Republicans Boost Jill Stein as Potential Harris Spoiler

www.wsj.com /politics/elections/jill-stein-republican-support-harris-voters-5a194ebf

“Federal Election Commission records show Stein paid $100,000 in July to a consulting outfit that has worked with Republican campaigns, as well as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential bid. The firm, Accelevate, is operated by Trent Pool. The Intercept reported that he appeared to be part of the mob that breached the grounds of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6., 2021. The Journal hasn’t independently verified the reporting.”

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And not just republicans. You can find all stripes of accelerationist crazies doing that on this very website.
- We must bring about glorious revolution, even if our methods aren't particularly effective and millions suffer.
  
  No you see they have a plan.
  Convince people likely to vote for Harris to throw away their votes by voting 3rd party or staying home
  Suppress democratic turnout while leaving Republican turnout untouched.
  Spoil the election while haughtily going “oh not voting is a vote for trump somehow” and snorting to themselves. Completely blind to context.
  Have the things they claim to really super duper care about like genocide in Palestine continue under trump
  Also have vulnerable groups in America, like legal Haitian migrants, be the target of Republican vitriol.
  (step missing)
  Glorious proletariat revolution against the most powerful military and militarized police force to ever exist
  Its brilliance is in its simplicity!
  
  Convince people likely to vote for Harris to throw away their votes
  Why do you believe folks voting for Stein would be likely Harris voters?
  
  So if you look at the policy positions of a Green Party, it tends to align more closely with voters who would traditionally vote Democratic.
  Here’s their own blurb from their website
  We are grassroots activists, environmentalists, advocates for social justice, nonviolent resisters and regular citizens who’ve had enough of corporate-dominated politics. Government must be part of the solution, but when it’s controlled by the 1%, it’s part of the problem. The longer we wait for change, the harder it gets. Don’t stay home on election day. Vote Green!
  Considering that the Republican Party uses the phrase “social justice warrior” as an insult and to this day field candidates that reject climate change, the idea that Republican voters might choose to vote for this party over their own seems less likely to me.
  The Green Party is politically left of center, so it seems reasonable to me that the people that would vote for them would be more likely to come from the group of voters more likely to cast a ballot for Harris than trump.
  
  So if you look at the policy positions of a Green Party, it tends to align more closely with voters who would traditionally vote Democratic.
  If you look at the textbook positions, sure. But if you look at the activities of the Democratic Party while in power, you see some sharp deviations. Biden expanding oil drilling leases on public lands. Harris taking money from Crypto shills and other energy ravenous tech billionaires. Their hard-line opposition to immigration. Their continued endorsement of arms sales to Israel.
  Considering that the Republican Party uses the phrase “social justice warrior” as an insult and to this day field candidates that reject climate change, the idea that Republican voters might choose to vote for this party over their own seems less likely to me.
  If you go back to the 2000 election with Nader and you look at Green turnout trends in Florida relative to party affiliation, you discover lots of GOP / Green crossover voting. Nearly as many Greens defected from the Bush Oil Family as the Gore camp. In fact, its the SJW and climate denialist rhetoric that turns died-in-the-wool Republicans into Green defectors on the regular.
  But the dirty secret about Green voters (much like their Libertarian counterparts) is that they tend to win votes in districts and states where one party thoroughly dominates. You'll find more Green Dems in bright Blue California and Minnesota and New York and Washington. You'll find more Green Republicans in Texas and South Carolina and Utah and Ohio.
  The Green Party is politically left of center
  The platforms of the Green Party have been shared by both parties across the decades. And you can regularly find Greens who fell out of one party or the other precisely because of the drift.
  What we're seeing today is a large number of Arab American spilling out of the Democratic Party, because the Dems are abandoning even a semblance of support for a Rules Based International Order, with respect to Israel. That's what has people freaked out about Jill Stein. She's become a magnet for disaffected liberals.
  But go back twenty years, to when John McCain was pushing a climate change bill and George Bush Jr was signing legislation full of EV car credits, and you can find liberal Republicans with Green frills. Go back farther than that and you can find Green Republicans in the Sierra Club and even Greenpeace. The Greens aren't Left-of-Center. They're simply platforming issues that the other two parties have abandoned.
  
  If the republicans thought that the Green Party was going to be an attractive option for their voters in 2000 they certainly adopted an odd strategy
  https://web.archive.org/web/20050912163938/http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20001027/aponline115918_000.htm
  Hoping to boost Ralph Nader in states where he is threatening to hurt Al Gore, a Republican group is launching TV ads featuring Nader attacking the vice president.
  The ads by the Republican Leadership Council will begin airing Monday in Wisconsin, Oregon and Washington, all states that are part of Gore's base and where Nader is polling well. The group plans to spend more than $100,000 at first and hopes to raise more over the weekend.
  It’s not some crazy conspiracy either, the Republican Leadership Council explained the ad buys in this way
  The Republican Leadership Council, a centrist GOP group, has been helpful to Bush before, airing ads during the Republican primaries critical of challenger Steve Forbes. Several members of the RLC board were early Bush supporters.
  The RLC ads will run initially in four markets: Eugene and Portland, Ore.; Madison, Wis., and Seattle.
  Mark Miller, the group's executive director, said the ads are partly a response to commercials being run by the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, which argue that a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush.
  "Ralph Nader doesn't believe that," Miller said. "Ralph Nader and his supporters are not backing down because they believe Al Gore has had numerous broken promises."
  Miller added that some of Nader's supporters have bragged that Nader has never had help from "soft money," the unrestricted donations used by parties and interest groups.
  "We'll put an end to that," Miller said.
  You might notice how the answer doesn’t really make any sense, a pro Bush Republican PAC wanted to run ads in Gore strongholds promoting Nader with the argument that Gore broke numerous promises. Why? Because groups said that a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush. It sounds like they are trying to counter this but then their actions fully support that idea.
  Maybe some republicans could be persuaded to join the greens, but I pay attention to how people spend their money because talk is cheap. If republicans spend money to promote Nader in states they want to win, they obviously think they’ll poach more gore voters than Bush voters, it just doesn’t make sense otherwise.
  I actually agree that the Green Party is staking out policy positions that both parties have abandoned, but I still think the abandoned policies they’ve picked up to champion are still more attractive to left leaning people than right leaning people.
  Unless the WSJ has been taken over by liberals, owned by famous liberal Rupert Murdoch, they seem to be following a similar path now https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/jill-stein-republican-support-harris-voters-5a194ebf
  So while I imagine some of these policy positions might be attractive to some disaffected republicans, republicans seem to think it will be useful to promote them. The only way that makes any kind of sense is if they think it will attract more potential Democratic Party voters than republican.
  
  the Republican Leadership Council explained the ad buys
  Republicans try things that fail or backfire all the time. That same year, George Bush was stumping in Fresno California a month before the general election.
  Does that mean Republicans had a genius plan to win California? No. Bush's pollsters were just shitily over-optimistic.
  Dems employ similar tricks, backing the wackier GOP primary contenders during the primary for instance.
  But in the end, how well do they work? Is a dollar spent on some quixotic 11D chess more successful than old school retail politicking?
  So while I imagine some of these policy positions might be attractive to some disaffected republicans, republicans seem to think it will be useful to promote them.
  Consultants love to pretend they are masterminds by zigging left when everyone else zags right. For all the panic you hear about Jill Stein being a Republican ploy to get people to care about environmentalism, I've rarely seen the GOP fumble harder than when they gave AOC's Green New Deal a vote in the Senate and raised her to national stature.
  Don't confuse people throwing shit at the wall with effective strategy.
  
  It’s true that consultants seem to love these “extremely clever” plays. I imagine if Harris wins, you’ll see a lot more “let’s switch the candidate out and get an excitement bump like that thing that worked that one time.”
  I looked for data to try to quantify the demographics of Green Party voters and couldn’t find much, if you’ve got some I’d love to see it.
  I suppose the thing that stands out to me is how Republican and Democratic programming works. Both parties enforce norms and spend a lot of time programming at their constituencies. I believe that trump was able to take over the Republican Party against the wishes of the party leadership because he intuitively understood this. He sorta hijacked this programming because he knew the dog whistles and catch phrases and was willing to shamelessly iterate and say whatever would work. Here’s a fun article about him thinking “drain the swamp” was a bad line and then embracing it wholeheartedly when it worked https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/2016-trump-explains-why-he-didnt-like-the-phrase-drain-the-swamp-but-now-does/2016/10/26/4a2f257a-9be0-11e6-b552-b1f85e484086_video.html
  This programming is where we get political tropes from. It’s why if you see a thumbnail about “woke dei bullshit” you can be pretty sure that’s going to be a conservative complaint video.
  When I look at the Green Party messaging, if they are trying to attract republicans as much as democrats, it’s weird. The comms are full of Republican third rails like social justice, the carousel says that the Green Party is the birthplace of the green new deal, the rail against corporate power. Now this isn’t to say there wouldn’t be anyone on the right that wouldn’t be cool with these ideas, but to frame it in these terms goes against decades of Republican talking points and programming.
  It’s not like support for the green new deal is something of a question on the right. They have been upset about the non-green new deal since FDR passed it, and I’ve never seen a single Republican politician or talking head have anything but disdain for the green new deal. As you point out, they didn’t promote it because they like it, but as a way to knee cap AOC which backfired.
  If you start with the belief that I hold that the Green Party has no chance of winning, which seems like a reasonable starting point. Every voter that would have voted for Harris and instead votes for stein is net 1 vote for trump and every voter that would have voted for trump and instead votes for stein is net 1 vote for Harris.
  I scroll around gp.org and it doesn’t have anything that looks like it’s aimed at attracting Republican voters. I do see a lot of stuff that seems like it could be aimed at attracting leftist and crunchy democratic voters. That’s not a criticism or anything, if that’s where their policy values are, that’s perfectly fine. But I just struggle to really think there are a ton of people about to vote for trump that are going to end up on that website and think “oh wow, finally a party that actually wants to work towards social justice.”
  As someone that is left of the Democratic Party I recognize a lot of the things on this website, it’s a lot of the things the democrats have been promising and failing to deliver for a long time. Perhaps because so many of the talking points and policies are so familiar and feel so comfortable to me as someone who is disappointed in the democratic party’s failure to deliver on these things I find it hard to believe that republicans are looking at this site and thinking “I’ve found my people”
  
  I'm much more interested in your plan than whatever strawman you can make up about the voters whom Democrats have left on the table for objecting to the genocide they want to fund.
  
  Focus on getting progressives into local and state offices so they can build experience necessary to successfully run for federal office. Vote lesser evil for president in the meantime to buy time for progressive to get that experience. In 10-15 years of diligent efforts we can get progressives into probably about a 1/3 of our congressional seats. At that point, a progressive presidential candidate with congressional experience stands an actual chance of winning the presidency, and will have the legislative support to actually accomplish their policy goals when they get there.
  
  How does this differ from the plan 10-15 years ago? Should we not be seeing returns if lesser evil voting did anything other than ratchet us over to the right? Should a politician have to do anything to earn the votes that put them into office?
  
  How does this differ from the plan 10-15 years ago?
  It doesn't, we just haven't been doing it. Progressives show up at mid terms in lower proportions than conservatives, we have to show up for every election, even the boring local ones. Governors and Senators become Presidents. If we want a progressive President, we need progressive Governors and Senators to nominate.
  Should we not be seeing returns if lesser evil voting did anything other than ratchet us over to the right?
  Perhaps I wasn't clear: voting lesser evil is necessary for change but it is not sufficient. Again, the return on lesser evil voting is delaying the greater evil so that good can get into position. If we're not using that delay to vote progressive into lower offices, then yes voting lesser evil accomplishes little else.
  Should a politician have to do anything to earn the votes that put them into office?
  This isn't a productive perspective. Lots of things should happen. You shouldn't have to look both ways before crossing at a crosswalk when you have the light; but if you follow "should", you'll have the satisfaction of being in the right when you get hit by a car.
  The point of your vote isn't to reward candidates for having the right policies, the point of your vote is to protect your interests. You vote lesser evil for the same reason you lock your doors, to mitigate a worse outcome.
  
  That's my point. I'm not convinced that my vote is protecting my interests at all, and what's changed to make the story any different with the plan from 10-15 years ago?
  The voting system works well for Republicans as it is currently. They have no reason to make the radical changes in the next four years that are being fearmongered right now. At least not any that the Democrats, with or without the president, would do anything to stop.
  Every bogeyman propped up as reasons to vote against republicans has not slowed down under recent democratic administrations, who refuse to defend the rights and meet the demands of the people even in the face of clear power grabs by the other side. There is no firm policy being presented, only vague projections that it won't be as bad as under republicans, who have shown us that don't need the presidency. The tail is already wagging the dog in that respect and the side that claims to represent the left believe in decorum too much to say enough.
  It is up to the democrats alone to convince anyone otherwise. We should not be scolding voters for being disillusioned by poor and ineffectual governance. If that's where we're at; blaming the voters for the failures of politicians that are first and foremost chosen by monied interests; then we've already lost democracy.
  We can do this again in four years, just like we did it four years ago and four years before that, or we can get what we want right now by banding together and telling them that our votes are on the table only if they make a good faith attempt to meet our demands, and if we're serious we will put our votes where our mouths are when the day comes. It's not impossible to win that way, we just watched it happen when they switched out Biden for Kamala.
  You're going to have at least as much success doing that as you are scolding american voters every four years for voting their conscience just to then turn around and somehow convince them to be more politically active. Because that's who you're alienating, the handful of voters that actually care about the state of politics and may hold just enough power to swing a federal election. Certainly not the voters that are won just by having a larger campaign budget.
  You can't beat them, so join them. Do not let this political moment go to waste, do not let yourself be complicit in genocide. Put pressure on the democrats to acknowledge the genocide in gaza, to stop arming Israel. That will get everyone on the same side, along with being a show of good faith that voters wishes still matter to Democrats. At a minimum, open your mind to that possibility.
  Do not let the establishment intimidate you into forgetting what power we hold as a collective, into actively working against collective's own interests and shielding the establishment from the electoral consequences of their actions.
  
  That’s not how evaluating a plan works.
  Here, I’ve got a cure for cancer, shove pinecones up your ass.
  You can determine that this plan is bad without having to have a cure for cancer.
  
  Right, well you keep guaranteeing your vote for Democrats every year and attacking anyone that criticizes them for being ineffective and see how much that gets you, since their current platform and every election leading up to this one hasn't been enough to prove that they don't really care that much about defending progressive policy and will throw both it and their voters under the bus if they think it will help them tap into the republican base instead. Continue directing your ire at your fellow voters instead of using it to hold your elected representative's feet to the fire. That definitely seems like a sound plan and totally isn't more of what got us here in the first place 👍
  
  It’s a nice straw man you’ve erected and if I did any of those things you might have some kind of point.
  I didn’t attack anyone, I pointed out that this alternative plan is unlikely to bring about any substantive change either.
  So you keep telling people to sit at home and I’ll wait for the glorious revolution, maybe if you shout down people and tell them to read more theory that’ll help. The American people are super into reading political theory.
  
  Lmao I've never told anyone to read theory or to sit at home but go off I guess.
  
  I thought we were just casting aspersions for fun 🤣
  
  Oh, so you're just trolling. Got it 👍
- Including Russian trolls

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