The road not taken

When historians look back on the 2016 election, they will no doubt argue at great length about the remarkable number of factors that led to the still almost incredible fact that Donald Trump nearly became the 45th president of the United States.  But there can be little doubt that one simple act, by itself, almost surely saved the republic from that nightmarish outcome.

I’m referring of course to Jill Stein’s remarkable speech at Oberlin College on November 5th, just three days before the election.  After acknowledging the hard work and dedication of her campaign staff, and the many contributions of thousands of volunteers, Stein stunned her audience with the following exhortation:

I’ve emphasized throughout this campaign that America needs an alternative political vision to that offered it by our major parties.  And I still believe that.  But I’ve also come to believe something else: Donald Trump represents, in many ways and on many levels, a unique threat to progressive values.  For all my deep disagreements with Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party, I am now, on the eve of the election, genuinely frightened by the prospect of a Trump presidency.

There have been times during this campaign when I have said things that could in all fairness be understood as claims that there was no real difference for America between electing Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump president of the United States.  Now, as we approach the moment of truth, let us speak the truth in the shadow of the unprecedented threat our nation faces: Donald Trump must not become the most powerful man in the world. We must not place a nuclear arsenal and an unparalleled security apparatus at his fingertips.  We must not give a man of his low character, his evident lack of emotional self-control, his bottomless ignorance, or his open bigotry, the keys to the American governmental system.

This is a moment of genuine crisis in America.  I am therefore asking anyone who is planning to vote for me, or who was considering doing so, or who was choosing not to vote as a kind of protest against the failure of the Democratic party to provide a sufficiently progressive alternative, to instead go to the polls on Tuesday and cast your vote for Hillary Clinton.

In retrospect, this remarkable gesture almost surely kept the incomprehensible disaster of a Trump presidency from becoming a reality.  Recall that Clinton won Michigan by less than 11,000 votes, Wisconsin by 22,000, and Pennsylvania by 44,000.  That is a total of 77,000 votes out of the nearly 14,000,000 cast in those states. If one in every 200 voters in those three states had either voted for Stein or — and this is the really key point — chosen not to bother to vote at all rather than vote for Clinton, then the presidency would have been Trump’s.

If she had insisted on continuing her quixotic campaign right through election day, Stein’s ability to both draw voters to herself, and, more crucially still, dampen turnout among progressives who had taken to heart her earlier message that there was little or no difference between a Clinton or a Trump presidency, would have almost surely, given the razor thin margin in the key swing states, handed the election to by far the worst candidate in American presidential history.

That at the last minute she did everything she could not to be responsible for the unspeakable reality of a nation ruled by Donald Trump ensured that this otherwise obscure political figure will have a permanent place in the annals of Americans who saved the nation from its worst impulses, and kept it from traveling down the darkest of historical paths.

And that has made all the difference.