Stein wasn’t even the only third party candidate stealing votes. I voted for Gary Johnson with the Libertarian party as a “protest vote”. Glancing at national results, he had almost three times as many votes as Stein did.
I was 100% the moron this meme is targeted towards. I voted for Harris yesterday.
But you aren’t a moron if you learned from your mistakes. It means the opposite.
I wish we had ranked choice voting. Then these protest votes would still work and not screw with the system so bad and we could fight the stranglehold of the two party system.
I want something like this where I live. We have FPTP here, but we have a viable third option in some areas. I’d be happier to to have more than 2 robust parties on the national stage.
There were 6 or 7 candidates for President on the Virginia ballot. Would have been great to have RCV at the bare minimum here.
My state is trying to constitutionally ban the use of ranked choice systems 🫠 fingers crossed the muppets just drew enough awareness to implement it after we reject this amendment
Hey good on you for being open to change your stance. So many people these days cant.
I was that moron too in 2016.
Never again.
Thanks, bro. Legit appreciate it.
Me too Stein in 2016. I was so mad at Clinton for what they did to Sanders. I am voting Harris as soon as voting is open here.
Bernie deserved so much better, and I fucking hate the way the 2016 democrats fucked him over.
Don’t forget 2020. They even made Warren stay in through super Tuesday just to fuck him over more. Not to mention thar snake trying to claim Sanders as a sexist with that hot mic. I never forgive her for that.
Same same man… Voting blue on Monday.
Third party voting; the really real reason Democrats and Republicans can’t get their candidates elected. lol
anyone who acknowledges and leans from mistakes is the smartest of the smart. the dumb ones double down and repeat mistakes no matter what evidence is presented to them.
thank you for admitting and learning from your mistake. I wish everyone was like you.
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The Jill Stein hate requires a lot of ignorance and very little faith in the candidate running at the head of the Democratic Party.
Obama crushed McCain and Romney, green party be damned. Biden squeaked by Trump on thinner margins than Trump beat Hilary. Nobody cared about Stein in that race.
What changed? Why are Democrats so terrified of the green party all of a sudden?
Because Biden just squeaked by Trump. Leading to 50%-ish of the US population and 80%-ish of Republican voters believing that the last election got stolen. Also leading to a lot of election officials in key states being replaced by fair election denying nutjobs.
Haven’t you been paying attention in the past few years?
I’m not even in the US and I’m already exhausted with the BS that’s upcoming, if there’s no landslide victory for any of the candidates.
Be aware that any third party vote will be a vote for trump. If that’s what you truly want, I fear for your sanity.
Btw, it’s not true that nobody cared about Stein in the previous election. Back then they too said “a vote for Stein is a vote for trump”. You may not have heard it personally, but that message was out there. And it’s still true today!
I’m voting Jill. All your liberal gaslighting just hardens my resolve. I don’t care how many convoluted explanations you come up with to say I’m voting for Trump. My ballot never said Trump and never will.
Correct, but your ballot helps Trump win nonetheless.
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No, your refusal to field an actual popular candidate with actual progressive policies helps Trump win.
Homie, I do not control who the DNC fields. I am basing my strategy on the facts of the situation as they are presented to me. Where’s your popular candidate?
Right, you only tirelessly shill for them by browbeating anyone that has a problem with their candidate currently overseeing a genocide.
Someone not even from the US understands this better than you?
Man… you have no excuses.
At this point it’s clear to me why you’re here and what you’re about.
either trump or Harris will be president. you can throw away your vote, or choose the one that better aligns with your position.
My ballot never said Trump and never will.
When your vote comes with a free red hat, it kinda does.
And the Shill Stein love requires zero common sense, and a shit load of entitlement.
The only people insisting someone is entitled to your vote are shills working for the Ds and Rs
No one is insisting anyone is entitled to anyone’s vote. We are however insisting that you try and understand how voting statistics and simple grade-school math works.
Everyone else has this figured out already? Why are we so close to an election and you still don’t? Do you seriously think that you have some big hidden secret figured out? You know better than the overwhelming majority of an entire country?
Every generation does this shit. You think you know how it works. You don’t.
No one is insisting anyone is entitled
a shit load of entitlement.
:-/
Everyone else has this figured out already?
There arguments have been made. You simply don’t like the conclusions other people have reached.
It’s amusing that you have the nerve to accuse others of being shills.
It’s curious to see what touches your nerves
This, but since dot world is infested with Reddit liberals you’re getting down voted into oblivion.
They’re getting downvoted into oblivion because everyone here knows better.
It’s always easy to be the most ignorant one in the the room if you ignore everyone that tries to tell you how and why you’re wrong.
a vote for stein is a vote for trump, both of which are a vote for poo-tin
Best Putin Pronunciation Award Goes To..
But I didn’t want Clinton to win. My picks were: 1. Lessig, 2. Sanders, 3. Stein, 4. Johnson (Gary), 5. blank. Knowing only what I knew in 2016, I disliked Trump and Clinton equally, and would never have voted for either one.
(And yes, I did know that Sanders had endorsed Clinton.)
I would hope that you learned something from your error, but this comment shows clearly you haven’t. I learned it when I voted for John Anderson and in my tiny way contributed to Reagan winning: in America, you vote to keep the worst fascist out of power, and if it means voting for someone who isn’t perfect but has the numbers to do it, that’s who you vote for. The primary may be your opportunity to show support for other parties, and you can go to rallies and spread the good word to influence the discussion, but until the day your third party candidate has enough potential votes to actually win it, you help hold the wall.
Shit, I wouldn’t even discount trying to vote 3rd party when it comes to local elections or state elections. You have to chip away at the power the big parties have at the peripheries first, before trying to do big stuff like voting 3rd party in the big presidential election where they are basically guaranteed to not win.
Yeah but saying that you vote third party during local elections doesn’t rile people up. Many of these third party voters only come out of the woodwork during presidential elections just because they want to be contrarians.
John Anderson shoutout!
Man, Lemmy is awesome.
in my tiny way contributed to Reagan winning
Reagan won in a landslide
We wouldn’t have a 6-3 conservative supreme court with Clinton, along with a rash of conservative lower courts. Not only have we had extreme fallout from this already. But it will be affecting us for decades.
A bunch of our red states likely wouldn’t have swung to extremism, like my home state which went from Asa Hutchinson to Sarah Huckabee-Sanders. I don’t know if my kids will legally be allowed to learn that slavery existed in school.
We would absolutely have a 6-3 conservative court with Clinton. We just wouldn’t call it conservative.
We probably wouldn’t have a fascist court like we do now though.
Also, the 2000 Presidential election results in Florida:
Ah yes, the true stolen election. But Al Gore conceded, even though it really was too close to call.
the electoral votes column juxtaposed with the other columns is just documenting what should be a crime.
Since all ‘electoral votes’ go to the winner in the US, why do they even bother mentioning it? Its seems entirely vestigial
US states have the option of choosing to distribute votes proportionally.
They even have the choice to let electors pick whatever they want
Oh my god what a tight race. I wonder what the closest vote in US history was.
My brother is voting for Jill Stein to “send a message to the Democrats” that they can’t automatically rely on liberal votes. He voted for Nader in 2000 to “send a message to the Democrats” that they can’t automatically rely on liberal votes. When I mention the 24-year gap here his response is “what’s your point?”
I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 and will never make that mistake again.
Not to worry, Nader hasn’t been a candidate in a long time. Good luck out there!
That’s the official count, but we’ll never know what the actual count was. A bunch of people who “voted” for Nader were trying to vote for Gore but got screwed over by the format of the ballot.
Holy shit, 2,912,790 people voted for Dubya in Florida?! How come nobody noticed this before? I feel like that might have affected the outcome of the election.
I didn’t actually realize the numbers were that high for her… Ffs.
They know what they’re doing. The elections in swing states are always down to razor margins. The right spoiler is almost a guaranteed win for the opponent :/
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Third parties help the democrats because the biggest third party is more right-aligned.
In Michigan Gary Johnson got 172,136 votes, in Pennsylvania he got 146,715, and in Wisconsin he got 106,674. If all Greens voted Clinton and all Libertarians voted Trump then New Mexico would’ve only been won by Clinton with around 1,000 votes, Colorado would’ve also been nearly Trump. Nevada, New Hampshire, and Minnesota would’ve been won by Trump. Maine might’ve gone majority Trump.
Third parties certainly know what effect they have. Their motivation is not to make the second party candidate win. Their motivation is to change the first party candidate.
According to Hotelling’s Law, a two-party political system with FPTP voting results in candidates that are very similar. This is why the Democrats won’t run real progressives for most offices, and why Sanders was forced out in 2016 with the excuse that he wasn’t “electable” enough.
Third parties running for president aren’t trying to win. They’re trying to eat some of the votes on their side, thus pulling the main party candidates toward that third party candidate to reclaim those votes.
Third parties certainly know what effect they have.
Third party candidates that are running specifically in presidential elections and nothing else.
Third parties that actually want to move the needle participate in local elections, caucus with a major party for ballot access, etc. (WFP)
Their motivation is not to make the second party candidate win.
Bullshit.
Green’s team literally stated the goal was for Kamala to lose.
Citation for that?
https://www.nj.com/politics/2024/10/harris-vs-trump-spoiler-says-the-quiet-part-out-loud.html
You can find others if you’d like to look, quite easily.
Edited to add the quote from Sawant:
We are not in a position to win the White House, but we do have a real opportunity to win something historic, we could deny Kamala Harris the state of Michigan. And the polls show that most likely Harris cannot win the election without Michigan.
Its pretty clear the goal there.
Jesus fucking christ. I’m so tired of the American political landscape
I have no idea why this is being downvoted. Thanks for the info.
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See how that says “99.8% reporting”? If you look at the NYT, it shows the results after counting 100% of the votes, and it matches what’s in the picture.
Fair enough, you are correct. Still bullshit to think that all of those voter would automatically go to clinton, but I will delete the bad information.
This should be top comment.
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By your standard, your posts here should be removed for misinformation because your numbers don’t include all of the election votes. Here are the final results of the 2016 elections by state, with citations. The numbers are consistent with the infographic.
Yeah, that’s why I did that.
Thanks for the retraction. It was the honest thing to do.
It’s incorrect. Look at the NYT. The difference is that Politico’s numbers weren’t updated after the final votes were counted.
/* in countries with a broken democracy
I voted for Harris yesterday, and I’ll be voting for Harris again tomorrow. Just kidding. Turns out the dead person whose identity I stole wasn’t registered to vote. 😞
You make jokes, but tomorrow this comment will be on FOX as proof them libs are cheating…
Well, they read it in a forum where anybody can write anything, so it must be true. They are truly the best at fair and balanced ripoartign.
I might risk voting 3rd party if this election wasn’t a choice between boring corporatists and 100% concentrated evil.
The stakes are just too damn high to risk letting Trump get back into the White House again.
it’s not worth it until first past the post is removed.
Until then it’s mathematically impossible for a third party candidate to win. Focus your energy instead on removing first past the post, then you have a chance
The only time I went third party it wasn’t to win. It was because I saw it as two main candudates so shirty that there was a good chance for third party to snag more voters than usual, possibly enough to gain slightly better recognition in the future.
The monkey’s paw curled.
We got Trump. The recognition came as irrational blame for Trump.
I won’t make the same mistake of voting for someone I think would do the best job. Now it’s merely an effort to keep the worst viable candidate out.
You do understand that this is exactly what the democrats and the GOP want? Most importantly, what the people funding both parties want. If you’ll vote for an unelected enabler of genocide just to keep another guy out you’re showing them morals don’t come into the equation for your vote.
What’s stopping them from running a charismatic fascist vs an unlikable one?
Stop blaming voters for the democratic party repeatedly choosing the most conservative candidate and pretending they did it for “electability”, only to end up in tight races.
What I want is to vote for someone I believe in. I don’t get to have that in this current reality. So I opt to do the most good I can with what extremely little power I have. It doesn’t matter what any other faction wants at that point. If the Republicans want my vote, they can stop presenting the greater evil.
Honesty is refreshing. I’m voting for Harris because I don’t want to see Trump’s orange face every week. Yes, I know what she is. Yes, I know what that makes me. I’ve made my peace with it. No, I don’t blame others who feel differently.
I’ve always critiqued the democrats but I’m so tired of trump. I will vote for a thousand boring democrats if it means removing these entitled, lying MAGA idiots from anything resembling power. They all belong in lunatic asylums, not in government.
This is the way.
The elections will always be between “boring corporatist and 100% concentrated evil”. Every election feels like it’s the most important one. You just gotta suck it up and vote third party regardless.
Except this time there is a literal fascist running. The third party argument doesn’t work when we’ve got a candidate quoting Hitler and promising that this will be the last election you’ll have to vote in.
There’s always a literal fascist running, that’s what the GOP is there for. Lately, there’s two.
No, there isn’t always a literal fascist running and to say that there is severely and dangerously downplays the threat that Donald Trump poses to both the US and the rest of the world. It’s also a disgusting way to devalue the victims of fascism. A fascist is not simply someone you disagree with; they are not just an asshole, or a bad leader, or someone who leads their country into a war for their own gain. Fascists will erode your way of life, they will take whatever they want, they will take away your rights and spit in your face while doing so (assuming they don’t simply have you arrested), they will kill you as soon as it either benefits them or if they just want to for the hell of it.
Use whatever perceived intellect and moral high ground you can trick yourself into believing you have to vote 3rd party, but just know that you are aiding in Trump’s re-election. And all because you’re too much of a dipshit to know the difference between an asshole and a fascist. Fuck you.
Lmao. Don’t lecture me on what Donald Trump is gonna do to the rest of the world when it’s been both parties robbing us in the global south. Many of Trump’s most atrocious policies have just been happily accepted as the new normal by democrats. That’s their function, one does the dirty work, the other pretends it has to stay this way now.
Any metric that doesn’t include Joe Biden – the guy directly responsible for the mass incarceration of PoC via the 90s crime bill, a segregation advocate, a guy who has increased the number of children in cages in migrant camps, who keeps shipping weapons to a state in the middle of a completely broadcasted genocide – as a fascist, is a worthless, arbitrary metric.
You’re telling me Bush, who greatly enhanced the ability of the NSA to spy on every single citizen in America, who had a torture camp in Guantanamo where they knew they were torturing innocent people, who had black sites in abu ghraib, who gave finance capital carte blanche to rob people with predatory mortgages and securities built on air, that guy isn’t a fascist?
All this tells me is that the US has a far greater tolerance for fascism than anywhere else in the world as long as you don’t use the word, and provided the fascists aren’t targeting them specifically.
That doesn’t have to be the case. I’ve never felt that we had pure evil to battle until Trump was a candidate. Historically there’s been mostly two sets of policies and I prefer one or the other
Ranked choice voting eliminates the concept of spoiler candidates/parties.
You are correct. Also, OP is correct.
The duopoly of power won’t add ranked choice voting
People said this about weed. We literally had two states add it in like the last 10 years. Once a few more states pass RCV via initiative we’ll start seeing legislatures take it up on their own.
People said this about weed
Weed is not the good argument you think it is lmao. The fact it took decades to legalize and people are still imprisoned over it is a huge L, not a W
Well the point is that lack of 2 party support doesn’t mean it won’t happen, it just means its a slower, longer push.
Edit: I would also say there’s likely less built-in opposition for RCV - even hard conservative states like idaho are fighting ballot initiatives to expand RCV this year. 2 states are voting on it. Only 9 states have banned RCV (vs federal bans for MJ)
If this were true then American politics really are terrible. Minority should hold seats. America needs to revisit representation.
Support ranked choice voting
I don’t understand why people make such a big deal out of these voters. Maybe I’m just consuming the wrong media, but it feels like third-party voters get 50x the blame nonvoters get for ruining elections with probably something like a thousandth of the population. I basically never see this discussion call out both third-party voters and nonvoters equally.
I keep seeing third-party voters maligned for thinking a candidate has hope to win a national election, I see so many arguments to address why third-party candidates can’t win. In spite of that, I have never come across any community anywhere where people collectively believe these candidates actually have a chance. People who consume crazy media can believe crazy things, that’s why MAGA is a thing, but there’s a whole Fox News etc media machine feeding those people. Is there a forum somewhere with more than ten people where there’s a consensus that a third-party candidate might actually win? None of the third party voters I have known or met irl believed this, and I would be shocked if they’re all weird exceptions.
Like, please, where are these people congregating to spread the ludicrous idea that a third-party candidate can win a national election? Looking on the recent green party posts on their subreddits, the only thing I see even close is a thread with a headline about “candidates are electable if people vote for them”, where the furthest they go in the comments is a few people talking about how big a deal it would be for the party if they got 5% nationally, and a couple other people replying to say the greens won’t even get 1% this year but the election is still very important because of some nonsense about incremental gains.
It feels like we’ve imagined a brainwashing machine that does not exist in reality, rather than admit to the existence of protest votes. Condemning protest votes means condemning protest nonvotes equally, and we’ll never have sufficient information about protest nonvoters to reasonably make a claim about how they would have voted. That would severely muddy any attempts to assign blame for election results.
If you’re trying to convince these voters to act differently, the way to do that would be to address the arguments they’re actually making, like the incremental gains nonsense. If you’re addressing arguments they haven’t been making at all, then it’s worth asking whether you’re trying to convince someone other than them.
Nonvoters suck too.
It’s about sending a message: “I care enoug to vote, but both of you are shit” in the hope that in the next election cycle the candidates are less shit.
Most elections I’m all for third party candidates in the hope that we’ll get one that can make a difference. We have had third parties on the national ballot and we’ve certainly had third parties influence the national debate even without getting a seat.
However the last few elections are different - Trump is so destructive to our democratic institutions, our national identity, any hope of caring for our own people or others. I still don’t see how he is a viable candidate or how any sane person will vote for him. But he is there and it’s a valid point that a third party can be a spoiler. In this case we have a party/candidate who is to the left of the Democrats, pulling enough votes to be a spoiler: your vote to be farther left could very well lead us into a nationalist tyranny, and assuming history repeats abuses of constitutional authority over the law, abuses of multiple scapegoated groups, historical levels of corruption, increased global warming, global chaos. None of us can afford this and while we appreciate your attempt to pull to the left, it could send us over the deep end to the far right
We have seen exactly zero indications that the republicans might start nominating better candidates anytime soon. The next candidate will probably be “Trump, but less incompetent at implementing his agenda”. It makes sense to want to stall as long as possible, but needing a democrat victory every single election from here out is not going to be a winning strategy longterm. If Trump winning is guaranteed global chaos, then there aren’t votes we can cast that will do anything other than slightly delay that.
Non-voters are idiots but ultimately they will not vote. You can’t lead a donkey to water
People who vote third party actively get up in the morning to piss away their votes. It’s like leading a donkey to water and they decide to eat sand instead.
You’ve never heard of a “get out the vote” campaign? I can’t imagine thinking that you can’t possibly convince someone to vote.
Non-voters are idiots but ultimately they will not vote. You can’t lead a donkey to water
I don’t understand what you’re trying to suggest here. Taking it at face value doesn’t make any sense at all - in spite of massively outnumbering third-party voters, the potential impact of non-voters should be dismissed because they are all somehow incapable of being convinced that voting is worth their time? Casting a ballot is a difficult mental hurdle to clear, so it’s reasonable to write off anyone who has not yet shown that they’re capable of doing so as a hopeless case?
If the argument is that third party voters are throwing their votes away, why should we consider a protest vote to be different in any meaningful way from a protest non-vote?
America’s system is a problem.
Yeah no shit. But 2 weeks from the election isn’t the time to try to fix it.
Its the only time to fix it
What’s your plan for getting a functional better system ready within two weeks? Because if you have an actually feasible suggestion, I nominate you for president.
Complain about it and get them to put it on their docket. Same as every other issue we care about.
The only way to have entrenched political parties adapt election laws is to vote for alternatives. Only at election time can the topic of election reform be addressed.
Ad 1) this voting system is fixed to keep the two entrenched parties in power. It is tailor-made to funnel power to the two behemoths so that they can amass power to a degree where other players overtaking them is… unlikely under regular circumstances. But apart from that, addressing the issue of the voting system and it being fixed are two different things, and just like one would not do car maintenance while the car is speeding along a highway, restructuring the voting process is not something that will feasibly be done two weeks before election day when certain states are already in the middle of voting.
Oh wait, you’re serious. Let me laugh even harder.
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People get weird close to the election.
People voting green party did so for a reason. Not everyone fits into perfectly shaped boxes for the 2 party system. Many vote 3rd party for leverage for policy change. The narrative of picking the lesser evil doesn’t always apply to the narrative of the individual voter.
We are literally vote in a Hitler figure who is going to build concentration camps and wreck the country or stick with sanity. The lesser of two evils is necessary until the second major party stops running Hitler.
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How is Harris a war criminal abroad? In what way do you imagine that Harris administers foreign aid authorized by congress?
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If Trump is Hitler, what is Kamala? At least third parties entertain ending wars
Third parties that can never win can in turn not make policy decisions.
A lot of things about foreign policy are based on realpolitik, not ideology. As long as you’re not in power, you can ignore realpolitik, and therefore can promise anything you want. Once in power, things are different.
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At least third parties entertain ending wars
Yes.
Ending wars.
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Did people who voted for Stein get what they wanted by electing Trump?
No, they got what they wanted by bringing third party candidates to the discussion table so more people would vote third party in future elections.
One day we might even be able to elect a candidate who isn’t the “lesser evil”
One day we might even be able to elect a candidate who isn’t the “lesser evil”
Literally impossible in the US unless one of two things happen. Either:
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Both the current major parties fracture, and the resulting two parties that will occur thereafter align themselves on axes that are dissimilar to the ones that the current two parties are aligned on, or
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Laws are passed to remove FPTP and winner take all so that not voting for a Republican or Democrat has an actual influence on the vote.
The current system in the US is statistically proven to result in two majority parties controlling the government. The only effect that voting third-party does now is to spoil the votes for the majority-party candidate most closely aligned with that third-party.
The Labour party in the UK won as a third party in a duopoly system
The rise of Labour happened because of a change in the voting system. The Reform Act of 1918 got rid of property qualifications which previously hindered Labour’s base from being able to vote. And even then Labour and the Liberals competing for votes resulted in a decade of conservative government.
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One day we might get stv approval voting instant runoff or one of the methods that allow 3rd parties to win push for that at the state level instead of fantasies that can never work
We’ll end up with 3 or more while instead of the usual 2.
They did manage that the democrats will never run with hilary again -> If both choices in the current election are shit you can at least try to influence the next one.
Also fuck 'muricas election system. Everything resulting in a 2 Party system is no real democracy.
Did Democrats get what they wanted by running Clinton?
No, she didn’t win. Did that sound like a cool comeback in your head?
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That makes an assumption that all or a big majority third party voters would prefer Harris over Trump.
Just for clarifying the logic here.
