this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
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What??
In Michigan Gary Johnson got 172,136 votes, in Pennsylvania he got 146,715, and in Wisconsin he got 106,674. If all Greens voted Clinton and all Libertarians voted Trump then New Mexico would've only been won by Clinton with around 1,000 votes, Colorado would've also been nearly Trump. Nevada, New Hampshire, and Minnesota would've been won by Trump. Maine might've gone majority Trump.
Third parties hurt Trump more than they help him, because Libertarians would not have voted Clinton.
The Green Party is far more left-wing than the Libertarian Party is right-wing.
How does that contradict what I said. Also the LP is still further right than the GOP
If all third-party candidates had to vote for one of the two main candidates, I think nearly all of the Green Party votes would go to the Democrat, while the Libertarian votes would be much more of a split.
Maybe an 80/20 split at best, but the GOP has always been the more libertarian aligned party, going back to Barry Goldwater, Ron Paul, Rand Paul, and now Thomas Massie
They actually aren't further right anymore
I don't agree, but "right-wing" doesn't really have a non-arbitrary definition so it doesn't really matter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_politics
Okay?
It's very convenient measuring ideological abstracts rather than the objective number of votes those parties got.
Vote for the candidate that aligns to your politics. If genocide and climate disaster is compatible with those, stick to the GOP or the Democrats.
And how many of them are running now? This isn't about them, this is about the one third party candidate that actually makes headlines.
Why do headlines matter if she gets way less votes than Libertarians?
The Green party gets more attention in left-leaning circles because there are people sympathetic to it and there are people who want to blame them for the Democrats losing. It's not because they're actually more popular than the Libertarian party, which regularly gets like 3 times as many votes.
2020: 1,865,917 (LP); 405,034 (GP) 2016: 4,489,359; 1,457,216 2012: 1,275,923; 469,627 2008: 523,713; 161,797 2004: 397,265; 119,859
So it's completely wrong to say that "there aren't any right-wing third parties making any kind of a meaningful run." It's just that your perception of how popular the Libertarian party is compared to the Greens is distorted.
At the same time, the way that the EC favors the GOP causes the spoiler effect of the Green Party to be amplified compared to Libertarians.
How? By the same math as OP, the Libertarian Party splitting the vote cost Trump Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin in 2020. That's 37 EC votes which would've been enough to make the election an exact tie.