This is part of it Wedge problemsa pop-up advice column about politics, now running during the elections. Ask a question here. It’s anonymous!

Dear wedge problems,

Should I be afraid of Jill Stein – or any other candidate for that matter? I recently read a piece about how Stein could have helped eliminate Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan in 2016. I also saw, according to a poll from the Council on American-Islamic Relations last month, that 40 percent of Muslims in Michigan also support Stein because of her stance on Israel’s war in Gaza. But I also saw that David Duke, the former grand wizard of the KKK, has supported her? There’s a lot of confusing stuff here. I just want to know if I should be afraid of what she can do with the election!

– Still, Jill?!

Best yet?!,

The Green Party is not a particularly serious political operation. The candidates have never won a federal election, and the vanishingly small number of successful candidates have been mostly at the municipal or state level. Winner-take-all races for nearly all seats in Congress and for the voters of most states in the Electoral College mean that minor parties tend to be completely shut out. But on top of that, the Green Party as an organization does next to nothing to build its brand and reach between elections, emerging every four years from a cocoon of delusion and extremism to scare liberals. It’s natural to panic: the Green Party is a zombie re-emerged from a dark resting place.

This year in particular, the Stein campaign happily serves as a spoiler. While the party’s 2004 candidate, David Cobb, explicitly declined to campaign in swing states after it was widely (and rightly) believed that Ralph Nader had cost Al Gore the 2000 election, the Stein campaign appears to be focusing all its energy in an attempt to deny Democratic candidate Kamala Harris the Blue Wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The New York Times reported that a speaker at a recent Stein event in Michigan admitted the obvious: “We are not in a position to win the White House.” He added: “We have a real chance of winning something historic. We could deny Kamala Harris the state of Michigan.” Okay then!

And specifically Jill Stein is not a serious person. The former doctor is launching her sixth ‘campaign’ for a major position in government, having twice run for governor of Massachusetts and now serving as president three times. Her best performance was actually the 17.7 percent of the vote she received 18 years ago in the race for secretary of state in Massachusetts, in an election in which there was no Republican candidate. She has openly worked with Republicans this year to get her on state ballots for the express purpose of screwing up the election and will almost certainly get a boost from Russian disinformation artists, as she did in 2016. While Stein has been disavowed in her endorsement by former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, it’s no surprise that her increasingly fringe politics are attracting unwanted bedfellows.

It’s unlikely that Stein will get more than 1 percent of the vote nationally, but unfortunately, she’s a threat we should still take seriously. That’s because it looks like the 2024 election will be painfully and almost impossibly close. The leading predictions are close to 50-50, and it’s hard to imagine that the polls in the seven decisive states will get any closer than they already are. It’s actually reasonable and understandable to make a bit of doomsday prediction about all the different things that could go wrong and lead to the future catastrophe of a second Trump term. And Stein is, unfortunately, one of them.

But: this is not a situation where we can use simple arithmetic to get mad at Stein. To properly blame Stein, and to figure out what she might do this time, we need to correctly assess what Stein’s voters would do if she did. not on the ballot.

There is a perception on the left that Stein cost Hillary Clinton the presidency in 2016. That didn’t happen, but it’s understandable why this myth has taken hold. The way people conclude this is by taking Trump’s margins in a given state and adding up Stein’s votes there. If Stein’s raw vote totals exceeded Trump’s margin, then voilà: She must have denied Hillary Clinton’s victory in that state and thus the presidency. But this is a misreading of how third-party voting works, one that political scientists like me have returned to repeatedly. The myth that Reform Party candidate Ross Perot cost Republican George HW Bush the 1992 election does not hold up under scrutiny. Perot won more than 18 percent of the vote in an election that Democrat Bill Clinton won by less than six points, but you can’t just take the Texas billionaire’s winnings and give them to Bush. Exit polls showed that Clinton and Bush were moment likely the second choice of Perot voters. And the latest analysis, from Split Ticket’s Harrison Lavelle and Armin Thomas, counterintuitively argues that Perot attracted more votes from Clinton.

And, perhaps most importantly, there is the fact that many third-party voters would not show up at all on Election Day if their preferred candidate is not on the ballot.

Political scientists Christopher Devine and Kyle Kotko published a paper in 2021 about the 2016 election and concluded that about 53 percent of Stein voters simply would not have turned out if she had not been on the ballot. According to the survey, about 35 percent of Stein’s votes would have gone to Clinton, and 8 percent to Trump. So yes, she may have “contributed” to his margins in some states. But the only state where Stein could actually have run for office decisive in 2016 it was Michigan, which Trump won by fewer than 11,000 votes out of more than 5 million votes cast, and where Stein won 51,463 votes. And while I’m sure it would have been a terrible, possibly unbearable blow to Trump’s crystalline ego if he had won 290 electoral votes instead of 306, that one state wouldn’t have even come close to winning Clinton.

However, in 2024 Michigan could essentially deciding the entire election single-handedly. Forecaster Nate Silver gives Michigan the second-highest chance of becoming the “tipping point state” in the election: the one that puts the winning candidate above 270 electoral votes. The Harris campaign is privately quite concerned about this. Assuming a similar turnout to 2020 – about 5.5 million votes – and using Stein’s RealClearPolitics average of 1.0 percent in multi-candidate polls for the state, she will likely get about 55,000 votes in Michigan . But if we also assume that Stein’s actual Election Day totals will be about half of her election night poll numbers, which is what we saw across the board with third-party candidates, including Stein in 2016, and which has been a consistent pattern in US elections, then number is reduced to 27,000.

So here’s what we can do with all of this: We can apply Devine and Kotko’s conclusions and the standard Election Day drop-off for third-party candidates and assume that Stein wins 0.5 percent in Michigan, that 53 percent of her If voters had stayed home, 35 percent would have gone to Harris and 8 percent to Trump. If so, Harris would have scored just over 3,000 additional votes without Stein on the ballot.

Could Michigan be that close? That certainly could be. But even in an era of sharp polarization in which the share of the electorate that switches sides between elections has plummeted, only a handful of states have been decided by fewer than 3,000 votes. This century, only New Hampshire (in 2016) and Florida and New Mexico (in 2000) have been so close. If we increase the margin to 5,000 votes or less, not many states will be added to the list.

The best thing you can do here, though, is not to suppress your fear of Jill Stein, but to reach out to friends and family members who are considering voting for her and gently talk them out of it, rather than berating them . social media or accuse them of naively helping Donald Trump. Voice shaming not only doesn’t work, but it almost certainly makes people dig in their heels. And that, ironically, could make everyone’s worst recurring nightmare of Jill Stein a nightmare reality.