You Can’t Stop Third Parties, But You Can Hope To Contain Them
By 
I must register a rare quasi-disagreement with Atrios here:
Again, I don’t have any interest in defending Stein. Boo Stein! But I don’t think it’s clear that absent Stein, Clinton would have won. More importantly, so what? Presumably we’re going to have 3rd party candidates in every election. You can think they’re assholes and that people who vote for them are assholes, but that doesn’t make the candidates go away or their voters vote for the Democrat. For various reasons I do think Nader was actually a spoiler candidate, in part because he got an immense amount of media coverage (when does anybody on the left get an immense amount of media coverage?) But generally…just a fact of life. Can’t wish them away, and can’t assume their voters would vote for you even if the candidates didn’t exist.
Well, I do agree that Stein failed in her attempts to throw the election to Trump. Consider this:
Jill Stein is now officially the Ralph Nader of 2016.
Stein votes/Trump margin:
MI: 51,463/10,704
PA: 49,678/46,765
WI: 31,006/22,177— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) December 1, 2016
Trying to claim that Stein ultimately threw the election to Trump, like simplistic arguments that Clinton could have easily won with different resource allocation, founders in the state of Pennsylvania. Stein quite possibly threw Michigan to Trump, but probably didn’t throw Wisconsin and very clearly didn’t throw Pennsylvania, which would require the unrealistic assumption that almost every Stein voter would have voted for Clinton. In 2000, the margins were so small that there’s no serious question that Nader threw the election; even if you make conservative estimates of how many Nader voters would have voted Gore it’s enough to throw Florida. The evidence cited by Nader himself shows that he clearly threw Florida. (And, just to preempt this, yes “durr, but many nominally registered Democrats voted Democrat for the last time in 1996 and voted for the Southern conservative over the moderate liberal because they’re conservatives who prefer conservative politicians, durr,” which is completely irrelevant to anything. Without Ralph, the efforts of Republican voters, Republican public officials, and conservative nominal Democrats would have been in vain and Gore would have won. The fact that other factors were necessary for Nader to throw the election alleviated Nader of exactly 0% of his responsibility.) Stein is not the Nader of 2016.
But, of course, this demonstrates the value of criticizing third party runs designed to throw elections to Republicans and pointing out that vanity campaigns are a dead-end with a huge downside and no upside. 2016, one would think, would be fertile ground for a third party run. A surprisingly successful primary challenge generated considerable discontent on the left. (To be clear: I am not criticizing Sanders for this. It was no more critical of Clinton than Clinton was of Obama. It was less critical than much of the Republican opposition to Trump. That’s politics.) There was a lot of complacency, across the ideological spectrum, about Clinton winning. Both candidates had unusually high unfavorables. The election came down to remarkably thin margins in three states. And yet, Stein, running the third party campaign of the left that got the most publicity since 2000, still wasn’t able to get enough support to materially affect it. She got much less support than Nader. Good! But that doesn’t mean people who don’t want Republicans to win federal elections should stop criticizing vanity politics — it means they should continue to do so.
This is not the only reason that Stein was a huge flop. The Democrats have moved to the left — despite the Green Party being a non-factor in 2004 and 2008 and 2012, because third party runs, unlike intraparty activism or primary challenges, do not influence the direction of parties — which probably helped and is a good thing either way. A bigger reason Stein generated very little support is that she somehow managed to win an ill-informed buffoon contest with Gary Johnson. A Green Party that could get someone who isn’t a ridiculous crank would be more dangerous…which is why it’s worth criticizing third party politics. Ralph Nader went from being a respected consumer advocate to someone widely and correctly viewed as a hateful, narcissistic crackpot and a cat’s paw of the Republican Party. Many people on the left who are more sympathetic to third party politics in theory than I am correctly view Stein as a ridiculous figure. Running an anti-Democratic campaign as a Green is a way to become a pariah with no influence on the left, and good. Ensuring that the Green Party can’t attract decent candidates for its presidential campaigns is important.
Duncan is correct, as far as it goes, that there’s no way of stopping Green Party presidential candidates from appearing on the ballot. There is no way of stopping some de minimis number of voters-as-consumers from coming up with as many arbitrary dealbreakers as is necessary to refuse to support the Democratic candidate (and, to add a note of dark comedy, the people who are the most clear that there is nothing a party seeking to win a majority coalition could ever do to win their support are also those who are the most insistent in asserting that third party campaigns are a brilliant strategery for moving parties to the left.) But not every third party campaign will be as nihilistically focused on opposing the Democratic candidate and as indifferent about throwing the election to the Republican Party as Nader’s successful attempt to elect Bush in 2000 or Stein’s unsuccessful attempt to elect Trump (“the best way to stop fascism is to elect fascists!”) in 2016. Whether the Green candidate gets less than 1% or 3% of the vote, given current partisan configurations, matters considerably. And if you care about the Democratic Party moving in a leftward direction, you should want the left to pursue strategies that, unlike third party politics, might actually work rather than strategies that are useless and irrelevant at best and horribly counterproductive at worst.
The point of criticizing third party politics, with the lesson of Nader at the center, is not to eliminate third parties on the left but to minimize their influence. It’s working, which it’s why it’s worth continuing to do so.