Could Jill Stein tip the election to Trump? It’s complicated.

This is part of Wedge problemsa pop-up political advice column running now through the election. Submit a question here – it’s anonymous!

Dear Wedge Issues,

Should I fear Jill Stein — or, indeed, any third-party candidate? I recently read a piece about how Stein might have helped get Hillary Clinton out in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan in 2016. I also saw, according to a poll by 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 endorsed her? Lots of confusing stuff here. I just want to know if I should be afraid of what she might do in the election!

– Still, Jill?!

Dear Still?!,

The Green Party is not a very serious political operation. Its candidates have never won a federal election, and its vanishingly small number of successful candidates have mostly been at the municipal or state legislative level. Winner-take-all races for nearly every seat in Congress and for most states’ electors in the Electoral College mean that small parties are usually completely shut out of power. But on top of that, the Greens as an organization do virtually nothing to build their brand and reach between elections, emerging from a cocoon of delusion and extremism every four years to scare liberals. It makes sense that you’re freaking out – the Greens are a zombie that has re-emerged from a dark resting place.

Especially this year, the Stein campaign takes great pleasure in acting as a spoiler. Whereas the party’s 2004 nominee, David Cobb, explicitly refused to campaign in swing states, after Ralph Nader was widely (and correctly) seen as having cost Al Gore the election in 2000, the Stein campaign appears to be concentrating all of its energy on trying to deny Democratic candidate Kamala Harris the Blue Wall -the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. New York Times reported it a speaker at a recent Stein event in Michigan admitted the obvious: “We are not capable of winning the White House.” He added, “We have a real opportunity to win something historic. We could deny Kamala Harris the state of Michigan.” OK then!

And specifically, Jill Stein is not a serious person. The former doctor is launching his sixth “campaign” for a major government post, having run for governor of Massachusetts twice and now the presidency three times. Her best performance was actually the 17.7 percent of the vote she received 18 years ago in the race for Massachusetts secretary of the commonwealth, in a contest that had no Republican candidate. She has worked openly this year with Republicans trying to get her on the state ballot for the express purpose of rat-fucking the election and will almost certainly get a boost from Russian disinformation artists as she did in 2016. While Stein has refused her endorsement from former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, it’s no surprise that her increasingly fringe politics are attracting unwelcome bedfellows.

Stein is unlikely to pull north of 1 percent of the vote nationally – but unfortunately, she is a threat that we still have to take seriously. That’s because the 2024 election looks like it’s going to be agonizingly, almost impossibly close. The leading forecasts is close to 50-50and it’s hard to imagine the vote getting any narrower than it already is in the seven crucial battleground states. It’s actually reasonable and understandable to do a little bit of doom and gloom about all the different things that could go wrong and lead to the looming disaster of another Trump term. And Stein is unfortunately one of them.

But: This is not a situation where we can use simple math to get angry at Stein. To properly assign blame to Stein, and to figure out what she might cause this time, we need to properly assess what Stein’s constituents would do if she were not on the ballot paper.

There is a perception on the left that Stein cost Hillary Clinton the presidency in 2016. She didn’t, but it’s understandable why this myth has stuck. The way people conclude this is to take Trump’s margins in a given state and tally Stein’s votes there. If Stein’s raw vote count exceeded Trump’s margin, then voila: She must have denied Hillary Clinton the 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 repeatedly pushed back on. For example, the myth that Reform Party candidate Ross Perot cost Republican George HW Bush the 1992 election does not hold up under close scrutiny. Perot pulled more than 18 percent of the vote in an election that Democrat Bill Clinton won by less than 6 points, but you can’t just take the Texas billionaire’s haul and give it to Bush. End polls showed it Clinton and Bush were equally likely the second choice among Perot voters. And the latest analysis, from Harrison Lavelle and Armin Thomas at Split Ticket, argues counterintuitively, from which Perot drew several votes Clinton.

And perhaps most importantly, there’s the fact that many third-party voters wouldn’t show up at all on Election Day if their preferred candidate isn’t on the ballot.

Political scientists Christopher Devine and Kyle Kotko published a paper in 2021 by looking at the 2016 election and concluded that about 53 percent of Stein voters simply wouldn’t have turned out if she hadn’t 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 one state where Stein’s candidacy has actually been crucial 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 received 51,463 votes. And while I’m sure it would have been a terrible, possibly unbearable blow to Trump’s crystalline ego to have won 290 electoral votes instead of 306, that one state would not have gotten Clinton anywhere near victory.

But in 2024 Michigan could actually decide the entire election on their own. Forecaster Nate Silver provides Michigan his second-highest odds to be the “tipping point state” in the election: the one that puts the winning candidate over 270 electoral votes. The Harris campaign is privately quite concerned about it. If we assume the turnout is similar to 2020 — about 5.5 million votes — and if we believe Stein’s RealClearPolitics average of 1.0 percent in multi-candidate polls by the stateshe will likely pull about 55,000 votes in Michigan. But if we also assume that Stein’s actual election day total will be about half of her election night poll, which is what we saw across the board for third-party candidates including Stein in 2016 and has been a consistent pattern in American elections, that the number will be cut down 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 dropout for third-party candidates and assume that Stein wins 0.5 percent in Michigan, that 53 percent of her voters would have stayed home, that 35 percent would have gone to Harris, and 8 percent to Trump. If so, Harris would have garnered just over 3,000 more votes without Stein on the ballot.

Could Michigan be that close? It certainly could. But even in an era of stark polarization, where the percentage of voters switching 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) were so close. Bumping the margin up to 5,000 votes or less doesn’t add many states to the list.

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