October 19, 2024

"Last week, the Democratic National Committee and Kamala Harris’s campaign did something never done before by a Democratic presidential campaign."

"They released a 30-second TV ad attacking a third-party candidate, specifically the Green Party nominee.... The ad mentions the Green Party nominee by name. I’m not—because she should be ignored, not paid attention with an ad buy or a Washington Monthly bounce in Google algorithms...."

Writes Bill Scher, in "Hey, Democrats: Ignore Green Party Presidential Candidate J**l St**n/The perennial third-party presidential aspirant can’t be a spoiler if voters don’t know she exists and they barely do" (Washington Monthly).

"... Democrats have evidence that confronting third-party candidates works after throttling the independent presidential bid of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.... But Kennedy, coasting on his famous name, began his independent bid with unusually high poll numbers and outsized media attention, warranting a muscular effort to drive him out of the race....  I hear you screaming, But! But! But! The battleground states are dead even!... Sure, but when a third-party candidate is polling between zero and one, you can’t assume many of those voters are even available to either major party candidate.... Despite what the new Democratic Party ad asserts, the evidence does not support the claim that the Greens played a spoiler role in 2016.... The case is much stronger that Nader did play a spoiler role in 2000.... Of course, infinitesimal margins could always happen again—especially when polls are so tight.... But the current Green candidate has been suffocating from a lack of media oxygen—unlike Nader, who was a household name—until the Democrats ran an ad about her!..."

58 comments:

Kevin said...

The party has so much joy, it’s spilling over onto Jill Stein.

Leland said...

Good to see the unbiased media giving campaign advice to the Democrats.

Christopher B said...

Telling people there's a way to get Trump into office but still be able to say you didn't vote for him.

Christopher B said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Iman said...

So much joy! This I can tell you.

Time to take the gloves off and go to teh mattresses!

Dixcus said...

How do they even write such an article without mentioning H. Ross Perot and his enshrinement of the Clinton's in our American polity?

Bill Clinton got 43% of the vote. And the rest is history.

rehajm said...

A third party vote means non-voters ballots aren’t available to the Democrats team filling out ballots…

tcrosse said...

Yeah, blame Jill Stein for 2016. Never mind that Hillary was a rotten candidate who ran a bone-headed campaign.

Jersey Fled said...

One more sign that Kamala’s internals must be awful.

tolkein said...

This assumes that Jill Stein voters would otherwise have voted for Clinton. Just as likely, they wouldn't have shown up to vote at all.

rehajm said...

Jaja- scraping the bottom of the bowl there, aren’t they?

Christopher B said...

Stein was the Democrat cat's paw to get the recount started, until it crashed and burned in Wayne County.

Christopher B said...

Dare I hope that Trump is outside the margin of fraud?

rehajm said...

This is a recurring theme in human error. Those recording artist lawyers, politicians and static scoring- the same mistake. Systems are dynamic…

Iman said...

Democrat shitbirds and their long knives.

They got rid of their candidate with a coup on the Day Democracy Died in Plain Sight.

gilbar said...

Democracy MEANS throttling the independent
Democrat Party or DEATH!!!

gilbar said...

BUT! not showing up (by election night) MEANS completely available to be absentee voted AFTER the polls close!
You're ASSUMING that there is some Small level of legalness in the Democrat scheme... There Is NOT

gspencer said...
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ThreeSheets said...

It also assumes Stein voters aren't well aware that their vote might hurt the Democratic candidate (or R). It could be protest votes to stop taking that wing for granted. Oh, this could hurt Kamala....good!

wild chicken said...

"Telling people there's a way to get Trump into office"

Exactly! So I don't feel guilty around my TDS-deranged husband, I cast my first third party vote ever. Trump will still win the state.

Genius!

tommyesq said...

This is good - it is another person Kamala can talk about to avoid talking about herself.

Howard said...

It looks to me like the DNC is bound and determined to hand the election to Donald j Trump. They don't seem to be able to get out of their incestuous echo chamber think tank where they come up with all of these horrible stratagems that they all believe will be the death blow or should I say the unalive blow to the Maga movement.

Tina Trent said...

Wow. And I thought the Al Smith Dinner video was excruciatingly dumb.

But there's a deeper election polling dweeb meaning here.

The Palestinian and Palestinian-supporting bloc on the Left that is aligned with Jill Stein is more powerful than most people know.

Alienating the soft ones by attacking Stein won't gain votes for Kamama.

Is there anything this campaign can't do wronger? Impressive.

Sally327 said...

If you're voting Green aren't you someone who thinks neither major party is worthy of your support? I can't see how such a voter is going to be persuaded by this ad to vote for Harris-Walz, if anything it probably just validates the reason why the person is voting Green in the first place.

Rory said...

Everything blew 2016 for the Dems except the Dems giving Trump $2 billion in free advertising in the year before the primaries started.

Iman said...

You tell that prick where to get off!

clint said...

Yep. These might be gettable votes, but not by attacking Stein.

Perhaps they're trying to shape the post-election narrative to shift the blame away from Kamala Harris or her campaign staff?

Mary Beth said...

And Harris is a bone-headed candidate who is running a rotten campaign.

Mary Beth said...

I have been trying to get people to refer to Jill Stein as the "real Dr. Jill", but I'm not getting much traction. It made more sense when Biden was still in the race and we were seeing more of "call me Dr." Jill.

Peachy said...

The Modern Left - A Millions Ways To HATE.

phantommut said...

Paradox: Telling Special K not to give oxygen to Stein gives oxygen to Stein.

Bonus: Points out that she's incompetent, un-smart, or both.

phantommut said...

Memories are short. Gen-X memories especially so.

Dude1394 said...

Democrats are all about democracy. As long as they are getting elected.

James K said...

You say that like it’s a bad thing.

Dogma and Pony Show said...

"... Democrats have evidence that confronting third-party candidates works after throttling the independent presidential bid of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.... "

Am I reading this right? They think what they did with RFK worked out to their benefit???

David53 said...

Just another person to blame when Kamala doesn't get elected.

Prof. M. Drout said...

I think it's good to that all pretense of idealism or "doing what is right" has been stripped away and the pure lust for power is out in the open.

RCOCEAN II said...

Interesting. I thought Stein was throwing the race again, like she did in 2020. Guess not.

Yancey Ward said...

One of those forgotten tidbits of history- on the first start of recounts in Detroit's vote in 2016 it became apparent that the Democrats had cheated in 2016 and that it would be revealed so the recount was immediately dropped- like at that exact instant.

Yancey Ward said...

Consider the alternate reality where the Democrats allowed Kennedy to run a normal primary campaign and he defeated Joe Biden. Kennedy would be pretty much shoo-in at this point given the Democrats' built in electoral advantage.

Yancey Ward said...

Stein's presence on the ticket does hurt Harris because it gives Democrats who can't pull the lever for Harris a non-Trump option should they show up to vote at all. The same will apply to whoever the Libertarian Party candidate is but against Trump.

Rusty said...

In keeping with todays theme she looks like Jim Gaffigan.

tcrosse said...

Consider the alternate reality where pigs might fly.

Charlie Currie said...

Looks to me that they're trying to set up a scape goat to blame for K's loss.

Lazarus said...

Cornel West gets no respect? I'd say he's a more recognizable and more personable figure than Stein. Maybe he's not actively campaigning?

It was foolish for the Democrats to call attention to Stein, but how many times have you heard or read her name over the last two months or so? The blackout has been working very well.

Stein's 2012 challenger for the Green Party nomination was Roseanne Barr, a well-known comedienne and actress who ended up running on California's Peace and Freedom Party ticket. How many people know that, or knew it at the time?

Jupiter said...

"I hear you screaming, But! But! But!"
No, you don't, you prattling shill. What you probably hear is the guy who hired you coming to tell you that you won't be needed after next month.

Original Mike said...

I don't think this is an outcome the moneyed interests controlling the democrats would have been interested in. They would have had little control over Kennedy.

Iman said...

Hitler’s had more then enough…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWSRgPpYKrg

Iman said...

than…

loudogblog said...

"Democrats have evidence that confronting third-party candidates works after throttling the independent presidential bid of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr"

Excuse me. That didn't really work for the Democrats. They drove RFK Jr. into the arms of Trump and RFK Jr's followers became Trump followers. I think that was the exact opposite of what they were trying to achieve.

Plus, as we all know too well, the Streisand effect can backfire on you spectacularly. I know a lot of liberals who are not looking forward to holding their noses and voting for Harris. The DNC has just given some of them an ethical option out of that quandary.

loudogblog said...

Since I live in California, my vote will play no part in deciding who wins the state. It will overwhelmingly go to whomever the Democrat candidate is. That's why I always vote third party as a protest vote.

loudogblog said...

I suspect that a major problem that the Democrats have is that they put too much faith in their young, college trained, staffers. These young people are too idealistic and too inexperienced to handle real world situations. You can't let them drive policy just because they're massively enthusiastic about far left causes. You need cynical realists to temper the message to make it appealing to voters.

meep said...

maybe they shouldn't be reminding people that Stein exists

Enigma said...

Third party candidates gain traction only when there is traction to gain. Ross Perot may have caused the defeat of G. H. W. Bush in 1992, but Bush offended many on the right. As a beltway dweller, inventor of the term "Voodoo Economics", former CIA Director, and president during the Ruby Ridge event, Bush was no more conservative than Liz Cheney.

Democrats are attacking Stein because she may encourage other breakaway factions to stand their ground (e.g., black males; pro-Palestinians) and ensure 40 years of Democratic irrelevance.

Kakistocracy said...

The best analogy of a Third Party voter I’ve seen is a house cat, thinking he is the master of his domain, without realizing he is completely dependent on a system they neither appreciate nor understand.

YoungHegelian said...

In the internet age, such attempts to strangle support for Stein won't work, because there are two kinds of Stein voters:

1) The last minute "eff-the both of them (Trump and Kamala) voter who marks The Green Party on the ballot because it's not Trump or Kamala or
2) The Green Party true-believer who long ago developed his/her contacts and sources of information outside of the standard media sources, since they would be insufficiently green-minded for such a voter.

Neither sort of voter is reachable by the campaign described above.

Tina Trent said...

Chase Oliver, a gay, militantly pro-transgender liberal whose major issues are: being gay, making sex change operations legal to perform on children, not allowing women to be free to compete in sports only against women or be safe from having to share prison cells with any male felon who merely claims to be a woman, and being very pro-marijuana, is the Libertarian presidential candidate this year. His VP, whom more libertarians at the convention actually wanted, hails from the more traditional, economics-based libertarianism, but he lost to Oliver because, as anyone who has ever witnessed the Rat King-making that is a libertarian convention knows, the rules are very vulnerable to manipulation by dirty tricks operatives like Oliver.

So, vote libertarian if you want non-surgically altered serial rapists locked up with women in prison cells and little boy's penises cut off at a whim.

As a campaign slogan, they're really gonna have to shine that turd.

Robert Cook said...

If I were not living in a Red state, I would be voting for Jill Stein.