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.
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.