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- cross-posted to:
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“Asked how many members of the House of Reps there were, Stein guessed 600-some before hosts corrected her.”
“Asked how many members of the House of Reps there were, Stein guessed 600-some before hosts corrected her.”
Look at the math.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/results-president.html
https://www.nytimes.com/elections/2016/results/president
Two last elections were won with 1 or 2 percent of certain states swinging one way or another. 1% of people voting Green in a swing state can absolutely hand the election to the fascists.
Greens and Libertarians heavily underperformed in those states relative to the national vote.
Folks who clung to those parties had no interest in voting except as a protest against the duopoly.
Thing is, research organizations have and do survey the public about this. A LOT of pollsters were surveying the public about RFK during this round.
A non-zero amount of 3rd party voters always say they’ll move toward Trump or Harris depending which 3rd party option falls off the pick list.
And when races are tight enough to be decided by a few hundred or a few thousand votes, a small non-zero amount of people can be the difference.
The biggest 3rd party margins are in states with firm single party majorities. Kicking RFK Jr has a very different consequence in California or Texas than Pennsylvania or Michigan.
It’s easier to simply kick ideologically adjacent rivals off the ballot than broaden your base or improve your voter outreach.
The real problem democrats are having is that Jill Stein leads Kamala Harris with Muslims in these three battleground states. And the assumption is that if Stein simply surrenders to Harris and walks away from the campaign, those Muslim voters will collapse into the Democratic Party.
But the assumption fails to address why these communities are polling at historic numbers for an out-layer candidate. Was Stein a rhetorical mastermind who could rally hundreds or thousands of votes to her quixotic campaign? Or is there something about the current Dem administration that Muslims have a problem with?
If you click into the state by state results that I posted, the click in on swing states and view full results, you’ll see that some of the razor thin wins of the past would’ve flipped if a candidate got a hair of a 3rd party’s votes.
That’s why both the GOP and DNC have been worrying about 3rd parties this season.