Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
My long disenfranchisement with the electoral process and government in general typically leads me to stay home on Election Day. This time around, however, I found myself supporting the campaign of Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson far more enthusiastically than I’ve ever supported any candidate for anything. Hell, I almost bought a T-shirt.
So, given Johnson’s heartbreaking defeat Tuesday, I decided to try to figure out what went wrong. Turns out, he was pretty close to the White House, he just needed some help in areas.
For example, in the key battleground state of Florida, Donald Trump received 4,605,515 votes to Hillary Clinton’s 4,485,745. If all the low-information voters who cast ballots for Clinton, who lost anyway, instead cast ballots for Johnson, along with the 206,007 people who voted for Johnson already, the resulting 4,691,752 total would have been enough for Johnson to secure Florida’s jackpot of 29 electoral votes.
Likewise, in Pennsylvania, 2,844,705 people threw away their vote by casting it for Clinton. If they had instead voted for Johnson, those votes, added to the 142,653 Johnson had would make for a final tally of 2,987,358 and would have just edged past Trump’s total of 2,912,941, putting 20 more electoral votes in Johnson’s column.
The same holds true in Wisconsin, where 1,382,210 cheeseheads wasted their votes on Clinton. Had they instead voted Libertarian, the resulting 1,488,652, with Gary’s 106,442 votes added in, would have trumped Trump’s total of 1,409,467, thereby giving Johnson ten more electoral votes.
Now, for Johnson to get to the needed 270 electoral votes to secure the presidency, he obviously would have needed to win a lot more than those three states and their combined total 59 votes. But, had he won just any one of those three aforementioned states, he’d have taken enough Electoral College votes out of the mix to deny either Clinton or Trump the needed 270 votes. As a result, the presidency would have to be decided by the House of Representatives, which is controlled by the Republican Party. Given the old-guard GOP doesn’t like Trump, and hates Clinton, it’s quite possible they’d have elected Johnson as something of a compromise, and we’d be about to enjoy four years of unparalleled peace and prosperity.
Now, of course, the above scenario does hinge on a few assumptions, some of them quite large. One of those assumptions is that the House of Representatives wouldn’t just hold their nose and elect Trump on a “party” line vote. Or, the House could be impartial and award the presidency to whichever candidate had the most electoral or popular votes.
Of course, the assumption that the House would elect Johnson is the largest single assumption in this scenario, but to even get there, this theory hinges on literally millions of smaller assumptions: namely that every voter who wasted their vote on Clinton, if they knew she wouldn’t win, would have instead voted for Gary Johnson. Given that we are talking about millions of individual people in each state, this makes for an awful lot of assumptions.
In fact, this idea hinges on so many assumptions, most of them most assuredly false, that this whole “argument” I’ve spent some 500 words crafting just now is totally asinine. Ludicrous. Insane. Damn my stream-of-consciousness writing style. How could I not have foreseen how idiotic this entry was from the outset? Well, now I’m stuck with it, so….
Alright, now I shall dislodge my tongue from my cheek. Yes, dear readers, the above 588 words are all pure rubbish. Well, I mean the words themselves are perfectly legit, it’s the way I’ve arranged them that’s shit.
Yet, as completely idiotic as the above is, such has been the basis for numerous columns, “news stories,” blog entries and social media scapegoating since the wee hours of Wednesday morning – many of the Clinton-ever-faithful have decided that Jill Stein and Gary Johnson are to blame for Trump being the President Elect. That’s unfortunate, because Harambe, the gorilla shot by zookeepers in Cincinnati after a five-year-old boy got into his enclosure earlier this year, garnered some 11,000 votes and clearly also therefore deserves a share of the blame.
Among my favorite examples of this idiotic argument comes from Jason Easley at Politics USA-dot-com, whose piece has the most hilarious headline and sub-head combination to ever appear in a publication not called The Onion.
“Here’s the Proof that Jill Stein and Gary Johnson Cost Hillary Clinton the Election,” reads the adorable headline. Ready for said proof? It’s right there in the subhead: “If Jill Stein’s supporters and half of Gary Johnson’s supporters had supported Hillary Clinton in 4 swing states, the Democrat would be the president-elect today.”
Go ahead, re-read that and let it sink in. I’ll wait.
So, right? How in the hell is that word salad any less moronic than the first 588 words of this piece? It’s not, and in fact is probably more so, because Easley here actually believes what he’s writing. And friends, he’s very unhappy with people who didn’t vote for his candidate.
“Lastly, there are the voters themselves. Congratulations, third-party voters who thought they were protesting system, you just got Donald Trump elected. Please enjoy the four years of your worst nightmares that you brought to life through your own arrogant and self-righteous stupidity.
It turns out that Clinton and the Democrats did not run an effective campaign, but those who are directly responsible for her loss are the voters who went to the polls and cast a vote for Donald Trump when they chose Jill Stein or Gary Johnson.”
The last sentence/graph couldn’t be more adorable in its butthurt or self-contradictory nature. Yes, it does turn out that Clinton and the Democrats ran an ineffective campaign focusing, as they do, on trying to assassinate the character of an already larger-than-life public figure. It didn’t work.
So, what he’s saying really is “if more people voted for my candidate, she would have won.” Well, yeah. What he’s assuming is that everyone who didn’t like Trump and voted for someone not named Trump would have automatically voted for Clinton but for those distracting “other” options on the ballot. That’s a million or so very big assumptions and many of them are likely wrong. It’s asinine to assume all of Stein’s supporters would have automatically voted for Clinton, as it’s impossible to understand what someone inclined to vote for Stein is even thinking about at any given moment. Likewise, it’s idiotic to assume half of Johnson’s supporters would have voted for a pro-war, pro-more-taxes, anti-gun, corrupt Washington insider like Clinton. Those just aren’t Libertarian values, not even to lukewarm-at-best Libertarians like Gary Johnson and Bill Weld and certainly not to their supporters.
There’s one person responsible for Hillary Clinton’s defeat Tuesday night, her name is Hillary Rodham Clinton.
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