016 election in Michigan. Four years later, the Green nominee got only about 0.25% there. Democrats might have had more to fear from defections to the Greens when Joe Biden was still at the top of the ticket. Since Harris has replaced Biden as the nominee, enthusiasm among progressive voters has soared, as the latest Monmouth Poll demonstrates.
That is not to suggest that the Democrats aren’t worrying about the Jill Stein threat. Indeed, losing even a few votes could matter. This dynamic reveals another rationale for Harris’s strategic ambiguity about her policy positions: she wants to appeal to moderates while avoiding alienating the Left, making vague gesticulations about a “new way forward” instead. By keeping her campaign floating in the stratosphere of generalities, Harris aims to deny Jill Stein and other third-party candidates any points of attack.
The tightness of recent electoral contests has made American political conflict even more fraught. Fewer than 80,000 votes across Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania sent Donald Trump to the White House in 2016. Despite Biden’s bigger popular vote margin, a shift of 50,000 votes in key battleground states could have changed the results of the 2020 election. Republicans’ narrow 2022 House majority relied on razor-thin margins in swing districts.
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SubscribePro-tip: the side that wants to kick people off ballots is NOT “saving democracy”.
Pro tip: the party cramming through votes with no ID, holds secretive ballot counts and ends up with more ballots than voters is destroying democracy.
Extra pto tip: the party invading the country with illegal immigrants and enabling them to vote is anti-democratic.
The most ironically named party in history: “democrat party”. Their dependable response is dehumsnization of opponents, dog whistling for violence against opponents, and lawfare to keep opponents off ballots, while flooding ballot boxes with dubious mail in ballots. And if that fails, invade the country with illegal immigrants to distort Congressional apportionment until they can cram through a faux amnesty.
The misnamed ‘Democrats’ do not believe in ‘democracy’, even though they are out to ‘save it’. It’s gaslighting at its finest.
Always fantastic when you meet someone in real life who speaks out loud the sentence — ‘I’m going to vote for the Greens’
I’m an open-minded guy
Is there anyone alive on earth today who does not know that voting for a third party candidate in a US election disadvantages the candidate closest to your preference and, in effect, aids the candidate furthest from your preference?
Given the well-understood nature of this fact it is odd that Democrats continue to depict Jill Stein and Ralph Nader as stealing votes that are rightfully theirs.
In reality, people who vote for Jill Stein are acutely aware of the consequences of their votes and they are voting that way anyway. If the Dems insist on interpreting these votes as anything other than a vote for Stein/Nader/West/Kennedy, then the more rational interpretation would be “I loathe your policies so very much that I am prepared to cut off my nose, spiting my face, just to let you know how much I loathe you.”
Dems cannot, of course, admit this interpretation because doing so would mean admitting that the most progressive voters don’t think that the Dems are progressive at all. Hence the charade of pretending to believe that Stein voters can be forcibly converted to Dem voters if she can just be kicked off enough ballots.
Harris a far greater threat to the US and the world than Trump.
Which is really saying something, is it not?