Why the Green Party matters.

[DanTex]

The Green Party functions like a GOP SuperPAC. They aren't officially aligned with the GOP, but their objective (which Nader made explicit) is to help the GOP win elections. Not because they share the same policy goals, but because they think that GOP victories will bring about a socialist awakening. More concisely, they are idiots.

Trump is an idiot too. That the Greens are idiots doesn't mean they can't wreak havoc. They did in 2000, when Nader's candidacy was one of the decisive factors in bringing about the W presidency. He wasn't the only decisive factor (SCOTUS, voter purges, poor campaign decisions, etc.), but there can be no doubt that he was one of them. That was my first election as an adult, I won't forget it.

That year, Nader pulled 2.7% of the vote, most (not all but most) from voters that would otherwise go Democratic. In 1996 he only pulled 0.7% of the vote. Fast forward to the present. Jill Stein got 0.36% of the vote in 2012. It's almost certain that she will get a higher number this year -- the longer a Democratic administration is in office, the more influence the Greens have (they got 0.10% and 0.12% in 2004 and 2008). I don't think Stein will rise to Nader's 2.7%, but 2% is not out of the question.

Even 1% of the vote is a very big deal. For context, Bernie Sanders broke records by having 2.5 million people donate to his primary campaign. That comes out to a bit over 2% of the GE electorate. Placing a dollar value on 1% of the vote would come out to hundreds of millions. It's hard to think of any other individual who could be a more powerful ally of Donald Trump than Jill Stein. If the Koch brothers get on board with Trump and come through with $1B of SuperPAC money, then OK, that's probably a bigger deal. But given the choice between having Sheldon Adelson withdraw the $100M that he is planning to spend on Trump or having the Green Party withdraw from the presidential race, it's an easy choice: get rid of the Greens. $100M won't buy 1% of the electorate away from Hillary, but Jill Stein might.

So to the question of whether discussing the influence of the Green Party is a legitimate topic on DU, the answer is of course yes. The Greens are likely to have more influence than the Libertarians, even though the Libertarians will get more votes, because the Libertarians draw more evenly from both sides, but the Greens draw much more from Dems. They are likely to have more influence than any individual Trump surrogate like Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani, etc. Nobody here would suggest that we shouldn't discuss Christie (or Giuliani or Palin...), so the suggestion that we shouldn't discuss Stein, who is numerically more of a threat, is nonsensical.

I don't think the Greens will succeed in electing Trump, and I don't think Chris Christie will either. But the risk to the nation is great. We must, in our daily lives, try as we can to influence people against GOP lies and propaganda, and we must also influence people against Green lies and propaganda. Particularly those of us who remember 2000, something that most first- or second-time voters won't have a good memory of. We need to fight all pro-Trump forces, not just the ones wearing Trump t-shirts.