After the Democratic National Committee ran an ad warning that a vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Donald Trump, I assessed her spoiler potential at New York:
In a presidential contest so close that every one of the seven battleground states could go either way, the major-party campaigns are spending some of their enormous resources trying to ensure that minor-party candidates don’t snag critical votes. This ad from the Democratic National Committee is indicative of these fears:
Not only does this ad convey the simple message that “a vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Donald Trump,” but it includes the reminder that according to the Democratic narrative of the 2016 election, the Green Party candidate was the spoiler who gave Trump his winning margins in the key battleground states whereby he upset Hillary Clinton despite losing the national popular vote.
It’s true that Stein won more votes than Trump’s plurality in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in 2016. So if all of her voters had instead voted for Clinton, Trump would have not become the 45th president and the hinges of political history would have moved in a very different direction. But even though Stein was running distinctly to Clinton’s left and appealing to disgruntled Bernie Sanders primary voters, it’s not 100 percent clear what would have happened had she not run (the Greens, of course, are a regular presence in presidential elections; it’s not as though they were conjured up by Trump in 2016). Some might have actually voted for Trump, and even more might have stayed at home or skipped the presidential ballot line.
The picture is complicated by the presence of an even larger minor-party candidacy in 2016, that of Libertarian Gary Johnson, who won 3 percent of the national presidential vote compared to Stein’s one percent. One academic analysis utilizing exit polls concluded that Clinton would have probably lost even had neither of these minor-party candidates run.
In 2024, Libertarian Chase Oliver is on more state ballots (47) than Stein (39), including all seven battleground states (Stein is on six of them, all but Nevada). Traditionally Libertarians draw a bit more from Republicans than from Democrats (many of them wouldn’t vote for a major-party candidate in any event). But it’s understandably the Greens who worry Democrats, particularly since Stein is counting on defections from Democratic-leaning voters who are unhappy with the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel in its war on Gaza. As the Times of Israel reported last month, there are signs Stein’s strategy is working to some extent with Muslim voters:
“A Council on American-Islamic Relations poll released this month showed that in Michigan, home to a large Arab American community, 40 percent of Muslim voters backed the Green Party’s Stein. Republican candidate Donald Trump got 18% with Harris, who is US President Joe Biden’s vice president, trailing at 12%.
“Stein, a Jewish anti-Israel activist, also leads Harris among Muslims in Arizona and Wisconsin, battleground states with sizable Muslim populations where Biden defeated Trump in 2020 by slim margins.”
It’s also worth noting that Stein chose a Muslim (and Black) running mate in California professor Butch Ware.
Any comparisons of her 2024 campaign with her past spoiler role should come with the important observation that non-major-party voting is likely to be much smaller this year than it was in 2016, when fully 5.7 percent of presidential voters opted for someone other than Trump or Clinton. The non-major-party vote dropped to 1.9 percent — a third of the 2016 percentage — in 2020. Earlier this year it looked like independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would push the non-major-party vote even higher than it was eight years ago. But then Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race, which reduced the “double-hater” vote unhappy with both major-party candidates, followed by Kennedy’s withdrawal and endorsement of Trump showed that particular threat evaporating. Despite his efforts to fold his candidacy into Trump’s in the battleground states, Kennedy is still on the ballot in Michigan and Wisconsin, though it’s anybody’s guess how many voters will exercise that zombie option and who will benefit. Another independent candidate, Cornel West, stayed in the race, but he’s struggled with both funding and ballot access; he’s not on the ballot in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, or Pennsylvania, and he’s competing with Stein for left-bent voters unhappy with Kamala Harris. Unsurprisingly, Republican operatives have helped both Stein and West in their ballot-access efforts.
There are some indications that the non-major-party vote will drop even more than it did earlier this year. A new Pew survey shows that only 12 percent of registered voters who express a preference for a minor-party or independent candidate are “extremely motivated to vote,” and only 27 percent of these voters think it “really matters who wins.” These are not people who will be rushing to the polls in a state of excitement.
It’s hard to find a credible recent national poll showing Stein, Oliver, or West with more than one percent of the vote. But a late-September New York Times-Siena poll of Michigan, with its significant Arab-American and Muslim populations, did show Stein with 2 percent of likely voters. In an extremely close race, even small splinter votes can matter, as the experience of 2000 in Florida will eternally remind Democrats. Had that year’s Green Party candidate, Ralph Nader, not appeared on the ballot, it’s pretty likely Al Gore would have been the 43rd president. So anything can happen in what amounts to a presidential jump ball, and you can expect Democrats to continue calling Stein a spoiler while Republicans not-so-quietly wish her well.
I am a Virginia Tech Hokie, and also a proud Democrat. While I lived in Blacksburg, I worked with any of the local elected Democrats. Sad to say, not all of them at the time felt a need to support better gun laws. In fact, one boasted of their endorsements from the NRA.
While I do not want anyone politicizing the tragedy my school and my fellow Hokies have suffered, there are certainly efforts that can be done, much as Gov. Kaine(D) did when he issues the executive order preventing mental patients from obtaining weapons. Every state should have similar laws on the books. It is not much, but if we cannot do even that, we should be ashamed of ourselves.
Ut Prosim
At Americans for Gun Safety (the forerunner of Third Way), we conducted a lot of in-depth research on guns. We wanted to understand how an issue like closing the gun show loophole, which polled 88-9% in SOUTH DAKOTA (!!!!), was universally thought to be bad for politicians.
Here were our conclusions: A lot of voters supported gun safety laws but were unconvinced that they would make a difference in reducing crime.
Many voters felt that when politicians talked about gun safety, they were talking about someone else’s concerns – not their own.
And last, Democrats had real baggage on the gun issue. People thought Democrats were hostile to gun owners and didn’t respect the values that gun owners held.
We counseled Democrats to solve these problems by both pairing the right to own a gun with the responsibility to pass laws that kept them out of the wrong hands. We told Democrats to wrap gun safety proposals around local values (“I’m bringing West Virginia gun values to Washington.”). And finally, we told them to win the crime argument and enlist local chiefs and sheriffs in the fight.
Gun safety isn’t bad politics when it is handled correctly. When it is handled poorly, politicians run from the issue like a stampede. We then see the results in the lives that are lost around the nation.
Jim Kessler.
I doubt that the number of “GUN TOTIN’ MANIACS” out there actually have enough voting power to stop real legislation on gun control. The NRA does. The Emphasis needs to move onto and into the NRA and its’ influence on the US Congress.
Many of us are well aware of this situation, but I believe that millions still see the NRA as that farmer friendly group of good ole boys that hold gun classes for young hunters, not the lobbyists for Remington Firearms and Colt Mfg. Start putting the truth out there on TV and across the internet… Gun Control starts with NRA CONTROL!!!
I think Bruce Reed makes a good point. Most people who want to maintain their right to have guns are not thinking a “criminal” should have the same right.
For some time Democrats have not taken advantage of this dichotomy.
However, I do wonder if there is a need to institute harsher penalties for illegal possession of guns along with tougher gun laws.
Just making it tougher to get a gun may not deter some criminals who will just buy them off the street.
Plus, some voters will perceive of laws making it tougher to get guns less than useful if not supported by measures to really make criminals pay for possessing and using guns.
David