Yep, his logic is flawed, even if his math is correct. Green voters would have never voted for Hillary. So to imply that say a red headed man had run on the Green party ticket that all those votes Jill got would have gone to Hillary is just stupid false. I voted for Jill, but in my precinct Hillary won anyway, so my vote for Jill didn’t make a difference. Now, if the DNC and Hillary hadn’t colluded with the media to give Trump all that free media coverage and sabotage Bernie’s campaign bye closing polling places, purging voter rolls, counting superdelegates to inflate Hillary’s actual delegate numbers. Democrats continue to bury their heads in the sand about how Clinton’s backroom shenanigans were her own downfall.

Actually, Blake, you are wrong since they aren’t Trump supporters and the Green Party mentioned Trump more times than you think.

Most people who voted for Jill Stein voted for her because it was a “protest” vote. It has nothing to do with her “progressive” platform. Most of the people-nearly all of them-didn’t research any of her views at all, and had no clue what the Green Party even stands for.

However, most of the people who CLAIMED to vote for Jill Stein were closet Donald Trump supporters. They spent most of their time bashing Hillary Clinton, and ignoring Donald Trump. If they truly thought they were both equally “as bad” as the other, then they would have said as such, but this was rarely the case.

It’s quite obvious from your post that you wanted Donald Trump to win.

You’re assuming that Jill Stein’s voters are ACTUALLY Green Party voters. Many Jill Stein “supporters”(I honestly think most of them were closet Donald Trump supporters) spent most of their time bashing Democrats, and Hillary Clinton, yet, RARELY mentioned Republicans, and Donald Trump. If they were TRUE Green Party voters, they would at least admit Democrats are more concerned with Green issues than Republicans, even if they didn’t like Democrats, but that wasn’t the case.

I’m not saying Jill Stein voters(the ones who actually did vote for her, not the closet Trump supporters) swayed the election though.

Good commentary, Jesse. A lot of what you say there rings true. These things are never black and white, and you can’t say any one thing by itself would have tipped the balance.

But 3rd party candidates do suck votes away from the Dems if they are left-leaning, and from the Rethuglicans if they are to the right. If that tips the balance in a few key states…

A preference voting system would solve that problem, where votes could be transferred from one candidate to another. You put a 1 next to your favourite candidate, a 2 next to your 2nd preference, etc. If your no. 1 choice gets eliminated, your vote is transferred to your no. 2 choice if they’re still in the race.

But of course, that would require the biggest change to the Constitution ever. Not gonna happen anytime soon in the current political climate.

Suppose the Greens keep voting for their candidate and tilting the election to the Republicans in a close race. They keep doing it even after having it pointed out what they are doing. What would liberals do? They would be forced to run a candidate closer to the Green line to get those 2% votes they need to win. They might even abandon their own candidate and vote Green, given the stakes. All Greens have to do it refuse to vote Dem and let Republicans win some elections. Applies for LIbertarians as well.

“…moving the needle essentially 1.5 % or so needed an affirmative reason to vote for Clinton — who won the popular vote, never forget. She’d have done even better against Trump I think if she was willing to at least throw a sop to Sanders people…”

‘Affirmative reason’, and as some said, what did Dems stand for? I thought it was pretty obvious what they stood for until I actually tried to put it into a straightforward, overarching sentence that had some punch to it: “Why vote for us? Here let us drag you into the weeds and hypnotize you with our wonkiness.”

Presentation was just problematic overall considering, for exmple, Clinton’s oddly weak performance with women; especially white women and millenials.

When I saw her on TV attempting to heal a rift with millenial women after patronizing them, I thought that what she said was pretty good — if you listened with your eyes closed. You could imagine her standing on stage surrounded by a diverse group of smiling supporters. Open your eyes and the optics said something else. All I remember is her standing there in front of a wall of somewhat smug looking, middle aged white women in pantsuits who looked like they might be hiding hickory switches behind their backs.

And then there was that spate of online comment testimonials along the lines of “I used to be a Bernie supporter, but then I grew up…”

I don’t know, it just seemed the campaign had the feel of people from another era living inside their heads… IMO.

That was no excuse not to vote for her, of course, but you can see how some of the enthusiasm might have been a bit more muted than necessary…when as it turned out, every little bit mattered.

Further, had Gore won his home state (Tennessee) neither FL or NH matter. But Gore couldn’t win a state that elected him as a senator. That’s the sign of a rather weak-ish candidate right there. No president has won without their home state (prior to Trump) for a century at least. (It makes some sense; generally if people who have the most reason to get behind you won’t back you, you’re not going to win over anyone else).

@Greg
As for blaming Stein, I don’t think that the position that a large piece of Stein voters would otherwise vote Clinton was wrong, exactly. But that doesn’t mean that Clinton’s campaign didn’t have problems — in fact it underscores it. I am not quite sure I buy that Russian influence always drove those voters either, because generally the right wing of the conspiracy spectrum is far louder than the left one (this isn’t always true, but it has been for the past few years). Relative GOP heavyweights were willing to spout the craziest things from InfoWars or Breitbart, and there wasn’t that kind of support for say, anti-vax or even anti-GMO thinking from prominent Democrats and CNN never repeated anything of what Stein had to say. (If you watched the major networks you’d hardly know she was running).

Aside from that, Clinton’s refusal — after the WI Dems begged her — to campaign in WI was simply complacency. That happens. There was every reason to think that WI was pretty likely to go Democrat once again, especially with Trump running. Similar things could be said of MI and PA. This wasn’t so much because pollsters were wrong (they were all w/in their MoEs) but because the available data Clinton had indicated that people wouldn’t likely change their voting patters a ton. They didn’t, either, but some of the ones who were Clinton people in crucial states stayed home.

And I’d have to agree that moving the needle essentially 1.5 % or so needed an affirmative reason to vote for Clinton — who won the popular vote, never forget. She’d have done even better against Trump I think if she was willing to at least throw a sop to Sanders people (remember Obama made her Secretary of State, and it was clear she was going to get a cabinet post when Obama ran, in no small part to appease her wing of the party). It wouldn’t have killed her to have one of Sanders’ advisors or supporters, or even Sanders himself, in a high-profile position.

And when Trump says “I will get your job back and keep more from going” and Clinton says “well, we will retrain you, and you might get a new job, might not” — when everyone knows that retraining is horseshit because your new job will probably pay less – who makes more sense to any worker? Add a dollop of racism that has infected the GOP for 50 years, and pushed the Overton Window far enough that they became the party of David freaking Duke 20+ years ago.

In that sense the fact that the Greens got roughly the same vote percentage as before is significant, as is the fact that there is good data to show Republicans were motivated to come out to vote in a way Democrats were not (turnout numbers bear this out). Clinton — a white woman — simply was never going to get black voters to support her in quite the same percentage (turnout wise) as Obama was.

Then we add on voter suppression efforts.

In sum, I don’t doubt the Russians would have tried some shenanigans. But I don’t think it was as simple as getting Trump a win, or supporting the Greens, just as the US governments meddling in other elections isn’t as simple as that binary. And I’d not lay Clinton’s loss at the feet of Stein, not entirely. Looking at some numbers, I see that in those crucial states Clinton lost Democratic turnout was depressed, the GOP’s was up. What would you expect to happen?

The election was always Clinton’s to lose, and not every problem was her fault. Stein voters could have tipped the balance, but Clinton could have made her affirmative case better. Those are not mutually exclusive, I don’t think.

(I didn’t vote for Stein because I thought she was simply put, unserious about policy).

I voted for Clinton roughly along the lines that you laid out. In terms of strategy, my hope was that, however incrementally, she might be able to bend the trajectory of the country in a good direction: though pessimisticly I suspected that at best she would only be able to slow what I see as a decline.

So I can understand that a certain percentage of people (out of a sufficiently large number of people fed up with BAU for whatever reason) might want to send a message if not just “rip the band aid off.” It’s practically physics, and it seems to me that things are very hot here– to the point that I question how manageable the situation is becoming… at least by the pool of managers we now have…