A new poll suggests that Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein is drawing more voters from former President Donald Trump than from Vice President Kamala Harris.
According to a Noble Predictive Insights survey released last week, Harris holds a narrow lead over Trump in a hypothetical three-way race. With Stein on the ballot, Harris’ lead expands, pointing to a potential spoiler effect similar to what many Democrats blamed Stein for doing to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
For Trump, the emergence of Stein as a potential spoiler may be a critical factor in battleground states, where even a small shift in votes could determine the outcome. For Harris, Stein’s candidacy could paradoxically provide an unexpected advantage, drawing votes from Trump and narrowing his pathway to victory.
Appropriately apocalyptic for the liberal view on these elections, but the problem, also appropriate for the liberal view on these elections, is that you are taking the Other to be a complete dipshit.
If you’re in a situation that isn’t the literal end of the world, bluffing has a serious danger associated with it because it informs all circumstances subsequent to the bluff if it gets called. From that point on, people know that your threats are not to be taken seriously, and you have robbed yourself of whatever power you had. You become a “boy who cried wolf” with respect to the actions you will take.
Furthermore, this time in all situations, it’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to stake such a widespread plan of action on everyone at all times maintaining a lie. How do you agitate for such a thing? You can’t speak of it in the open. How do you vet candidates? Someone might be an asset (and liberals usually believe spaces both online and offline are crawling with assets for other states) or even just someone who thinks you plan is bullshit and will decide to talk about it afterwards. Basically, your plan works in the same realm of imagination where wars would stop if all of the soldiers on both sides just laid down their arms. That is to say, if you could just cast a spell and make people act that way, sure, but that’s not how politics works.
Lastly, it’s important to remember we are talking about threats, so “If we have nukes, we should just use them!” is a complete non sequitur. That’s not a threat, that’s just an attack. Incidentally, while there is a good argument to be made that if you get nuked, you should just take the L if you think your barrage might tip the scales into the world ending, such an idea definitionally does not work as the dominant ideology because at that point MAD does not protect your country anymore and there’s really no point in you having nukes when you’re just surrendering to death anyway. If you’re an individual operator of a nuclear silo or something and you refuse to participate in ending the world, good for you, but again that’s something that you can’t organize with because it’s a conspiracy of a similar style to what I outlined before, so you aren’t going to succeed in helping very much unless you’re on the vanguard and it might be a false positive that an enemy nuke was launched at all (this happened at least once with the USSR, during the Cuban Missile Crisis). In that extremely specific situation where mass action is impossible and only a tiny fraction of a fraction of the population ever gets close to being in the conditions where such an incident has even a slim possibility of occuring: Yes, there it works well.