Green Party candidate Jill Stein says she's not to blame for Trump's fluke victory, Democrats...

[DonViejo]

Green Party candidate Jill Stein says she’s not to blame for Trump’s fluke victory, Democrats still doomed

Fiery Green nominee makes a coherent case about the many failures of American democracy. But she's not the answer

ANDREW O'HEHIR

Jill Stein really, really wants you to know that she’s not responsible for President Donald Trump. I had a chance to put that case to the Green Party’s 2016 presidential nominee when she visited Salon’s New York office on Friday, and she was more than ready for the accusation. Stein has a point — at least up to a point.

Her comeback is sensible enough: The math doesn’t work. To make the case that Stein played a definitive spoiler role in the 2016 presidential election, you have to assume that nearly all her voters (or at least nearly all of them in the key Midwestern states won by Trump) would have yanked the lever for Hillary Clinton if Stein hadn’t been on the ballot. No one can prove or disprove what might have happened in an alternate universe, but Stein is correct to say that isn’t a coherent or logical assumption. She says that polls of Green voters suggest that most of them would simply have stayed home, some would have voted for Trump or Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, and fewer than one in three would have voted for Clinton. That almost certainly would not have been enough to alter the outcome.

So I concur that it’s not fair to point the finger at Stein and the Greens and say “You ruined everything!” She’s right to observe that the number of Democrats who didn’t bother to show up at all, or who crossed party lines to vote for Trump, vastly exceeds the number of potential Clinton voters who went Green instead. She’s also right that the Democratic Party’s default position after every electoral setback is to blame renegade leftists on the margins rather than confronting the consequences of several decades’ worth of rootless, rudderless ideological drift. To consider the “Ralph Nader factor” in isolation — as if it had no political causes and no historical context, and as if it could have been wished away — was not entirely fair in 2000 (when the case for it was a lot stronger), and is even less so in 2016.

But even the fact that Stein’s vote total was too small to make much difference, and that the Democrats’ major institutional and ideological problems lie elsewhere, speaks to the fundamental weakness of her position. On one hand, the Green Party’s optics are terrible, as we say these days. There’s no way around the fact that Stein’s modest vote totals in each of the three fateful states that put Trump over the top — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — exceeded the razor-thin margins between Trump and Clinton.

more + 3 min video of interview
http://www.salon.com/2016/12/02/jill-stein-spoiled-the-2016-election-for-hillary-clinton/

[wcmagumba]

1. Jillenstein...

kindly please gfy!

[bravenak]

2. She is crazy and needs to go home and stop ruining our lives

Blah blah blah, jill is a bad singer and a worse politician

[Uponthegears]

3. IMHO, the problem with Jill Stein

and the Green Party in general, isn't that they cost Hillary the election (which I agree they did not), but that they aren't really "leftists" at all, past a slogan or two.

The Greens in Europe actually stand for a set of principles and are a real force. They aren't saying "we can't win, therefore you shouldn't participate." They're winning.

Here, they are just a fraud.

[dalton99a]

8. They certainly were Putin's useful idiots in the election.

[Paladin]

4. You sure as hell didn't help matters, lady.

Collect your Ralph Nader Democratic Spoiler certificate, and disappear......

[Gothmog]

5. Denial is not just a river in Africa

Stein is an idiot if she believes her editorial

[BlueMTexpat]

6. F*ck Jill Stein!

And anyone who voted for her.

[world wide wally]

7. Why doesn't the Green Party start with school boards and state legislators if they actually

want to be a viable political party?
Just straight to POTUS?