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Republicans Boost Jill Stein as Potential Harris Spoiler
(www.wsj.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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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.
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 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
It’s not some crazy conspiracy either, the Republican Leadership Council explained the ad buys in this way
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.
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?
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”