That whole Jill Stein thing in 2016 again …

Ruy Teixeira has written a useful short article on the perennially important theological question of whether Green Party candidate Jill Stein cost Hillary Clinton the Presidential election in 2016: Did Third Parties Sink Hillary Clinton in 2016? American Prospect 08/29/2019.

He deals with the effect of third-party Presidential candidates more generally, which include Gary Johnson (Libertarian Party) and Evan McMullin (Independent), not only Jill Stein.

Teixeira refers to a study, whose conclusions he summarizes this way:

Trump still wins the electoral vote [in an estimate without the two small parties], only by a larger margin, 309–229. This is because he still carries the key states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, while also carrying New Hampshire by a narrow margin. This makes sense when one considers the actual distribution of the third-party vote in these states: Michigan, Johnson 3.6 percent/Stein 1.1 percent; New Hampshire, Johnson 4.9/Stein .9; Pennsylvania, Johnson 2.4/Stein .8; Wisconsin, Johnson 3.6/Stein 1.

So the third-party effect is not necessarily anti-Democratic. And Hillary Clinton did not lose the 2016 election because of it.

Yes, that sound you hear is the anguished screaming of corporate Democrats for whom Jill Stein will forever be a Putin stooge who put Trump in the White House by denying her the Electoral College votes of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

From the figures quoted above - Michigan, Johnson 3.6%, Stein; Pennsylvania J 2.4%, S 1.1%; Wisconsin J 3.6%, S 1.1%:

• If Johnson had not been in the race, and
• If Stein had still been in the race, and
• If all Johnson's voters had still voted, and
• If all of them had gone to Clinton,
• Then Clinton might have won.

Also:

• If neither Stein nor Johnson had been in the race, and
• If all Stein’s and Johnson’s voters had still voted, and
• If more than half of the Stein and Johnson voters had gone to Clinton,
• Then Maybe Clinton would have won.

I didn’t crunch the numbers any more exactly. But Teixeira’s figures put the Jill Stein question in the right context.

While Libertarian voters are closer to Republicans positions and Greens closer to the Democrats’, it would be wrong to simply assume that all the Libertarian voters would have gone to Trump and the Greens to Clinton.

But third party voters wouldn’t all have gone to their supposedly corresponding major party. Some of them wouldn’t have voted, or just wrote some candidate in. If either Stein or Johnson had not been there and the other was, some Johnson voters would have gone to Stein and vice versa. It’s likely that some Stein voters were confused enough to have voted for Trump. The Johnson voters would have probably gone more for Trump than Clinton, which is why Johnson’s absence from the race wouldn’t necessarily have put Clinton over the top.

The study to which Teixeira referred is now entirely new. Its publication date is April 2008, America’s Electoral Future Demographic Shifts and the Future of the Trump Coalition, authored by Teixeira, Robert Griffin and William Frey.

That’s not to say that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats will attempt to play strategic games to use third parties against the other side. Politics is politics. But evidence-based analysis of politics is generally preferable to the alternatives.