(7/8/2023: I may have to revise and update this piece: David Axelrod recently tweeted, “In 2016, the Green Party played an outsized role in tipping the election to Donald Trump. Now, with Cornel West as their likely nominee, they could easily do it again. Risky business,” Obviously, this argument isn’t going anywhere.)

(7/9/2022: Once again, someone else has done an excellent analysis of this subject: J. Riddle’s piece “Setting the Record Straight on “Sanders Voters Elected Trump!” makes arguments similar to mine, but Riddle uses far more detailed polling and election data.)

(8/20/2020: some minor changes and rewrites)

(12/5/2019 addendum: well, someone else has addressed this issue far better than I did. You can read what I wrote, below, which I think is still pretty good. But, when you’re done, please read Robert Wheel’s wonderful piece “Did Bernie Sanders Cost Hillary Clinton the Presidency?” Robert’s analysis hits points I’d missed.)

Introduction

Ever since the 2016 election, it’s been almost an article of faith that Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump because left-wing voters (Sanders supporters or Green Party voters) failed to vote for her. Either they stayed at home, or voted for the Green party as a protest. It’s also presumed that this is a real danger in the 2020 election; as I write this, the Democratic National Convention is going on, arguments about Biden are continuing, and I’ve seen an increase in posts or tweets urging people to put aside their qualms and “purity tests,” and vote blue-no-matter-who.

If it’s not a joke already, it oughta be:

Democrat: “Those Bernie-bros cost us the election! They all threw their votes way on Jill Stein!

Answer: “Actually, no, they didn’t. If you look at–”

Democrat: STOP RELITIGATING THE ELECTION! WE HAVE TO PUT ASIDE OUR DIFFERENCES AND WORK TOGETHER!

So I wrote this article to save me the trouble of making the same rebuttals over and over. It might even save other people from having to dig up arguments. The fact is, a lot of Democrats hold an intense and irrational grudge against the political Left, and that’s going to hurt us in the battles to come. So here’s my one-stop FAQ on Why You Can’t Blame the Left for Trump, or Anyone Else We Got Stuck With.

So what’s the argument here?

As we all know, Hillary Clinton lost the election to Donald Trump in a unique way: she won the popular vote, but she lost the Electoral College. So, angry Democrats blame the 2016 election on an ill-defined radical left: misguided Greens, sexist Bernie-bros acting out, and childishly selfish people who “voted their conscience” rather than voting pragmatically. Frequently, a “three crucial states” theory is made– that the Green Party caused Clinton to lose in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. If they hadn’t misbehaved, Hillary Clinton would be President, and Donald Trump would have returned to his career as a TV personality and ruble-launderer.

The story gets endorsed from the very top, from Hillary Clinton herself. She blames the Greens (among other things) in her book What Happened:

“Stein wouldn’t be worth mentioning, except for the fact that she won thirty-one thousand votes in Wisconsin, where Trump’s margin was smaller than twenty-three thousand. In Michigan, she won fifty-one thousand votes, while Trump’s margin was just over ten thousand.”

“A small but still significant number of left-wing voters may well have thrown the election to Trump. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, called me and my policies ‘much scarier than Donald Trump’ and praised his pro-Russia stance. This isn’t surprising, considering that Stein sat with Putin and Michael Flynn at the infamous Moscow dinner in 2015 celebrating the Kremlin’s propaganda network RT, and later said she and Putin agreed ‘on many issues’… “in each state, there were more than enough Stein voters to swing the result, just like Ralph Nader did in Florida and New Hampshire in 2000. Maybe, like actress Susan Sarandon, Stein thinks electing Trump will hasten ‘the revolution.’ Who knows?””

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper cited the “three crucial states” myth while promoting his book Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence. In an interview with Vox, and in other media outlets, Clapper cited the three-crucial-states myth as evidence that the Russians managed to influence the election:

But now I’m speaking as a private citizen, having left government service and knowing what I know about what the Russians did, how massive the operation was, how diverse it was, and how many millions of American voters it touched. When you consider that the election turned on 80,000 votes or less in three key states, it stretches credulity to conclude that Russian activity didn’t swing voter decisions, and therefore swing the election.

The following meme, credited to “American News X,” gives a sense of the intense, wrathful anger many Democrats hold towards the Sanders-friendly wing of the party:

“1968: Humphrey wasn’t good enough for the leftist/progressives, so they got Nixon. 1980: Carter wasn’t good enough for the leftist/progressives, so they got Ronnie Reagan. 2000: Gore wasn’t good enough for the leftist/progressives, so they got G.W. Bush. 2016: Hillary wasn’t good enough for the leftist/progressives, so they got Trump. ‘As a dog returneth to its vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.”

This way of thinking gets a lot of circulation: for example, one “DCPetterson” is one of thousands who tweeted a variation on this story (https://twitter.com/dcpetterson/status/1150089399067140096):

How persuasive is this?

As we all know, Clinton won the popular race by more than three million votes. And this confounds a lot of easy, simple answers.

For one thing, it indicates that Clinton wasn’t as weak or as compromised a candidate as her critics have claimed. 2016 had the largest number of voters in  history, and Clinton won the majority of those votes.

However, this fact makes it very hard to believe that legions of defecting Bernie-bros amounted to any large chunk of the electorate. Frankly, despite the anecdotage about angry Twitter feeds and Facebook arguments– ably debunked by Current Affairs’ writer Emily Robinson— we have to accept that leftists, progressives, liberals, and liberal-leaning centrists did come out to vote for Hillary (or against Trump).

The radical left isn’t much of a factor in elections.

Historically– and I hate to admit this– leftist third parties and independents have never made much of an impact. About the largest showing in recent memory was in 2000, when Ralph Nader ran as a Green candidate, and won a whopping 2.74% of the popular vote. This seems to have been a one-time-only event. In the years since, Nader has run as an independent, and the Greens ran other candidates. But, even combined, this left constituency has never matched its 2000 performance, with the Greens usually polling less than 0.5% of the popular vote.

Generally speaking, third-party spoilers are the Republicans‘ problem. Right-wing third parties and independents usually have a much larger impact. The Libertarian Party usually polls about three times that of the Greens. But in 1992 and 1996, Ross Perot’s independent runs drew 18% and 8.5%, respectively, and he clearly deprived the Republicans of victories against Bill Clinton.

In 2016, both the Greens and the Libertarians pulled in about triple the number of votes and percentages they’d drawn in 2012. For the Greens, their 1.1% wasn’t a record-setter: it was still less than half of the Nader/Green high water mark of 2.74% in 2000.

What about the 1968 Riots? Didn’t that hurt Humphrey against Nixon?

1968 was a year when a third-party run really did damage the Democrats. In the aftermath of the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts, Alabama Governor and segregationist George Wallace ran for President on a third-party ticket. Now, remember that Wallace was a Democrat, and that until the 1960s the Southern states were firmly Democratic states.

Wallace’s run was probably the most successful third-party run for the Presidency, because he won five Southern states— thus depriving Hubert Humphrey of electoral support, and enabling Richard Nixon to win the election. (This also delivered a lot of southern whites to the Republican party, a trend that continued through Nixon’s term.)

The antiwar Left had nowhere near that kind of impact. You can’t name one state that they swayed against Humphrey. But Wallace clearly captured five states with racist hatred.

But it is almost an article of faith among Democrats that the 1968 election was lost because of the Chicago convention antiwar riots. In this myth, the antiwar Left are portrayed as unreliable and disloyal. But the conservative, racist southern Democrats who ditched the party and cast their votes for Wallace aren’t discussed, except as an embarrassment of an earlier time. This suggests, to me, that centrist-liberal fears of a disloyal Left overrule facts and history, and may have a deep psychological basis.

The Electoral College changes political strategy

The presence of the Electoral College means that it’s not enough to get the most votes: a candidate has to get the most votes in the right states.

Individual voters can affect their own states’ results, but there’s no strategy they can use to affect the Electoral College beyond casting a ballot in their own state.

There are some people who can influence voting across states– usually elected officials, party leaders, and national campaign managers. But not individual voters.

In Clinton’s case, the campaign managers were John Podesta and Robbie Mook, and if you’re interested in their decisions, I suggest reading Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. Their decisions had an immense impact on the election’s outcome– far more than any individual voter. And remember, the majority of voters voted for Clinton.  For now, one could persuasively argue that their bad campaign decisions lost the campaign despite the best efforts of sincere voters.

The Electoral Win and the “Three Crucial States Theory”

A month after the election, the Washington Post (12/1/2016) offered the following observation about the way the Electoral College gave the election to Trump.

“The most important states, though, were Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump won those states by 0.2, 0.7 and 0.8 percentage points, respectively — and by 10,704, 46,765 and 22,177 votes. Those three wins gave him 46 electoral votes; if Clinton had done one point better in each state, she’d have won the electoral vote, too.”

For want of a nail, the war was lost. The Washington Post article isn’t an analysis of the election. It’s an interesting observation about the election results, and how a small number of voters in certain states could have been crucial. There’s no mention of Sanders or Jill Stein as a factor. That came later, when someone noticed that Trump’s margins for victory were smaller than the number of votes cast for the Green Party. Clearly, misguided progressive/leftists jumped ship to Jill Stein. And from then on, it became an article of faith among many angry Democrats. (Including Hillary Clinton, who has good reasons to be angry about the election.)

But the “Three Crucial States” theory just doesn’t work to explain Clinton’s loss.

The Other Crucial States

The Post article cited above states that Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are “the most important states,” but this isn’t true. They are “important” for only one reason: they are the only states with margins so razor-thin that the Greens’ vote becomes crucial. In other words, if you want to blame the Greens, these states are very important.

If you want to understand the election, look elsewhere.

You might start with looking at the states that swung from Democrat to Republican– the states that voted for Barack Obama in 2012, but which swung to Donald Trump in 2016. You know– where the action was, where the Democrats lost where they’d previously won. The states where the difference between 2012 and 2016 actually happened. These are the important states… and there were six of them.

Three of those states were the “three crucial states” mentioned above: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which counted for 46 electoral votes. These states flipped, but by very narrow margins, of less than one percent. We might win them back in 2020. These were certainly dramatic, in the same way a near miss is dramatic, or if you’d missed the lottery by one digit. But they don’t really reveal why Clinton lost.

The other three states, Florida, Iowa and Ohio, counted for 53 electoral votes. And yes, if Clinton had won those three states, she’d be President. They are every bit as crucial as the other three states. But here’s the difference. Clinton lost these states by much larger margins: Florida by 112,911 votes, Iowa by 147,314 votes, and Ohio by 446,841 votes. The losses of these states cannot plausibly be blamed on Jill Stein or on defecting leftists.

They also indicates more profound political shifts, and a looming problem for the Democrats. In other words, these states are much more important.

(In the following, I’m using the votes reported on Wikipedia’s pages about recent elections.)

Voter Turnout Favored the Republicans

Generally, the Republicans turned out the vote, and the Democrats didn’t. In all but Florida, the Democratic voter turnout went down, and Republican turnout went up. And in all six states, the Democratic drop was much larger than the Green totals. So on this point alone, we can stop blaming the Greens for anything.

Voter Turnout Loss/Gains between 2012-2016, compared to Green Party vote totals
	State	Republicans	Democrats	Greens
“Most Important”	Michigan	+ 4,287	– 295,730	51,463
	Pennsylvania	+ 290,299	– 63,833	49,941
	Wisconsin	– 2,682	– 238,449	31,072
Other Lost States	Florida	+ 454,439	– 267,219	64,399
	Iowa	+ 70,366	– 168,875	11,479
	Ohio	+ 179,568	– 433,545	46,271

Clearly, those Democrats didn’t migrate to the Green Party.

A more realistic estimate of the “Bernie-Bros” and Greens

As we saw earlier, left-wing third parties don’t do very well. But they do represent a perennial radical Left, that will never vote for the Democratic Party. Estimating the size of this constituency can’t be precise, since Nader ran as an independent 2004 and 2008 and won more votes than the Greens did. But, in 2012, without competition from Nader, the Greens won 0.36% of the popular vote. These are voters who didn’t even vote for Barack Obama. They’d never have voted for Hillary Clinton. It seems to me that this 0.36% is a reasonable measure of a Left that will not vote for Democrats under any circumstances. The Greens usually poll 0.5% on their own, so maybe 0.14% can be counted as defectors from the Democrats. That’s a very tiny number.

This helps us divide the Green vote into two rough categories. These would be the perennial Left voters who’d never vote Democratic (0.36%), and people who vote Green because of issues of that particular election– they didn’t like Hillary, they were disappointed over Bernie, they really wanted Ralph Nader, they grew more radical about global warming.

Did these voters make the difference in the 2016 election?

There are no solid numbers on how many Sanders supporters voted for Stein, but election data enables us to make a very rough ballpark estimate. The table below shows the total votes the Greens won in 2012 and 2016 for our six important states. If we use the 2012 numbers as our baseline of solid, uncompromising Greens, then the difference– the 2016 gains over 2012– includes the Democrats who switched to Jill Stein. Let’s err in favor of the left-bashers, and assume that all of them are.

So, if we moved the Greens’ 2016 gains over to the Democrats, would Hillary have won?

Green Vote Gains between 2012 and 2016
	2012	2016	Gain over 2012	Trump’s Margin
Michigan	21,897	51,463	29,566	10,704
Pennsylvania	21,341	49,941	28,600	44,292
Wisconsin	7,665	31,072	23,407	22,748
Florida	8,947	64,399	55,452	112,911
Iowa	3,769	11,479	7,710	147,314
Ohio	18,573	46,271	27,698	446,841

The answer is no. The only states that would have flipped to Hillary are Michigan and Wisconsin. And if she had won those, she would still have lost the Electoral Vote.

(Addendum 8/30/2020: I came across a piece by Reason magazine’s Matt Welch, with the oddly-familiar title “No, Jill Stein Did Not Cost Hillary Clinton the White House.” He uses exit poll data to come to a conclusion that both contradicts my own, but also argues that Clinton would still have lost the election. He cites a CBS exit poll that “asked Stein voters what they would have done if faced with a ballot featuring only Clinton and Trump. Result: 61 percent said they wouldn’t vote, 25 percent said they’d vote for Clinton, 14 percent said Trump. Applying that formula to Michigan would not be enough to make up that 10,704-vote gap.”)

Okay, these analyses are based on very rough estimates, and some odd arguments, but the general conclusion is that there’s no way that one can reasonably argue that the people who voted Green in 2016 would have supported Clinton enough to give her the win that year.

Okay, so maybe the Bernie-bros voted for Trump

In August 2017, the website Vox reported on a study claiming that ten to twelve percent of the people who voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary voted for Donald Trump in the general election. One of the study’s authors, Brian Schaffner, tweeted a series of comments claiming that this difference was crucial to Trump’s victory… again, citing this effect in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

These was circulated widely, and usually with a lot of intense Democrat outrage. These Bernie-bros didn’t just waste a vote on Jill Stein: they actually voted for the toxic figure of Donald Trump.

However, the actual Vox article, Jeff Stein’s interview with Schaffner, gave a very different story. Schaffner stressed that “The way to think about this is, as several people have noted, that this election was so close that any number of things could have proved the decisive difference… This is yet another one of those anythings.”

Schaffner explained that this kind of defection is actually a normal and well-recognized part of electoral politics.

One piece of this that’s important to keep in context is that you always see this kind of defection between a primary and a general election. In 2008, you saw a lot of Hillary Clinton voters who ended up backing John McCain — so it’s not abnormal to see this kind of thing. And more of them did so in 2008 than this time. [15 percent of Clinton’s 2008 voters in the primary supported McCain in that year’s general election.] Although given the candidates this time versus in 2008, it may have been surprising to see even this rate of defection.

Given Trump, perhaps this may be a bit high. Or maybe not: another study in Public Opinion Quarterly, “‘Sour Grapes or Rational Voting?’ Voter Decision Making Among Thwarted Primary Voters In 2008,” reports that 25% of Clinton voters abandoned Barack Obama and defected to John McCain in 2008. That’s extremely high.

But despite the higher defection rate among Clinton supporters, Obama managed to win in 2008. This indicates that these defections are nothing special. It’s something that most political analysts take for granted.

And Schaffner’s study also gives the lie to the idea that the defectors were the young progressives who rallied to Sanders. Frankly, they don’t match the stereotype of angry young leftists.

The thing that really stood out to me is that a lot of these people who voted for Sanders — and then Trump — don’t look like modern day Democrats. So you saw a lot fewer of them actually identify as Democrats than your normal Sanders voter; and, even more striking, they seem to have views on racial issues that are far more conservative than your typical Democrat.

[…]

By contrast, about 45 percent of these Bernie-Trump voters say they’re ‘middle of the road’ — basically, a lot of them see themselves as “moderates.” Meanwhile, another 35 percent of them are claiming to be either somewhat conservative or very conservative.

I think what this starts to suggest to me is that these are old holdovers from the Democratic Party that are conservative on race issues. And while Bernie wasn’t campaigning on that kind of thing, Clinton was much more forthright about courting the votes of minorities — and maybe that offended them, and then eventually pushed them out and toward Trump.

What about Republican defections to Hillary?

Schaffner doesn’t present figures for Republicans who defected to Hillary– in fact, I’ve been unable to find any studies that provided numbers on this question. Schaffner does note that a surprisingly high 35% of Kasich voters defected to Hillary. He estimates this as “more of a wash,” i.e., about the same as the defections in the other direction. He’s probably correct: 35% of Kasich’s primary totals and 12% of Sanders’s primary totals are both roughly 1.5 million votes. The impact of these defectors seems close to nil.

Okay, maybe they stayed home.

Sometimes, the accusers avoid the charges against “Bernie-bros” or Green Party voters, and assert that the real culprits are people who didn’t vote at all, who stayed home, who didn’t turn out for Hillary. These non-voters are always assumed to be left-wing voters, for whom Hillary “wasn’t pure enough” or who crazily asserted that there was “no difference” between he and Trump.

Frankly, there’s not much one can say about this claim, for the simple reason that these are people who didn’t vote. Even if we could estimate the number of people didn’t vote, we really can’t tell with any accuracy why they didn’t vote, because they didn’t register an opinion. So the accusers can blame these people with no idea of their numbers or reasons, and frankly, no real fear of contradiction. So if someone makes this particular claim, they can and should be ignored. They have no real evidence, beyond a lot of projected anger at a bizarre caricature of left-wing voters.

At any rate, left-wing voters who voted in the primaries certainly didn’t stay home in big numbers. Schaffner says:

“It’s worth noting that very few of the primary voters stayed home. People who vote in primaries are highly engaged in politics — they’re not people who come in and out of the electorate.”

Lower African-American Turnout in 2016

One indisputable factor that contributed to Clinton’s defeat in 2016 was that the African-American turnout was noticeably lower than in 2016, dropping from a high of 66.6% down to 59.6%.  The most obvious explanation is that in 2008 and 2012, the candidate was a young, charismatic black man who stood outside of the Democratic Party leadership circles Clinton represented. In 2016, that wasn’t the case. (It ought to be mentioned that the biggest drop-off was among Black millennials, but I’ve been unable to find a good authoritative source as to why that’s the case.)

This may or may not explain Clinton’s loss and Trump’s victory. But there is an important point to consider. Unlike the radical Left, African-American voters are not being blamed for the election’s outcome. Liberals and Democrats are quick to blame a radical Left for the 2016 loss, based on spurious and incomplete statistics. But when statistics clearly show that an important constituency didn’t participate as much as they could have, Liberals and Democrats say little. It may be that they don’t wish to scapegoat an ethnic minority, or appear racist, or alienate an important constituency by blaming them.

This tells me that blaming any constituency for not voting for you is probably a bad move.

The Unavoidable Conclusion

There is no solid evidence that angry leftist Sanders supporters or Green Party voters cost Clinton the 2016 election.

• If any Sanders supporters migrated to the Green Party, it was a very small number, and not enough to sway the election.
• The Democrats who stayed home don’t fit the “angry leftist Bernie-bro” stereotype.
• The Democrats who defected to Trump were older, conservative Democrats, and it’s likely their defection was balanced out by Republicans who votes for Hillary.