I don’t like Jill Stein. I don’t have one good word to say about her. It has nothing to do with her being a member of the Green Party or deciding to run for president and it has everything to do with her personality, her lack of intelligence, her sanctimonious dishonest bullshit, and her almost regal hypocrisy. I am not a fan. And I’ve been mocking her (mostly on Twitter) for having so little support that she can see Zero from her house.
And, it’s true, virtually no one voted for her and for good reason. I’d guess that three-quarters of the votes she did get were not cast in support of her personally but more as just a way of saying that you didn’t like your choices or that you’re to the left of Clinton or that you didn’t like how Sanders was treated, or whatever.
Here’s the irony, though. Now there are a bunch of people coming out who are really incensed that she’s getting blamed (along with Gary Johnson) for throwing the election to Donald Trump. And what’s their argument?
Their argument is that it’s impossible for her to have destroyed the country and probably the world because she didn’t get enough votes to change anything.
Now, first of all, that’s a contentious assertion. She and Johnson did get enough votes in enough key states that their voters alone could have changed the election. But this debate gets muddled quickly because no one keeps their categories segregated. Are we blaming Jill Stein for putting her name on the ballot? Or are we blaming the people who voted for her for not voting for Clinton? Are we going to include the people who stayed home because Stein wasn’t on the ticket (in some states)?
So, let’s not make this too complicated. Did Jill Stein and Gary Johnson cause Donald Trump to win simply by putting their names on the ballots in key states? That’s kind of unknowable. We can argue about how we think their voters would have behaved if given only two choices. It’s a close call, and it will probably never be decided conclusively.
The next question, though, is would it have been easier to say they did if they got more votes? And here I think the answer is clearly yes, particularly for Stein. If she had gotten 10% or 20% of the vote, no one would be disputing that she had cost Clinton the election. So, this defense of her really comes down to saying that she didn’t make Trump our president but only because she failed to win more support.
It’s a very odd defense of Jill Stein. She tried to throw the election to Trump but it turned out that Trump didn’t need her help.
It really doesn’t make her look better. She had no appeal so she did no damage so don’t be mad at her.
Okay.
That’s great.
But this is all a distraction because it’s not about who was on the ballot but about who voted for anyone but Clinton. It’s the voters who committed this act of self-harm, not Jill Stein. How many people would vote today for Clinton knowing that Trump would win if they didn’t? How many Stein voters would?
How many people who didn’t show up to vote because they weren’t “inspired” or because “it didn’t matter” or because “they’re all crooked” would now show up to say, “Uh, Donald Trump? No. That’s fucking crazy!”
Because the true argument here isn’t over whether or not candidates should even put their names on a ballot. The true argument is over whether people should vote for third party candidates if there’s a clear choice between the top two.
In this case, wankers and idealists fucked us all. And that’s the way it is.
Yeah, you can absolutely blame Clinton and her advisers and the strategy and the running mate and the ads and the last thirty years if you want.
But the voters decide. Did you decide to use your vote to stop Trump?
If you didn’t, you take your lumps before Jill Stein or Gary Johnson. They didn’t force you to do anything.
More broadly speaking, people need to look themselves in the mirror and stop trying to blame everyone else. It doesn’t matter. It’s not going to ever be resolved. It’s not helping.
