Third Parties are supposed to represent democracy in action, but we have now learned the hard way that it denies popular vote winners the Presidency!
It happened in 2000, when Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan took enough votes away to harm Al Gore, and elect George W. Bush.
And now it has happened again in 2016, with Gary Johnson and Jill Stein taking enough votes to harm Hillary Clinton and elect Donald Trump.
Bush did much harm in his Presidency, and realistically, Donald Trump can be seen as likely to do even greater damage.
Any one who voted third party in 2000 or 2016 should feel guilt, as it has led to the worse choice, and nothing was accomplished, except maybe to feel good that one protested.
There is no way to prevent third party movements, but it has NEVER had a positive effect, with maybe the exception of Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive (Bull Moose) Party in 1912.
But in a democracy, nothing can be done to prevent this harmful action from taking place, so likely, we will lose the better Presidential nominee more times in the future!
Hi Professor, just a thought. . .
When looking at the voting numbers in many of the swing states that went to Trump it doesn’t seem like to me that enough votes went to Johnson, Stein or any other 3rd party candidate to flip enough electoral votes to give Clinton the victory. If you take the total number of votes for Johnson and add it with Clinton’s, in many states Clinton still would not have had more votes than Trump. And that is assuming that all of the votes that went to a third party were taken from Clinton.
Hmm, I have not had time to fully analyze each state and some are still not complete in statistics.
So you may be right that Hillary would have lost anyway.
Thanks for the info!
From what I’ve been hearing on some of the progressive blogs I’ve been to, it seems to be a combo of voting for third parties, not voting at all, and voter suppression.
I agree, Princess Leia!