I won’t go so far as to say that Jill Stein put Trump in the White House, because absent her and her party’s name on the ballot, who knows how many of her voters would have voted for Hillary, how many would have stayed home, or how many would have voted for someone else.
But still, JFTR, since the totals from those three key states are now official:
PA: Hillary lost by 44,292 votes, Stein got 49,941 votes.
WI: Hillary lost by 22,177 votes, Stein got 31,006.
MI: Hillary lost by 10,704 votes, Stein got 51,463.
That is an interesting coincidence. Thanks for sharing.
In a close election like this, it’s possible to attribute her loss to any of a dozen or more things. Maybe if she hadn’t said “deplorable”, maybe if she’d campaigned more in the Rust Belt, maybe if Comey hadn’t written that second letter to Congress, maybe if she hadn’t fallen ill on 9/11, maybe if she’d kept her gun control thoughts to herself, etc.
Seriously? With all the insults that TinyHands leveled against everybody, “deplorable” is what you think people remember? It’s the FIRST letter that Comey wrote that made the difference, not the second. She showed perfect health in the debates after 9/11, so that wasn’t a factor. And finally, everybody who bases their votes on what they perceive as their right to own a gun would never vote for any Democrat. I see a pile of nothing here.
Yeah, those protest votes for Stein made the difference. As did Comey’s interference. When you have the KKK, FBI, and KGB working against you, it’s hard to win.
This is true. Hillary’s loss was, as they say, overdetermined. For want of a nail, and all that.
My takeaway from it is that Trump hit a triple bank shot to win this thing, despite having lost the popular vote by (currently) a margin that isn’t even all that close - 2.85 million. He overcame that sizable deficit by winning by comparatively tiny margins of 11,000 in one state, 44,000 in another, and 22,000 in a third.
No question, he won it, assuming the EC votes the way we expect them to, and they don’t get any crazy ideas about using their dormant election-deciding super-powers. Even if he won it by hitting a crazy triple bank shot, he still won it.
The question, though, isn’t whether he won, but whether winning by triple bank shot should continue to be possible. Regardless of all the arguments being made for and against the EC in other threads, what it comes down to for me is that this is a very arbitrary and capricious way to choose one’s President.
I dreamed the other night that Hillary and The Donald and I were about to sit down to a game of poker that would decide the Presidency. (I’d just finished reviewing the ground rules with them when I woke up, dammit.) I’m not sure which would be the more fluky way to decide things.
While I agree with the “want of a nail” analysis in terms of Clinton’s flaws and strategic errors, you’ve gotta look at the cabinet picks (if anything is losing without compromise right now, it’s the environment) and wonder if any of those Stein voters are regretting their choice…
The first letter, over the summer, said that there was nothing indictable in anything Clinton had done. The second one, a week before the election, said “Wait, there’s this new source of e-mails, let’s see what they say”. The third one, on the eve of the election, said “Nope, turns out there’s nothing in the new e-mails, either”.
My mistake. I was thinking of the pair that went just before the election. The first went “Holy cow! Emails!” The second was “never mind!” I had forgotten about the midsummer one.
I suspect at least some Stein voters are pleased by what they’re seeing. I feel a few of them are hoping the Trump Presidency will be a complete disaster so it will open a path for whatever revolution they imagine happening.
Why do people assume that the Stein votes would have gone for Clinton? It’s much more likely that they would have stayed home if it was a choice between Trump and Clinton.
Well with government science shut down, neither side will have pesky facts or data to get in the way, whether the subject is climate change, nuclear power, or vaccinations…
Still, if only the Clintonistas could have winnowed out from voting all those who planned not to vote for Clinton, including the Greens, Trumpsters and Sanderites, Hillary would have got her LANDSLIDE !
Ada didn’t think of that.
Well, I think some would have stayed home and some would have voted Clinton. Looking at the numbers, I think one can argue that she probably would have lost PA regardless, given that almost all Jill Stein’s votes would have to go to her to win it. She probably would have won MI since only ~20% of Jill Stein’s votes would have to go to her to win it. And, WI is a tough call.
So, yeah, I think the Jill Stein factor alone was probably not enough to swing the election to Trump, although it certainly would have been considerably closer without Stein. (Of course, it was extremely close already, despite Trump team’s ridiculous claims of an “electoral college landslide”. A pure count of electoral votes with no accounting of how close the various states were is a pretty meaningless statistic.)
On a more serious note, Hillary did win by a landslide, 59% to 35%, amongst the 75% of voters who are not White evangelical or born-again Christians…It is that damn demographic that really screwed the country over. I guess they want their rapture. (See Election 2016: Exit Polls - The New York Times)
“If people who voted for Candidate A would have voted for Candidate B instead, B would have won!” Well, no shit! Maybe your candidate should have focused on winning those votes instead of whatever the hell she was doing.
Am I reading it wrong? Where did you find out that only 25% of voters are White evangelical or born-again Christians? (I’m not disputing it, the % sounds about right to me, I’m just genuinely curious where you got the number from)
Well sure, Hillary should have focused on those 132,000 votes out of 136,700,000, because it should have been obvious the whole time that they’d have made the difference.
Too lazy to dig it up now, but the exit polls did identify white evangelical/born-agains, who went for Trump by an 81-16 margin, IIRC.
If white evangelicals/born-agains were 25% of this year’s electorate, then the ones who voted for Trump were about 20.25% of the electorate. Considering that 46% of the voters voted for Trump, that means that about 44% of Trump voters were white evangelicals. He couldn’t have done it without them.