A new poll suggests that Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein is drawing more voters from former President Donald Trump than from Vice President Kamala Harris.
According to a Noble Predictive Insights survey released last week, Harris holds a narrow lead over Trump in a hypothetical three-way race. With Stein on the ballot, Harris’ lead expands, pointing to a potential spoiler effect similar to what many Democrats blamed Stein for doing to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
For Trump, the emergence of Stein as a potential spoiler may be a critical factor in battleground states, where even a small shift in votes could determine the outcome. For Harris, Stein’s candidacy could paradoxically provide an unexpected advantage, drawing votes from Trump and narrowing his pathway to victory.
Cripes. My point was our current system means your vote for the perfect candidate can put the candidate you disagree with most into office when one with much closer views to yours could have been elected instead. It has happened, and in a place where it really shouldn’t have.
That system should be changed for that reason, and until it is you should be very aware of unintended consequences of that vote.
So now that you’ve identified the problem I can only hope you’re actively building grassroots support to replace the current system instead of just posting online about how people should vote blue no matter what, right?
I see lots of problems in the world. Our voting system is flawed, income inequality is bananas, people still think Donald Trump won the election 4 years ago, our cities are very car-dependent, and plenty more. If I built a grassroots program for every issue I point out to every yahoo on the Internet, I wouldn’t have time to change my toddler’s diaper. If my posting online tells people to keep the cart behind the horse or reconsider their points of view (glad you seem to agree with me what the problem is!) I’ll call that a win on a smaller scale.
I know people who have small children and are still involved in socialist organizing.
Cool. Am I supposed to do that for every cause I believe in or just the ones you say I should?
Literally just target the root cause of the problems, capitalism. All these problems don’t exist in a vacuum.
Are you suggesting you don’t believe in RCV?
I absolutely do think RCV should be used! Or at least runoff voting or SOMETHING other than FPTP. But the other commenter was suggesting that because I’m in favor of it, and because I pointed out the potential consequence of voting third party under FPTP, I must prove my allegiance (or something) by starting a movement. As if I can’t simply have an opinion without dedicating my life to it.
Well, I ask because the implications of your previous posts in this thread seem to be that you think third party supporters should just vote Democrat and work to change the voting process to RCV at the ground level but you don’t want to do it yourself. Then once they suggest you work on it…
so I asked if you believed in RCV, and anyways… There’s this famous quote that says “If you aren’t acting on your beliefs, then they probably don’t exist.” -maybe you don’t subscribe to that but my experience voting for the Democrat party is that they like a lot of things that are nice ideas, but in reality they don’t ever intend to act on them as if they believe in those ideas.
Just the ones you believe to be such a great problem that you’re recommending people vote for your preferences out of fear.
I understand juggling the current political hellscape with a child is nightmarish but building a movement behind a better political system would be the first step in allowing people to vote for better options and resolve the myriad of issues you’ve listed - until then saying to “keep the cart behind the horse” only means we’ll continue bickering in the backseat while the obviously broken two-party state drives us all off the edge.
And I get that between work and family finding time to be politically active can be challenging but I would hope you can find an hour or two a month to join your local RCV advocacy group and help create a better political environment for yours and everybody else’s children.