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.
Here, perhaps, is the saddest commentary on the American electorate: that overwhelming majorities regard atheism as a most-disqualifying flaw and religiosity as a most-qualifying commendation.
This is to say that Americans require their leader not only to espouse, but also to demonstrate a decision-making process essentially–by definition–irrational, what Kierkegaard called an absurd “leap of faith”. Such demonstrated irrationality, in fact, is a requirement for true adherence to any faith, whether of extreme or moderate stripe.
Now of course, one of the oldest adages is “when in Rome, do as the Romans”; and none know this better than the politicians. One must genuflect before the idols for the sake of the form. But particularly in a secular state that maintains official neutrality among religions, the politician–as he always has–must do so with a wink and a nod. The 1st Amendment right to practice religion as one pleases is at stake, so the politician must maintain an official neutral stance, even if his values are influenced by his religious training–and even if he admits as much.
Neverthless, the soundness of the secular state is threatened when infested by “true believers” masquerading as politicians, rather than the other way around. We have seen the devestating effect with some of the Bushies. We see the worry in military quarters with the Turkish parliament’s election yesterday of Gul. We worry about the influence of the ayatollahs in Iran.
So, we should safeguard against such an infestation of the Democratic Party. As Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet illuminate in Mother Jones (Sep/Oct 2007), HRC holds hands weekly with mostly-GOP Christian ‘wingers at the Senate Prayer Breakfast and is a member of the shadowy Fellowship of Doug Coe. Many sources demonstrate a history of HRC’s knee-scraping religiosity, including her own statements and writings. The question Joyce and Sharlet ask: is this more Clintonian triangulation, a clever strategy for Senatorial achievement (ala those Romans), or is she really “down with” the theocratic aims of Coe, the Fellowship, and their congregants? The nod and wink have yet to come.