Considering that corporate right-wing Democrats still blame Ralph Nader for Al Gore’s 2000 “loss” to George W. Bush (scare quotes due to the fact that newspaper recounts show that Gore actually won the state of Florida), it comes as little surprise to hear than blaming Green Party candidate Jill Stein for Hillary Clinton’s loss yesterday to Donald Trump.
Do a little arithmetic, however, and that line of argument is quickly exposed as bullshit.
Let’s assume, although it really isn’t true, that every Jill Stein voter would have voted for Hillary Clinton had Jill Stein not been on the ballot. In other words, let’s assume a total Jill Stein as spoiler narrative. (Actually, many of her voters might not have voted at all had she not been on the ballot.)
Here I’m going to reassign all of Stein’s votes to Clinton. Let’s see what happens in the key swing states, where Trump won and Stein was on the ballot) that could have possibly changed the results of the election in Clinton’s favor:
Florida (29 electoral votes)
Trump 4,603,897 votes
Clinton 4,482,940
Stein 63,953
Clinton + Stein = 4,546,893
Result: NO CHANGE
Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes)
Trump 2,912,351 votes
Clinton 2,844,339
Stein 48,998
Clinton + Stein = 2,893,337
Result: NO CHANGE
Ohio (18 electoral votes)
Trump 2,771,984 votes
Clinton 2,317,001
Stein 44,310
Clinton + Stein = 2,361,311
Result: NO CHANGE
Iowa (6 electoral votes)
Trump 798,302 votes
Clinton 652,437
Stein 11,180
Clinton + Stein = 663,617
Result: Result: NO CHANGE
Michigan (16 electoral votes)
Trump 2,275,770 votes
Clinton 2,261,153
Stein 51,420
Clinton + Stein = 2,312,573
Result: CLINTON + 16 = 244 electoral votes (270 needed to win)
Wisconsin (10 electoral votes)
Trump 1,409,282 votes
Clinton 1,381,892
Stein 30,981
Clinton + Stein = 1,412,873
Result: CLINTON + 10 = 254 electoral votes (270 needed to win)
One important note: some ballots are still being counted so these numbers were calculated using the latest Google results at 12 noon Eastern standard time today. If these numbers hold up, however, it’s clear that any argument that accuses Jill Stein of acting as a spoiler in this election is baseless.
43 Comments.
The Democrats are the spoilers. They shit in their own nest. They could have given Sanders an unimpeded opportunity to win the primary fairly.
Had Sanders had this opportunity he would likely have won both the primary and the general election.
But the Democrats risked running with the flawed candidate Hillary and losing to Trump, and acted as if a loss by Hillary to Sanders would be worse than a loss to Trump. The Democrats acted as privileged oligarchs, as if the office was theirs by right, and as if my vote for Stein was also theirs to command by right.
If the Democrats find a lack of enemies in the Republicans, I welcome the opportunity to be their enemy also. When the Republicans kick Democratic asses, they should not expect those they cheated to come to their aid. Nor should they expect me to comply with their demands that my vote be given to them to use as they see fit.
If the Democrats cheated themselves into a predicament they couldn’t get themselves out of, the responsibility does not fall upon the cheated to rescue cheaters. It is this logic that enabled the bailout and enrichment of Wall Street criminals.
The responsibility is upon the cheaters to make every effort to resolve and repair the damage they have done to their cheated.
But they won’t make this effort because of the lack of character that let them think cheating was OK will also allow them to deny personal responsibility for what they have accomplished in their enabling of Trump.
Yep. For the next 8 years I’ll have to hear how Bernie would’ve beaten Trump. I’ll just choose to be amused rather than annoyed.
Amusing, Jack?
After you come down from the high, it will occur to you at some point that this was actually close to a 50:50 toss, and the coin could have just as well come down on the other side. Even a cursory look at Ted’s maths shows just how close that was… The real reason that Jill Stein isn’t a mathematical spoiler being that her numbers were so embarrassingly low, with a lot of people sitting this one out rather than voting Green or writing in Sanders. It shouldn’t have been this close, not against Trump, grabber of pussy, who is the one politician even more unpopular than Hillary.
The Democratic establishment will do a post-mortem on whether their formula Wall Street plus Identity Politics (and shaft the working class) is finally broken, or whether they’ll think they can resurrect the charade with a more sympathetic face than Hillary’s.
That was what the Democratic primaries were supposed to be about, field-testing their approved candidates for likability – think Obama, who btw enjoys high approval ratings. The Clinton machine decided to fix the process rather than lose once more (against someone like Joe Biden), and thus came close to handing the keys to an absolute outsider scaling an uphill slope.
Instead, a Sanders campaign would have broken a lot of Wall Street from the coalition but added enthusiastic Labor people – remember unions? Still have core social networks on the ground plus a lot of support from volunteers and especially young people who “were with her” at best on facebook, not with shoe-leather on the streets.
It would have been a very interesting campaign, Trump couldn’t have brushed Sanders off as the establishment candidate. And they would have had to do something, rather than just watch Clinton self-destruct, as the initial polling showed unequivocally that Sanders was much stronger among independents than Clinton.
Perhaps you could enlighten us what that would have been? How would Trump have responded to Sanders’ aggressive push of a $15 federally mandated minimum wage in the debates? No federally mandated minimum wage – let freedom ring? You really think that’s what gets the 46% of votes (out of maybe 60% turnout, likely higher with Bernie) needed to translate into the grotesquerie that is an Electoral College majority?
Many of the supporters of Trump are not the troglodytes the corporate media portrays them to be.
Many recognized that the Democrats were a false opposition party, a cancer on democracy, one that had to be exorcised before dealing with the symptoms, these which are the same policies that Bill Clinton and George W. Bush introduced, and Obama carried forward.
The Brexit phenomenon has played out again in the Trump campaign. Nate Silver had Bernie Sanders trailing Hillary by double digits in nearly every primary contest, of which he won twenty-two. Nate Silver had Trump with only a 15% chance of winning through most of his campaign. The corporate media has become relevant only as a ministry of propaganda useful only to divide the Sanders and Trump voters from their common interests.
The pro-Brexit people portrayed the anti-Brexit people as the same “basket of deplorables” as Hillary did, and the anti-Brexit people won a close race just as Trump did, to the surprise of those who believed in the propagandist polls.
Trump is popular compared to Hillary, but with Hillary gone, Trump will soon be judged as he stands alone for what he is, the bloom will be of the rose, and his popularity will diminish.
Nixon became a liberal when besieged by public opinion.
The Symptom (Trump) will be under siege soon, now that the Cancer of Clintonism is on its way out.
The Trump protests will become more effective when no longer burdened by the false opposition of the Cancer of Clintonism.
Sure I remember unions–the guys the Democreeps called to foment violence at Trump rallies as revealed by Wikileaks.
You really believe 50-50 is an honest result? We know now that despite the Left’s incessant adamant denials that voter fraud is real. That the Dems rig elections–and not just in Chicago. That Podesta revealed what we on the right knew all along, that mass immigration is how the Democrats have gotten and plan to increase their support. That the constant media assault against Trump took its toll. That the VA governor likely stole the state from Trump by registering thousands of felons at the last minute.
These Alinksyites belie the recurring claim on this blog by the proprietor and other commenters that Dems are “right wing.”
The only reason Dems didn’t succeed in their cheating is because the support for Trump was far greater than the official results would have us believe–support so great that Dems had almost no hope of stealing the election in such a decentralized system.
Well, Jack, now we’re back into opposite universes (cue music from the Twilight Zone).
In the left-wing universe, it isn’t possible to significantly affect elections through voter-impersonation. This leaves paper trails and is vulnerable to being spotted, especially when people are actively looking out for it.
Vote-suppression, however, is a very real thing, perpetrated against the poor and/or people of color.
There is a veritable list of practices, starting with the “legal”, i.e. disenfranchising the incarcerated [where I am from they roll out polling stations within prisons], disenfranchising those who did time, not voting on Sundays like the rest of the world, putting fewer polling stations equipped with fewer or faulty voting machines into poor neighborhoods. And gerrymandering to take care of local elections.
Then the spotty-to-illegal: disenfranchising those with names that kinda sound like names of those who did time, flat-out lying to people that voting times have been extended due to long lines, challenging voters to make lines move even slower, running out of ballots and switching to “provisional ballots” (that can be quietly thrown away), spoiled ballots, …
For some reason in the right-wing universe the importance of these two problems is inverted.
Crucially, it takes control of the process (which in the U.S. inexplicably resides with local officials) to pull off voter impersonation as well as the more heavy-handed suppression tactics. Control residing with the Republican machines in the majority of places. Why would the local Republicans suppress the Trump vote? Because they love Clinton? However, you are certainly correct that Democrats have an equally dismal record in places such as Chicago, with some high-profile dead/zombie voters and much more suppression of African-American voters whom they don’t like any more than Republicans.
On first sight, there does not seem to be as much outright vote suppression this time around, as exit polls generally match the official results – which they did not when Al Gore was cheated out of his narrow victory.
But of course, had they actively made it easier for the poor to vote, rather than the opposite, the result would look very different as the poor brackets consistently vote Democratic, though this margin is a little lower for a DINO like Clinton.
You really think there are so many more of you, your very existence somehow swept under the rug? Where have you guys been? Waiting for Trump? It would seem that Trump got about the same number of votes as McCain/Palin, slightly less than Mitt Romney.
Perhaps you could be so kind as to provide links as there is a lot of material from wikileaks. I would have assumed disruption of Trump events to have been done by decentralized social media networks (“I’m heading down there to make a stand, who’s coming with me?”), with people crowding together especially in reaction to single people and small groups of protesters being harassed. I have a hard time imagining rank and file union members doing anything on behalf of the Clinton team, let alone someone from the Clinton team even being willing to communicate with them as they are commoners and carry diseases.
Ok here goes.
Obama ’08 primary voter fraud:
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/10/15/wikileaks-john-podesta-believed-obama-forces-committed-voter-fraud/
Indiana voter fraud:
http://www.indystar.com/story/news/crime/2016/10/04/state-police-raid-indy-office-growing-voter-fraud-case/91540816/
Texas voter fraud:
http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2016/10/17/largest-voter-fraud-probe-underway-north-texas/
Virginia and Pennsylvania voter fraud:
https://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2016/10/03/yes-virginia-aliens-are-registered-and-voting-and-in-pennsylvania-by-the-thousands/1/
New York voter fraud:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUDTcxIqqM0
http://dailycaller.com/2016/11/06/exclusive-virginia-gov-pardons-60000-felons-enough-to-swing-election/
Finally and most importantly, this shows Dems centrally plan voter fraud and incitement of violence at Trump rallies.
“I’m saying we have mentally ill people we pay to do shit, make no mistake. Over the last twenty years.”
“Our union guys, a lot of union guys, they’ll do whatever you want…When I need something done in Arkansas, the first guy I call is the head of the AFL-CIO down there, because he will say, ‘What do you need?'”
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-20/dnc-leaks-bob-creamer
There’s the video and then Wikileaks backs it up.
This isn’t as hard to get away with as you seem to think. After all, the entire MSM insists voter fraud isn’t real and that Trump supporters are the violent ones. Local and state Dem officials run cover for the fraud. And motor voter in some states makes this all even easier.
https://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2016/10/19/podesta-wikileaks-horror-voter-id-doesnt-stop-alien-voting/
I would actually recommend clicking on each of Jack’s links to tabloid headlines and giving them the benefit of the doubt. Even on their own terms they’re not actually saying much of anything, it’s funny how shrill headlines about major conspiracies to defraud are sourced e.g. on only a single newspaper report about an alleged minor scandal based on circumstantial indicators (and they even consulted a legal expert who concluded that there might be nothing to it later on in the article).
The other articles/blog posts lead with a cryptic wikileaks snippet (literally starting with Podesta commenting on “Teddy’s idea”, never explained but sure sounds nefarious) and then jumping right into musings about voter fraud without actually connecting any of this back to the wikileaks snippet in any way, skillfully letting the readers build the (non-existing) connection themselves based on nothing but insinuation. You need to google this and follow links outside of the right-wing echo chamber to find out about Teddy’s idea actually being about voting online to get out the Millenial vote and Podesta’s comment ironically shooting it down over concerns of possible voter fraud with online voting. Seriously.
Plus add in some videos thrown together by James O’Keefe (yes, that James O’Keefe) and stir. And the O’Keefe videos are actually about diabolic DNC machinations to insert agents provocateurs at Trump rallies, which doesn’t even touch on voter fraud. I wouldn’t put such stuff (actually pretty milquetoast as dirty tricks go) past the DNC but then again wouldn’t put it past O’Keefe to make the whole thing up out of whole cloth so I’m sitting this one out 😉
It’s disappointing how thin this all is, given that it isn’t all that hard to find actual evidence of these people pushing wars overseas and handing the domestic area over to corporate interests while holding open the revolving door to each other and their kids to cash in.
In my comment I got carried away and included some tabloid headings of my own (such as: Chelsea Clinton’s evil plan hatched at Mao Tse Tung’s bar mitzvah, revealed) and apparently hit the tone close enough to get my comment flagged as clickbait 😉
Just to make your numbers more accurate, you can subtract one Jill Stein vote in Michigan from the Hillary column. I would have not voted at all if not for the Green Party candidate.
Can you retweet this article to Paul Krugman? And then, since you live in New York, can you punch Paul Krugman? I’ll contribute to GoFundMe for any resulting legal expenses.
I concur.
A lot of people, Ted, yourself included, pushed the idea that there was no real difference between the two major candidates, that both were beneath consideration. The size of the Stein faction was just one result of that, voter apathy on the left another. But in fact, a Clinton presidency, while bringing no gains, would at least have held the ground for the progress we’ve made on civil rights, health care, environmental protection, wages, etc. A Trump presidency is likely to cause significant regression. I think you’ve been around long enough to know that; pragmatism just wasn’t sexy enough for you.
No sense in having a discussion with someone who thinks civil rights, health care, environmental protection, and wages are strong points in Hillary’s and the Democrats’ favor.
Best to let sleeping yellow dogs lie.
Reading comprehension clearly isn’t your strong point.
Yeeeah! Roll it all back!
First, the Republicans have just 52 Senators, and it takes 60 to confirm a Supreme Court justice or to pass a law. Unless the Democrats roll over and play dead, as they did when Bush, jr had his majorities in the House and Senate, and will probably do for the next 4 years.
Second, Hillary repeatedly promised that Putin had to return all of Ukraine and Syria, or else. Sometimes she threatened war with Russia starting 20 Jan, but in the last debate, she said she’d give Putin an ultimatum on 20 Jan, and he’d have time to choose peace or war. Full compliance with the ultimatum, and we’d have peace, which Hillary wanted (???); but, if given no choice, Hillary was ready for war with Russia, and by ‘no choice’ she meant Putin’s slightest failure to follow in full every item in her ultimatum, so the war would be all Putin’s fault, and Hillary’s advisers told her the US is so superior to Russia that regime change in Russia will be as easy as, or easier than, Libya, and no American would be in the slightest danger. What could go wrong?
Thanks to Trump’s loss of the vote but win in the Electoral College, we’ll never find out, and, in this case, ignorance is bliss.
«Thanks to Trump’s loss of the vote but win in the Electoral College, we’ll never find out, and, in this case, ignorance is bliss.» Come on, Michael – admit that you, like myself, were really curious to see if the pantsuited one had the balls to go to war with a Power of an another calibre than Libya or an Iraq exhausted by more than a decade of «sanctions». But not to worry, now we get to see which way Mr Trump will jump – not only vis-à-vis Russia, but vis-à-vis China….
However it goes, we shan’t be bored….
Henri
This is a deja vu of 1948, the last time the polls were completely wrong. Why? How?
Secretary Clinton said a) a vote for Trump is a vote for a nuclear holocaust; and b) I will force the Russians to toe the US party line.
So which candidate really posed the threat of a nuclear war?
Clinton and Trump were terrible politicians. Both made horrendous mistakes. I thought Trump’s mistakes swamped Clinton’s mistakes. I was wrong.
Trump will be an unmitigated disaster. As would have Clinton, had she been elected.
The US had a choice between the frying pan and the fire. And they chose one.
It’s ok. I called it. And made a cool 4.5k. Thank you President-Elect.
Iowa electronic election market?
«I called it. And made a cool 4.5k. Thank you President-Elect.» Wow – a super businessman, just like her/his idol ! And whose anecdotes are, no doubt, equally authentic….
Henri
So when I said before the election I was going to make money on Trump winning you mocked me. And now that he has won, that it also worthy of mockery. Got it.
«So when I said before the election I was going to make money on Trump winning you mocked me. And now that he has won, that it also worthy of mockery.» You are, indeed, worthy of mockery, «Jack Heart». Glad to see that you «g[e]t it» !…
Henri
Imagine, Michael, if Henry Agard Wallace had won in 1948 – the whole post-WW II history, not only of the United States, but of the entire world, would have been different, and dare I say, far more peaceful….
So it goes….
Henri
Yeah Chris Matthews was blaming Stein as soon as it started to look bad.
Simply inspiring how Trump took PA, IA, and MI.
And FL.
I expected that. And it was one of the required 3.
≎ It’s distressing to see the automatic “Stein is Nader” commentary, hinging of course on the bogus story that Nader was a spolier. It’s just lazy thinking from the get-go.
Another piece that people either or ignore or just lazily lump in with the Stein votes are the votes for Gary Johnson. He got several times as many votes as Stein, and these would be conservative-leaning votes (plus maybe a contingent of potheads). If we’re going to pretend that Stein’s votes somehow rightfully belonged to Clinton, then Johnson’s votes somehow rightfully belonged to Trump. Which would mean that third-party voters actually helped Clinton and hurt Trump overall.
I thought the same. Indeed if we are going to talk about 3rd party “stealing votes” then more likely Trump lost more votes than Hillary.
«If we’re going to pretend that Stein’s votes somehow rightfully belonged to Clinton, then Johnson’s votes somehow rightfully belonged to Trump.» That’s a pretense, jym, for which we certainly should not fall ; persons who voted for either Ms Stein or Mr Johnson had an alternative far more powerful than that of voting for either Ms Clinton or Mr Trump, i e, abstaining from voting. According to data (still preliminary) from the US Election Project, some 48 % of eligible voters in the US did not cast a ballot in the late elections, a figure much higher than for either of these two candidates. Blaming Ms Stein – or the Russians, or Mr Comey for Ms Clinton’s failure is no more than a case of special pleading. Ms Stein’s votes belong to Ms Stein ; Mr Johnson’s votes belong to Mr Johnson….
Henri
42%
«42%» Quite right, «Jack Heart» ; I am amazed and impressed by your mathematical talents. My slip of the fingers (alas, Ted doesn’t provide a correction option) doesn’t however, affect my point, i e, that the number of eligible voters who did not cast their ballots is «a figure much higher than for either of these two candidates» and that « [b]laming Ms Stein – or the Russians, or Mr Comey for Ms Clinton’s failure is no more than a case of special pleading»….
Henri
It’s quite a difference in number, but I did not suggest it affected your point which I believe was well made.
Ok, Jack, I’m trying. And there are very few things I would put past the DNC, nobody at the Rall Blog would.
This stuff is really thin.
Your first link is about caucus voting, where the 2008 Clinton campaign in private suspected the Obama was flooding caucuses with voters. Maybe Clintons are just sore losers (I for one am shocked at the mere possibility) and the voters where legit, maybe the Obama ground campaign bent some of the (rather arcane) rules of the internal Democratic primary, maybe they even broke some (Obama 2008 was basically run by the Chicago machine). This has very little to do with general elections which are very unlike primary caucuses.
The other voter fraud articles have shrill headlines with very little to back them up. Even just reading them and following the links nothing much emerges. Again, alleged fraud. Of a few hundred cases. Little evidence. Some of the articles further down even include experts saying that there may be nothing to this.
Again it would be a very stupid way of rigging an election to get fake voters registered and then actually mail their ballots in, as this literally creates evidence and is rather hard to do on scale without detection, especially under the noses of solidly Republican machines running Red States like Texas.
There is a list of possible motives for alleging voter fraud, from throwing read meat to the base to actually legitimizing the push for harsher voter ID laws which are the main legal vehicle for additional voter suppression. So we would need some hard evidence for any of this.
The Podesta email contains a cryptic short paragraph (starting with “Teddy’s idea”) and a long insinuation of what it is supposed to mean. Even a simple web search shows (apart from the same insinuation in the right wing echo chamber) that the actual context was rather different. Teddy’s idea was allowing casting votes through the internet, in the hopes of getting out the Millenial vote. This sounds good on paper (for them) but then Podesta himself cautions against this on the basis of potential problems with voter registration when voting online.
http://www.factcheck.org/2016/10/more-bogus-voter-fraud-from-trump/
The final part with the incitement apparently boils down to more camera work by our friend James O’Keefe, of doctored ACORN video fame. It would be hard to find a more discredited source. But let’s say there is something to this, that (stupid) people in the (awful) DNC had actually called up some of their contacts in organized labor to have them put some agents provocateurs to Trump rallies with the hope of getting a violent response and negative coverage.
1) That would be monumentally stupid, counter-productive, and they really could have saved themselves the trouble. 2) You know that we’re not supposed to physically attack people even when they provoke us, right? 3) Didn’t the tea party send provocateurs to town hall meetings en masse? 4) What has this to do with anything we wrote about before?
My larger point was really what’s in this picture. Admittedly we haven’t got the official results in yet and the absolute numbers may differ a bit.
Anyway, thanks for the links. Top 5 proofs the Democrats are space lizards dressed in suits. Obama not born in Nigeria, not Kenya, sources reveal. Statue of Elvis found on Mars. What you don’t know about this popular product may kill you. Click here to read what your neighbors are doing right now, it will astound you. The evil plan Chelsea Clinton hatched at Mao-Tse Tung’s bar mitzvah, revealed. Beltway caffe macchiatos found spiked with the same experimental mind-control drugs also found in chemtrails above flyover country.
I think you do try, which is more than I can say for 99% of the Left. You do strain my assessment of you; however, when you class voter fraud in with the most absurd conspiracies.
The bottom line is: we require ID for everything else, why is it so outlandish and unjust to require them for something as important as voting? I’m supposed to believe that no, in a country as corrupt and vast as we know the USA is, that no voter fraud really happens. Also, it’s just too much to ask minorities to buy an ID for a few bucks.
The real problem, I submit, Ted, was not that Ms Stein wasn’t a «spolier» in the late US presidential election, but quite the contrary – that she didn’t receive enough votes to serve as one. Had Ms Stein received more than 5 % of the votes – instead of the 1 % she did receive – then we’d be looking at a whole new ballgame as regards future US elections….
This is not to dispute your point that Ms Clinton and her supporters are blaming everybody – Ms Stein, Mr Comey, Mr Assange, and not least, those dastardly Russians – for her own failure….
Henri