FINAL COUNT IN: Green Party's @DrJillStein helped Trump win!

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[Updated with final vote totals 15 November 2016]

On November 8th many elements of capitalist reaction came together to make Donald Trump president-elect of the United States. The white nationalist Atl-Right movement, financed by Robert Mercer and organized through Breitbart and a host of Mercer funded agencies, and fronted by con artist Trump, was able to completely take over the Republican Party, use it as a vehicle to channel the discontent of white people caused largely by the neo-liberal policies of the Democratic Party. Added to this is an electoral system that allows Donald Trump to claim the presidency even though a majority of Americans voted for Hillary Clinton. These were the principal causes.

But there were also many "contributing factors" coming from organizations and institutions we have every right to expect neutrality from:

• Wikileaks worked as a virtual arm of the Trump campaign as it released damaging exposures about only one side. I would love to see what these fascists write when they think they have their privacy.
• Russia and Putin were the most likely sources of the Wikileaks hacks of DNC and Podesta emails.
• The mainstream media gave lopsided coverage to the Trump campaign from the very beginning.
• The FBI made empty noise about more legal jeopardy for Hillary just when it looked like Donald was on the ropes.

Take away any one of these and there is a good chance Donald Trump won't have made the cut. And then there is the Green Party, the Jill Stein candidacy and the #NeverHillary Left. Now they've got what they wanted, and we'll all get to learn what it means to forgo the chance to pick a lesser evil. But Jill Stein's influence was tiny. She actually got less than 1% of the vote. How could she possibly be a significant factor in Trump's victory?

Let's run the numbers:

Looking at the vote totals for certain key battleground states, we can see that in Michigan, Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by only 11,423 votes, whereas Jill Stein got 50,690, which is to say that if all those that voted for Jill Stein in Michigan had instead voted for Hillary Clinton, she would have won Michigan and its 16 electoral votes.

Gary Johnson got more votes than Jill Stein in Michigan and the other states we will discuss, but polling suggests Johnson votes came equally from Clinton and Trump, if not more from Trump, so his supporters probably didn't hurt Clinton, but the Green Party, with its pro-Trump "Jill not Hill" campaign slogan, set out specifically to divert Clinton votes.

The same analysis shows us that if most of the 30,980 Jill Stein voters in Wisconsin had instead voted for Clinton, it would have been more than enough to overcome Trump's 27,257 lead and, in that case, Wisconsin's 10 electoral votes would have gone to Clinton. But even with Michigan's 16 and Wisconsin's 10 added to the 232 she had won in other states, she only comes up to 258, and still 12 electoral votes short of beating Trump.

That would seems to settle things because the next close state was Pennsylvania with 20 electoral votes. Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 68,236 or almost 19,000 more than the 48,912 citizens that voted for Stein in Pennsylvania, so even if every person that voted for Jill Stein in PA had instead voted for Hillary Clinton, she still would have lost the state and the election, so you can hardly lay the blame at Jill Stein's doorstep.

Or can you? Remember, I have shown elsewhere, as others have, that less than half of the citizens who claim to be Jill Stein supporters in polls end up actually voting for her. What do the others do? Well, maybe some decide not to waste their vote after all, while others decide that if they are doing to waste their vote, by voting for someone with no chance of hitting the 5% mark and less chance of being elected president, why bother voting at all?

data from Politico [updated 15 Nov. 2016]:

Candidate	Count	%	Michigan [16]	Wisconsin [10]	Pennsylvania [20]	Florida [29]
Donald Trump	60,526,852	47%	2,279,221	1,409,467	2,912,941	4605515
Hillary Clinton	61,324,576	48%	2,267,798	1,382,210	2,844,705	4485745
difference			11,423	27,257	68,012	119,770
Jill Stein	802,119	0.7%	50,690	30,980	48,912	64,019

Looking at the Real Clear Politics poll average for Pennsylvania for the day before the election, we can see that Jill Stein had dropped down to a paltry 1.5%. Still, this is almost twice the 0.8% that actually voted for her. From this we can see that if even half of the roughly 43,000 Stein supporters who said they were going to vote for her and didn't had voted for Clinton instead of staying home, Clinton would have won Pennsylvania's 20 electoral votes for a total of 274 and become President instead of Trump. RCP PA polls:

The situation is very similar in Florida with its 29 electoral votes. Trump beat Clinton by 119,770 votes, which is more than twice the 64,019 Jill Stein votes, but again, when evaluating Jill Stein's effects as a spoiler, its important to not just count the number of votes she gets. It may be more important to consider the number of voters she discourages from voting for Clinton. RCP Florida polls:

The bottom line is than when evaluating Jill Stein's effect as a spoiler, the important number to consider, even though it may be hard to determine, is the number of citizens she discouraged from voting for Clinton, which could actually be much higher even than those that poll to be her supporters.

Consider that the Jill Stein campaign was focused on targeting Clinton far more than it targeted Trump. It gave citizens many very good reasons for not voting for Clinton. It was not so effective in giving them good reasons to vote for the Greens. So its entirely possible that she convinced many more citizens not to vote for the lesser of two evils, than she convinced to vote for her.  It's not a stretch to imagine someone leaving a Jill Stein rally, or website, and being thoroughly convinced not to vote for Clinton without also at all being convinced to vote for Jill Stein. If she convinced just twenty thousand more Pennsylvanians to refuse to vote for the lesser of two evils than actually voted for Jill Stein, or less than one stay-at-home for every two that cast ballots for her in PA, then its safe to say she threw the election to Donald Trump. And Florida? We don't even have to go there.

My other recent posts relating to this unique election cycle:
Did @DemocracyNow helped elect President Trump?
How Green Party's Jill Stein tells two lies at once
Donald Trump wants to be the Last US President
Trump/Stein -- Stronger Together
Will Wikileaks "salt" the Clinton-Podesta emails before the election?
Trump Super Predator behavior is Workplace Sexual Harassment writ large
Is US Green Party's Jill Stein a holocaust denier?
Jill Stein now claiming Donald Trump is less of two evils
Did Dishonest Jill Stein change her Syria statement on the sly?
Republican support for Green Party @DrJillStein is emerging
Why "Jill not Hill" is a pro-Trump slogan
Donald Trump can only win if Jill Stein stays in
Does Donald Trump's secret plan to defeat ISIS involve using nukes?
Why doesn't "What's the Triad?" trump "What is Aleppo?"
Green Party Jill Stein's campaign in context
What should the Green Party do?
Greens could give White House to Trump as poll numbers even
Why Green Party's Jill Stein should drop her presidential bid
Amy Goodman should address this extremely important statement by her guest
How Jill Stein Tweets for Trump
HuffPost item shows how @JillStein campaign whitewashes @realDonaldTrump
Trump tells his '2nd Amendment people election will be stolen to prepare for insurrection
Trump didn't threaten Hillary, he threatened violent insurrection
Meet Green Party's Jill Stein, Putin sock-puppet & Assad apologist

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