I’d pretty strongly disagree with that, if you mean actually causing centrist Dems to not vote for Biden.
I’d remind you that if all Green Party voters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in 2016 would have instead voted for Clinton, those states would have flipped, Hillary Clinton would be President right now, Roe v. Wade would still be intact, and many many many things would be very different.
Now, I won’t pretend that these kinds of hypotheticals are super meaningful (the Libertarian party obviously exists as a factor, for instance), but the fact of the matter is that voting for the Greens in a tight state can and has contributed to very real harm to people. Second-order effects really aren’t that complicated to understand.
If all Stein voters had voted for Clinton (which, even if the Green party weren’t running, they wouldn’t all have), then maybe Clinton would have won Michigan, and final EC result is still 290:248. The contests elsewhere either weren’t close enough, or didn’t have enough Green voters to matter. The Libertarians had a much bigger impact.
I don’t mean it’s good for them to ride the whole race out, that is just a spoiler vote. But at this early point it’s good to have left leaning opponents out there to force democrats to answer questions that may be popular with the public but they wouldn’t ask themselves if they were running opposed.
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I’d pretty strongly disagree with that, if you mean actually causing centrist Dems to not vote for Biden.
I’d remind you that if all Green Party voters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in 2016 would have instead voted for Clinton, those states would have flipped, Hillary Clinton would be President right now, Roe v. Wade would still be intact, and many many many things would be very different.
Now, I won’t pretend that these kinds of hypotheticals are super meaningful (the Libertarian party obviously exists as a factor, for instance), but the fact of the matter is that voting for the Greens in a tight state can and has contributed to very real harm to people. Second-order effects really aren’t that complicated to understand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election#Results_by_state
If all Stein voters had voted for Clinton (which, even if the Green party weren’t running, they wouldn’t all have), then maybe Clinton would have won Michigan, and final EC result is still 290:248. The contests elsewhere either weren’t close enough, or didn’t have enough Green voters to matter. The Libertarians had a much bigger impact.
I don’t mean it’s good for them to ride the whole race out, that is just a spoiler vote. But at this early point it’s good to have left leaning opponents out there to force democrats to answer questions that may be popular with the public but they wouldn’t ask themselves if they were running opposed.