2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Switch Jill Stein votes to Clinton, and just half of Gary Johnson votes, and here's what you get: [View all]kenfrequed
(7,865 posts)First though you have to subtract the Green party votes that voted for Stein in 2012 from the totals in each of these states. These are hard core green party people. They *might* have come out for Bernie. They were not going to vote for most democrats though.
And as far as adding half of the Johnson voters, that is just absurd. These are fairly stubborn (and annoying) libertarians that are basically against Hillary on most issues (save possibly religion). Some of these people might have voted for Bernie for is reluctance towards interventionism or his positions on his war on drugs. Hillary was never going to get these votes either. Some of them were republicans that didn't feel they looked good in white sheets and for those guys neither Hillary nor Bernie was likely to win them over.
The very idea that someone is trying to push this media myth in is ridiculous. In every election there are always a few percentage points of third and fourth party voters. It is silly and arrogant to presume that those automatically would have gone to the second least popular candidate in modern American history.
If your election strategy absolutely falls onto those people that rarely ever vote for your party (or bother to vote at all) then your strategy is to lose.