• KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 months ago

    The spoiler candidate logic has always been sketchy.

    it depends on how popular third party is. If they’re getting 20-30% of the vote but no more it’s extremely common for them to drop out to support the primary instead.

    Anything lower than 10% and it probably doesn’t matter much. RFK jr is a decent exmaple of this, although he was more “bipartisan” in terms of support, apparently.

    • turmacar@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      The last US Presidential election decided with more than a 10% margin was Regan. The only vote with above a 5% margin this millennium was Obama’s first term.

      “Anything lower than 10% and it probably doesn’t matter much” is a weird take.

      • Krauerking@lemy.lol
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        2 months ago

        As in that’s such a small group they are probably more dedicated to their candidate and won’t vote for anyone else.

        Again. You can’t expect to remove candidates from a ballot and their support will all just vote Democrat. It’s a false logic to assume they belong to anywhere else other than their vote block.
        When you have a large base that small percentage that’s willing to vote off base ends up being a larger percentage of the vote overall as well.

        Currently you would have to get every single last green party voter to give up and vote Blue which is an impossible ask. So even at 5% of the vote I’m not sure they could swing an election with enough if their candidate asked nicely.
        They went high with their estimate though.

        • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2 months ago

          yeah, my 10% figure was probably generous, but i think i would probably stand by it in most cases, as unless you’re polling 20% at bare minimum you’re probably dropping out of primaries anyway out of fears of “siphoning” votes. Realistically the outcome between the two alternatives here is probably marginal, if at all.

      • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 months ago

        this is assuming that the voter split isn’t roughly at random. Jill stein is running on either extremely far left anti war sentiment, which we see among the right as well, along with cozying up to russia apparently, which only tankies and farther right people want.

        That alone is pretty mixed.

        Generally unless the candidate is going to pull a large enough share of the votes to the point where it enact a significant draw from the candidate hence my 20-30% figure, it really won’t do anything to the voter turnout. Like i said, as we saw with RFK, it was roughly split down the middle.

        Jill stein might pull more far lefties, but that’s only because they refuse to vote in their best interest lmao. They wouldn’t vote anyway.