Last updated on September 25th, 2023 at 02:05 pm
If Jill Stein’s supporters and half of Gary Johnson’s supporters had supported Hillary Clinton in 4 swing states, the Democrat would be the president-elect today.
Steve Benen of The Maddow Blog did the math to show how Hillary Clinton got Nadered in 2016:
In Florida, Hillary Clinton lost by about 1.4% of the vote – but if Jill Stein’s supporters and half of Gary Johnson’s backers had voted Democratic, Trump would have lost the state.
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Similarly, in Pennsylvania, Clinton lost by about 1.1% of the vote – but if Jill Stein’s supporters and half of Gary Johnson’s backers had voted Democratic, Trump would have lost the state.
In Wisconsin, Clinton lost by about 1% of the vote – but if Stein’s supporters had voted Democratic, Trump would have lost the state.
In Michigan, Clinton appears to be on track to lose by about 0.3% of the vote – but if half of Stein’s supporters had voted Democratic, Trump would have lost the state.
There are a lot of ways to slice this news and a lot of areas that are ripe for blame. If the corporate press would not have hammered voters with the bogus narrative that the election was a choice between “the lesser of two evils,” the third party vote would not have been as appealing. The media spent more than a year making the false equivalency that Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server was the same as Donald Trump’s sexual assaults.
Some voters believed this, which is why they voted for a third party candidate and got Trump elected president.
Democrats and the Clinton campaign themselves deserve plenty of blame. Outside of strategically deploying Bernie Sanders, Clinton and the Democrats never talked about the threat posed by the third party candidates, probably, because they assumed that they were going to win by such a large margin that it didn’t matter.
Lastly, there are the voters themselves. Congratulations, third-party voters who thought they were protesting system, you just got Donald Trump elected. Please enjoy the four years of your worst nightmares that you brought to life through your own arrogant and self-righteous stupidity.
It turns out that Clinton and the Democrats did not run an effective campaign, but those who are directly responsible for her loss are the voters who went to the polls and cast a vote for Donald Trump when they chose Jill Stein or Gary Johnson.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
