Atlantic staff writer Mark Leibovich has this article about the prospect of a Green Party presidential campaign in 2024. He assumes the Green Party will nominate Cornel West. His article carries all the cliches about the likelihood that West will cause Donald Trump to win the 2024 election.
He quotes David Axelrod as saying the Green Party in 2016 placed an “outsized role in tipping the election to Donald Trump”. He does not mention the 2016 exit polls which show that Jill Stein did not cause any state to be won by Donald Trump. He could easily have checked the exit polls, but apparently he did not. Even Michigan, the state with the smallest margin (among the states Trump carried) was not affected by the Stein vote. 25% of the Stein voters said they would have voted for Hillary Clinton if Stein had not been running, but 14% of the Stein voters said they would have voted for Donald Trump if Stein had not been running. The Michigan Trump margin was 10,704. Eleven percent of the Michigan Stein vote was only 5,661, not enough to tilt the outcome.
He quotes Matt Bennett as saying, “The idea that a third-party candidate won’t hurt the Democratic nominee is preposterous on its face.” Apparently neither Bennett nor Leibovich has ever read Samuel Lubeell’s 1951 book, “The Future of American Politics”, which showed after intensive research with election returns and poll data that the Progressive Party of 1948 helped the Democratic Party to elect President Harry Truman. The index for Lubell’s book, under “Henry Wallace” has this entry: “helps elect Truman, pages 210-211.”
Commie on commie crime!
This is hysterical that they would attack the Green Party for “being a spoiler” when yet the Democrats have ignored major flaws in Joe Biden’s presidency such as inflation and foreign policy for his poor approval ratings.
Facts don’t matter to unDemocratic Party hacks like them. It’s like something out of Orwell’s 1984.
And yet you a commie just like them.
HOW MANY COMMIE POLITICS MAGS NOW — ESP WITH DEVIL CITY OFFICES / MAG STAFFERS ???
I AM A BARBIE GIRL, IN A BARBIE WORLD!
AZ1: ALL OF THE ONES YOU LINK
AZ2: ONE AZ IZ ENOUGH AZ IT IZ
The Democrats need to find better candidates than Biden and Harris.
If they had them, those albatrosses would already be overboard.
There was one state in the 2016 Presidential election where a third party candidate probably cost a major party candidate the state. However, it certainly wasn’t Hillary Clinton and the state of Michigan. Rather, Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party is the main reason Donald Trump lost to Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire.
I assume the Green Party will nominate Cornel West too. The party is really more of an advocacy group than anything else. Their meetings are painful. There never seems to be any initiative at winning elections. Some Greens are against winning. When you go canvassing people usually don’t even remember registering with the party. They often did it as a joke. Or as part of a coordinated effort to interfere in an election. The Green Party intelligentsia would be more honest if they dropped the facade of partisan politics and refocused their energies in advocacy within other parties and among citizens. The Green Party is not a valid electoral instrument except for in very rare instances where there’s a non partisan election or where voters have no other choices.
OP: The 2016 exit polls are questionable. Who did them, any biases, and methodology? Were voters honest with these pollsters? Who chose to speak to them, who didn’t, and were those who did representative or perhaps qualitatively different from ones who did?
Supposing the exit polls were accurate, all that says is that Stein wasn’t strong enough to cost Democrats the election. Has she received sufficiently more votes, or had the election been even closer than it was, she would have. Axelrod isn’t wrong that her voters had an outsize role compared to their numbers. He didn’t say they alone changed the outcome of the election, at least to my knowledge. He didn’t say they alone swung any state, again at least to my knowledge. Outsize influence is correct. Third parties should either embrace that outsized influence or stop running presidential candidates. They want to get the benefits of attention that outsize influence gives them, but run away from the criticism they get for using that tactic. They can’t have their cake and eat it too.
Whether West would cost Biden the election would depend on how close the race will be between Trump and Biden and how well West will run his campaign. However well or poorly that is, most of the attention he’ll receive will be only because of the possibility that he might potentially do that.
OP is correct in disagreeing with Bennett that a third party might actually help the Democrats. For example, Justin Amash might do that if he runs, among other possible candidates. The Greens may not hurt the Democrats enough to change the outcome, but they’ll still push it in that direction, even if by only 11% of their voters. And even 11% could potentially be enough.
I have not read Lubell’s book either, only Richard Winger’s summary of it in a previous article. The thesis that Wallace helped Truman by running to his left and making him seem more reasonable by comparison, especially to anticommunist immigrants from countries like Poland, seems plausible.
I’ll refrain from comments on Lubell’s research unless and until I read it, but as a general rule polls were even less reliable then, for one thing because only relatively wealthy people had their own home telephones to answer when pollsters called. That’s been cited as one of the main reasons many incorrectly predicted a Dewey victory – I no longer remember where I read that, but I have.
If Lubell was correct, I don’t see a third party candidate from the left having that sort of effect in 2024. Biden’s biggest problem will most likely be turnout. It’s possible a far left candidate might mobilize people who would have stayed home, and that in the end some of them will vote for Biden. However, there was no major bloc of voters who saw Biden as too far left in 2020, defected to Trump, and could be won back by Biden if West or a similar candidate draws more support than Hawkins. If anything, Biden seems more extreme than some of his voters hoped in 2020, as well as less competent. Trump seems poised to benefit from the swing vote even more than in 2016, much less 2020.
Anonymous: most people who agree with green party views already don’t participate in that party, especially actively. Their existing leadership are the leftover dregs who choose to focus their energies on the party, perhaps in search of an ego boost from important sounding titles, out of sunk costs, or because they have not yet realized they are wasting their time. All third parties face this issue, and constant infighting and burn out, because regardless of what arguments they make or whether those arguments are right or wrong, most voters and potential active members see them as either spoilers or irrelevant even if they agree with them.
The people who do get involved usually expect way too much, and are prone to quitting or causing a ruckus whenever they don’t get their way on something. Naturally such people will clash. People who are effective and have means at their disposal don’t usually get involved in such quixotic quests, preferring to spend their time on other things. When they do get involved, the sad reality of how these operations work usually sends them running away rather quickly. This is generally true all across the political spectrum. It’s why third parties usually splinter or fade off or both.
Jim Linger is probably correct about NH in 2016. Johnson got more than 10x the difference between the two candidates who came in ahead of him.
What would you expect from the Atlantic if not a defense of the Fascist DemoRat establishment? Honesty is besides the point, they operate by the realpolitik idea that the ends justify the means. You aren’t going to convince that type of propagandist no matter how much you explain it to them. In fact, you only extend their reach by linking to them. They’ll continue to publish dishonest self serving trash no matter what you say or how many times you say it.
APPV- PENDING CONDORCET = RCV DONE RIGHT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election
8 STATES CLOSE
MINORITY WIN IN NC
42 STATES/DC NOT CLOSE
SAME/WORSE IN 2024 ???
MORE GERRYMANDER AREAS AS IN ME AND NE ???
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P-A-T