A new poll suggests that Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein is drawing more voters from former President Donald Trump than from Vice President Kamala Harris.
According to a Noble Predictive Insights survey released last week, Harris holds a narrow lead over Trump in a hypothetical three-way race. With Stein on the ballot, Harris’ lead expands, pointing to a potential spoiler effect similar to what many Democrats blamed Stein for doing to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
For Trump, the emergence of Stein as a potential spoiler may be a critical factor in battleground states, where even a small shift in votes could determine the outcome. For Harris, Stein’s candidacy could paradoxically provide an unexpected advantage, drawing votes from Trump and narrowing his pathway to victory.
You heard’em, start campaigning for Stein if you want Kamala to win.
Says everything you need to know about Jill Stein doesn’t it?
I don’t listen to polls anymore. I’ve already voted, I don’t give a fuck about who’s leading who.
Bullshit.
MRW when @univeralmonk was right
Without looking at any statistics or polling, I think the spoiler effect is not as prominent and is over stated for one reason.
If I’m going out of my way to not vote for the Democrats or Republicans and voting third party that would mean that I dislike my options so much that I’m giving a fuck you to the two party system.
What people can gather from this is if you said there was only two options I would just sit out and therefore it wasn’t going to affect either candidate regardless.
I’m open to be convinced otherwise but I think candidates blaming spoilers should look at the electoral college and themselves when every 4 years they are ready to blame single digit candidates for their losses.
It sounds like your interpretation of the spoiler effect centers on people voting third party due to dissatisfaction with the 2 unfortunately omnipresent parties, which would be the same as not voting. Have you considered that some people who were going to vote no matter what might vote for a third party candidate because their listed policies actually resonate with them?
Democrats will still blame Stein if they lose, and even though their explicit strategy is to pick off disaffected Republicans, they’ll never blame Chase Oliver. It’s just like in 2016, when Hillary used the exact same strategy, and they blamed Stein, even though Gary Johnson took home a much higher percentage of the vote in most swing states. They don’t care about spoiler candidates; they just want to punch left, especially when they need a scapegoat for a loss.
Dem mental gymnastics are going into overdrive rn
Do you think all of those people who have been saying that third-party voters are going to destroy the US will be apologizing in the comment section here?
It’s possible the warnings helped. No reason to apologise for that.
Regardless of outcome, you’re playing with fire in our current voting system. Even if a few states did actually elect a third party, you could see no candidate reach 270 electoral votes and then it goes to the even more arcane vote done in the house of representatives (which each state gets a vote)
A very blue district in Hawaii sent a Republican (Charles Djou) to Washington in a special election with less than half the vote, because the two Democrats in the race refused to back down. If there were a ranked choice or other voting system than “plurality takes all”, he wouldn’t have won
Oh geez, really tightening up the narrative now. 3rd party voting in non-swing states is getting demonized.
Cripes. My point was our current system means your vote for the perfect candidate can put the candidate you disagree with most into office when one with much closer views to yours could have been elected instead. It has happened, and in a place where it really shouldn’t have.
That system should be changed for that reason, and until it is you should be very aware of unintended consequences of that vote.
So now that you’ve identified the problem I can only hope you’re actively building grassroots support to replace the current system instead of just posting online about how people should vote blue no matter what, right?
I see lots of problems in the world. Our voting system is flawed, income inequality is bananas, people still think Donald Trump won the election 4 years ago, our cities are very car-dependent, and plenty more. If I built a grassroots program for every issue I point out to every yahoo on the Internet, I wouldn’t have time to change my toddler’s diaper. If my posting online tells people to keep the cart behind the horse or reconsider their points of view (glad you seem to agree with me what the problem is!) I’ll call that a win on a smaller scale.
I understand juggling the current political hellscape with a child is nightmarish but building a movement behind a better political system would be the first step in allowing people to vote for better options and resolve the myriad of issues you’ve listed - until then saying to “keep the cart behind the horse” only means we’ll continue bickering in the backseat while the obviously broken two-party state drives us all off the edge.
And I get that between work and family finding time to be politically active can be challenging but I would hope you can find an hour or two a month to join your local RCV advocacy group and help create a better political environment for yours and everybody else’s children.
I know people who have small children and are still involved in socialist organizing.
Cool. Am I supposed to do that for every cause I believe in or just the ones you say I should?
First past the post is a terrible design. Let’s rank choice and move on.
lol, pie in the sky right?
Always make both parties worried: threaten to vote for a third party to keep the main party on its toes. But vote for the main party on the actual day. This isn’t a time for idealism.
A threat that you refuse to make good on is the same as doing nothing. I have no interest in telling someone who to vote for, but your proposed strategy is ridiculous.
Right? If we have nukes, we should just use them! The threat itself does nothing…
(…think before you speak)
Appropriately apocalyptic for the liberal view on these elections, but the problem, also appropriate for the liberal view on these elections, is that you are taking the Other to be a complete dipshit.
If you’re in a situation that isn’t the literal end of the world, bluffing has a serious danger associated with it because it informs all circumstances subsequent to the bluff if it gets called. From that point on, people know that your threats are not to be taken seriously, and you have robbed yourself of whatever power you had. You become a “boy who cried wolf” with respect to the actions you will take.
Furthermore, this time in all situations, it’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to stake such a widespread plan of action on everyone at all times maintaining a lie. How do you agitate for such a thing? You can’t speak of it in the open. How do you vet candidates? Someone might be an asset (and liberals usually believe spaces both online and offline are crawling with assets for other states) or even just someone who thinks you plan is bullshit and will decide to talk about it afterwards. Basically, your plan works in the same realm of imagination where wars would stop if all of the soldiers on both sides just laid down their arms. That is to say, if you could just cast a spell and make people act that way, sure, but that’s not how politics works.
Lastly, it’s important to remember we are talking about threats, so “If we have nukes, we should just use them!” is a complete non sequitur. That’s not a threat, that’s just an attack. Incidentally, while there is a good argument to be made that if you get nuked, you should just take the L if you think your barrage might tip the scales into the world ending, such an idea definitionally does not work as the dominant ideology because at that point MAD does not protect your country anymore and there’s really no point in you having nukes when you’re just surrendering to death anyway. If you’re an individual operator of a nuclear silo or something and you refuse to participate in ending the world, good for you, but again that’s something that you can’t organize with because it’s a conspiracy of a similar style to what I outlined before, so you aren’t going to succeed in helping very much unless you’re on the vanguard and it might be a false positive that an enemy nuke was launched at all (this happened at least once with the USSR, during the Cuban Missile Crisis). In that extremely specific situation where mass action is impossible and only a tiny fraction of a fraction of the population ever gets close to being in the conditions where such an incident has even a slim possibility of occuring: Yes, there it works well.
I’ve also seen people vote third party for just as long and not a damn thing has changed either. In fact I used to be one of them.
Has it not? Political parties have copied popular policies from third parties in their subsequent elections many times.
But only once they see how many votes they lose on it they will start considering those policies.
Sure, if you’re willing to take your actions to the streets and have a large following behind you, then by all means strike while the fire is hot.
But if you’re not organised other than a vague internet presence, now is really not the time to fuck about.
Oh, you mean materially supporting protests, showing up to several daily for months, and marching in the street as often as possible? Glad to hear you support Jill Stein.
MLK commanded 44% popularity, Jill Stein is nowhere in that league.
To compare the marches and the impact of the two is the definition of insanity, and to ask others to lend support for her or any 3rd party now at such a critical time is literal madness.
Who in the fuck brought up MLK?
Ranks 60 out 284 in Five Thirty-Eight’s rankings. Not bad.
Libs will still blame leftists like blue maga wants them to.
Jesus, bucketing everyone together and then throwing out crazy labels. Sounds like you live by the MAGA playbook.
Alright I’ll bite. I don’t understand this. The word liberal has two meanings: the classical and the colloquial. The latter is indistinguishable from leftist, so I assume you are using the classical form.
Classical liberals will still blame leftists, like … blue maga wants them to? Who exactly is blue maga? Jill Stein supporters?
Classical liberals also span the left-right spectrum right now, with many identifying as libertarian. I struggle to see what you are getting at regardless of who blue maga represents, but maybe there is a point here.
No it’s not ingestinguishable from the left, as issues like this show very clearly. That’s just a fiction you’re taught by liberals to fool you into thinking they’re on your side.
Words can have different colloquial meanings. There is a really crass meaning of liberal that would identify Marx as a liberal, yes, and this is the most popular one in America, but there’s another colloquial meaning (more popular in other anglophone countries, but gaining traction in America) where liberals are basically centrists (in capitalist societies) who might pretend to be progressive but are ultimately moderates to their bones. This came from the proclivities of “Liberal” parties, along with centrists understandably claiming the name of whatever the ruling ideology is, and here it is of course liberalism.
Among leftist circles, “liberal” is sort of an unmarked term for the moderate definition and the Lockean definition both, like how “guys” can refer to both a group of males and a group of mixed gender, despite “gals” only referring specifically to a group of females (I’m using those terms because they apply to children also, not just men/women).
So the comment is saying, in translation: “Democrat aligned people will still blame socialists (etc.) like their Democrat ideological cult wants them to.” Does that make sense?
How in the fuck were you approved for .ml?
You mean because I am asking reasonable questions to learn. I have heard the phrase blue maga but am not very familiar with what it means. Meanwhile your post history is nothing but frothing at the mouth vitriol and online angst just like all of Reddit. Why exactly are you somewhere else? You definitely belong there. I seek a place where smarter and more reasonable people discuss.
“Blue MAGA” are the Democrats who think their shit doesn’t stink and love to insist that any vote that doesn’t go to Harris is a vote for Trump.
Classical Liberals are right-wing. Yes, this includes the Democrats.
This is a sentence with words, but the arrangement makes no sense. You sure you didn’t generate that from ChatGPT?
I think it’s funny that someone with “Locke” in their name would seemingly not distinguish between liberals and leftists.
You realise that you’re not using the word liberal as Locke would either right?
That’s true, they are (and I guess I am, by extension) using it in a narrower sense than is represented in Locke, who encompasses both the red and blue team, but the Lockean sense would still distinguish between liberals and modern leftism.
“I have no reading comprehension skills” isn’t the own you think it is.
This is a sentence with words, but the arrangement makes no sense. You sure you didn’t generate that from ChatGPT?
? Do you disagree? Isn’t blaming leftists what blue maga is currently priming their voters for if/when they lose?
Funny if true.
She can still go fuck herself.
Why? What’s the excuse this time? You guys are too comfortable supporting genocide perpetrators
‘What’s wrong with this foreign stooge spoiler candidate? I don’t know how elections or trolley problems work!’
Blocked.
Keep downvoting, that’ll change how the Electoral College means fascists win by default, thanks in part to nobodies like this. Her chances of winning even a single state are zero point zero percent - but tell me you’re gonna do it anyway, because that triggers the libs! And lets a fascist ruin America and Gaza!
So dnc candidates are not puppets, got it. Also the comment was made taking the survey findings for granted, so no spoiler candidates for you people, but you didn’t see that either.
I saw everything I need when you moved right past the genocide part though, I don’t expect someone like you to understand regardless.
“No shit,” seth suggests.
I’m struggling really hard to see which voter is on the fence between Trump and Stein. Wouldn’t it be more likely to be on the fence between Stein and Harris, or Stein and the couch?
People who don’t like Trump but are too anti Democrat to vote Harris
Don’t those people usually vote Libertarian?
They vote anti establishment in general, which is the green party.
I just personally hate anyone who tries to argue somebody doesn’t have a right to ruin for presidency, they might not win but that’s not the point. If you’re a democracy, any citizen who meets the criteria has he right to run for an elected position.
One could still be pro Democrat or pro democracy, and still do not like Harris. Many things can be true at the same time.
Not as many people hate Harris specifically as hated Hillary, but a lot of people (for good and bad reasons) hate the Dems and also Kamala to some extent.
Jill Stein is providing spite voters an option to not vote for Donald Trump.
Hillary took a lot of friendly fire in 2016 from the Bernie Bros who were not too happy.
It’s a fun thing to tell yourself, but more Sanders voters voted for Clinton in 2016 than Clinton voters voted for Obama in 2008.
I don’t know the exact math you are referring. but I do know that Obama won and Hillary lost.
Did Obama win over more right wing voters than Hillary left wing voters?
Obama was remarkably good at getting young voters out in record numbers at that time. My state went Democrat for the first (and last) time in 30-something years and when I looked at the county breakdown the newly turned blue counties were all counties with a major public university or multiple smaller universities.
I think Trump draws a lot of broad support from his ‘anti-establishment’ rhetoric so it kinda makes sense for folks to look to other anti-establishment candidates as an alternative to him. There’s a tendency to look down upon Trump voters as only right wingers, conspiracists etc and not really understand that a lot of his support is superficial and based on limited information.
In a way it’s not so much that Stein or other left candidates are spoilers for the establishment Dems but more the case that figures like Trump are spoilers for progressive alternatives to the establishment.
