General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Jill Stein's latest victory lap demonstrates she was in favor of Trump the entire time. [View all]BzaDem
(11,142 posts)Stein voters are not people who look at the candidates during each election cycle, analyze their policy positions, and pick the candidate that best represents them. (Very few people vote that way, but the ones that do certainly don't consider voting for Stein.)
If someone knows who Jill Stein is, that immediately implies they are much more politically engaged than most voters. But if they are that politically engaged, they of course know that we live in a functional two party system (that can't be changed without a constitutional amendment), where third party votes just enable the major party candidate whose views are furthest from the third party candidate.
Putting two and two together, this implies that any Stein voter is not a rational voter that wants to increase the chances that progressive policy gets enacted. This is why the idea of winning over Stein voters with policy based arguments is an exercise in futility. Notice how no Democratic candidate actually makes any attempt to go after Stein voters. Instead, they are treated as a lost cause. (This has the perverse effect of pushing candidates to the right, since when Stein voters are taken out of the pool, the median voter is further to the right.)
This is not to say that it is impossible for Stein voters to be won over. But for a voter who is so irrational that they might consider voting for Stein, rational argument does not work. The only thing that actually works is having the opposing side enact policies that harm them, or people they know. (This is why Nader's vote share dropped by 90% from 2000 to 2004, despte a Democratic candidate that was if anything further to the right.)
Of course, the negative consequences of Republican policies are easy to predict in advance at a high level. That is why the vast majority of left leaning voters vote for Democrats. But in any population, there will always be a small group of people that do not respond to reason, and only respond when the consequences to not responding are up close and personal.