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.
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.
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.
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!
And the Shill Stein love requires zero common sense, and a shit load of entitlement.
a vote for stein is a vote for trump, both of which are a vote for poo-tin
Best Putin Pronunciation Award Goes To..
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.
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 :/
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.
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...
/* in countries with a broken democracy
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.
Ranked choice voting eliminates the concept of spoiler candidates/parties.
If this were true then American politics really are terrible. Minority should hold seats. America needs to revisit representation.
It’s actually not entirely true, it only counts stein as the only 3rd party (the libertarian candidate in PA got 3x as many votes as her, I’d bet those 3rd party votes wouldn’t have gone to Clinton) AND doesn’t report factual numbers.
It’s just not true.
That said unfortunately voting for a 3rd party candidate is largely useless in the USA and the forces trying to get their opponents voters to vote 3rd party are probably more overwhelming then the forces actually compelling folks to vote 3rd party.
FPTP needs to die in the USA.
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.
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.
Did people who voted for Stein get what they wanted by electing Trump?
G.R.E.E.N.
GET
REPUBLICANS
ELECTED
EVERY
NOVEMBER
America's system is a problem.
Yeah no shit. But 2 weeks from the election isn't the time to try to fix it.
So early voting has started in some states. Get out and vote people
A broken system gives you broken candidates.
That makes an assumption that all or a big majority third party voters would prefer Harris over Trump.
Just for clarifying the logic here.
I'm going to dress up as third party voting for Halloween
I don't know if you've noticed this about Stein voters, but they're very unlikely to switch their vote from Stein to Harris. If anything, there would suddenly be an unexplainable surge in write-in votes for Putin.
Almost like Clinton should have run a real campaign in MI😃. Stop running unpopular candidates and blaming it on greens. How embarassing lol.
Democrats who are actually concerned about Republicans should be pushing hard for ranked choice voting.
These memes make Democrats feel good, but only annoys third party voters.
There you go again. Blame third parties for your own failure. Keep doing it, tell yourself it's true.
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