But people are saying we do it all the time
Menzo
5610
Yep, it’s going to happen. Tulsi is going to start beating the drum of being screwed by the DNC establishment and run as a third party spoiler.
They only need her on the ballot in a few states to make it basically impossible for the Dem candidate to win.
Another “stunning claim” - water is wet. It’s a bombshell, I know!
Yes, Gabbard is Putin’s pick to be 2020’s Jill Stein. The question is, will the trick still work when the strings are now in plain sight?
KevinC
5612
It’ll be effective. She can siphon off some conservative Democrat votes as well as some people who are anti-Trump but have struggled with the idea of pulling the lever for someone with a D in front of their name. Now there’s an out, they don’t have to vote for a Democrat.
Alstein
5613
It might siphon off just as many votes from Trump. Some folks who would vote Trump would vote Tulsi instead.
magnet
5614
There was already an out: stay home.
Nesrie
5615
It really depends on whether their motivation is to not vote for Trump or not have Trump win. If it’s the latter, they won’t vote for some weird third party. If it’s the former, well people voting third party isn’t new, and they will pretzel themselves into knots to excuse that vote and not take claim for any outcomes.
If Joe Biden is the nominee I see this being effective. I don’t know why anyone would vote for Tulsi Gabbard over Warren, who would otherwise vote for Warren over Trump.
So if it’s Biden, we maybe lose. That’s my bold prediction. This all assumes we have a fair election to begin with and MAGA goons aren’t blatantly stuffing ballots in key districts like they do in Russia.
Timex
5617
The people targeted are dumb as a sack of hammers, so, yeah, probably.
History says it’ll be of limited, if any use. Americans seem very trendy and correlative about showing voter’s remorse at 3rd party votes…but not always predictably on where those previous 3rd parties go. In four presidential elections in the last generation and a half, we’ve had four where a third party candidate or candidates got more than 6% of the vote. And in the following election, third party candidates got less than 3% combined.
The main “unpredictability” here is which way those 3rd party voters swing when they come back to the two majors in the following election.
Frankly, it’s hard to imagine either of those constituencies voting for Gabbard. She’s not a conservative Democrat, and she’s not someone who will appeal to conservative Republicans.
Alstein
5620
Fox will make them believe Gabbard is a conservadem.
Enidigm
5621
Basically. Every Democrat is a “radical” and people are just looking for a moderate that “both sides”, you know, the average American who doesn’t buy into all this Fake News can accept. Someone like Tulsi, someone who makes sense.
Did you know that all the other leading Democratic candidates are radical socialists that want to take your rights away? Just fyi! Thought you might like to know.
Matt_W
5622
In 2016 Stein got about 1% of the vote, but Clinton would have won if all of Stein’s voters had voted for Clinton instead. In 2000, Nader got less than 3% of the national vote, but those 100,000 votes in Florida proved pretty crucial. It’s more about that impact of 3rd parties on election results than how big their vote share is.
Enidigm
5623
Agree. Although tbh, this isn’t ever completely clear - i read one year gerrymandering doesn’t matter, than a new study comes out and it does. Independent voters are a myth, and then they aren’t. 3rd party candidates draw equally from Democrats and Republican voter pools, and then new analysis shows they didn’t.
My prior is that i don’t believe that a Democratic candidate running as an independent will draw as many Republican leaning voters as a GOP candidate that runs as an independent.
Even closer than that: 7,211 votes. Nader got 22,198. That was the difference between a Bush and Gore presidency (Bush won NH but those tiny 4 EC votes would have swung the election the other way had Gore won, FL notwithstanding.)
(Edit: So far in NH the only Democratic lawn signs I’ve seen are Gabbard. Long, long way to go until Feb. though.)
2016 and 2000 are both elections in which third party candidates totaled over 6%, so there you go!
So, I guess the billion question is, where would those votes go without the 3rd party? Would they have gone Democrats, would they have stayed home?
Is it only Liberals that are so very very very stupid about all this?
CraigM
5627
I mean if you ignore the fact Gary Johnson voters outnumbered Jill Stein 3:1
Isn’t Tulsi the second-most leftwing candidate after Sanders, foreign policy entanglements aside? Like, appreciably to the left of Warren on several issues? She’s hardly Biden/Buttigieg/etc. I can’t imagine ‘centrist’ voters opting for her, unless they just focus on her military service.
