Could Jill Stein make the election benefit Trump? It's complicated.

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

Dear Wedge Problems,

Should I fear Jill Stein — or any third-party candidate, really? I recently read an article about how Stein may have helped oust Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan in 2016. According to a Council on American-Islamic Relations poll last month, I also saw that 40 percent of Muslims in Michigan support Stein also based on her position on Israel's war in Gaza. But I also saw that David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the KKK, supported her? There's a lot of confusing stuff here. I just want to know if I should be afraid of what she might do to the election!

– Still, Jill?!

Dear still?!,

The Greens are not a particularly serious political undertaking. Its candidates have never won a federal election, and the minuscule number of successful candidates have largely been at the local or state legislative level. The race for almost all seats in Congress and for most states' electoral votes in the Electoral College means that small parties are generally completely excluded from power. But beyond that, the Greens as an organization do virtually nothing between elections to expand their brand and reach, emerging every four years from a cocoon of delusion and extremism to terrify liberals. It makes sense that you're freaking out – the Greens are a zombie that has once again emerged from a dark resting place.

This year in particular, the Stein campaign is taking great pleasure in acting as a spoiler. While the party's 2004 nominee, David Cobb, explicitly refused to campaign in swing states after it was widely (and rightly) believed that Ralph Nader had cost Al Gore the election in 2000, it seems Stein's election campaign is denying Democratic candidate Kamala Harris the blue wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The New York Times reported that a speaker at a recent Stein event in Michigan admitted the obvious: “We are incapable of winning the White House.” He added: “We have a real chance to do something historic win.” We could deny Kamala Harris the state of Michigan.” Okay, then!

And Jill Stein in particular is not a serious person. The former doctor is embarking on her sixth “campaign” for a major government position, having run twice for governor of Massachusetts and now three times for president. In fact, her best performance came with 17.7 percent of the vote, which she received 18 years ago in the race for Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in a contest that did not include a Republican candidate. She has openly collaborated with Republicans this year who have tried to put her on the state ballot with the express goal of skewing the election, and will almost certainly receive support from Russian disinformation artists, as she did in 2016. While Stein has rejected her support 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 win more than 1 percent of the vote nationwide — but unfortunately, she is a threat we still need to take seriously. Because the elections in 2024 appear to be agonizingly, almost unimaginably close. The leading predictions are around 50-50, and it's hard to imagine the polls in the seven key battleground states getting any tighter than they already are. It's actually reasonable and understandable to have a little doom spiral about all the different things that could go wrong and lead to the future-warping catastrophe of a second Trump term. And Stein, unfortunately, is one of them.

But: This is not a situation in which we can get angry with stone with simple arithmetic. To properly assign blame to Stein and figure out what she might do this time, we need to properly assess what Stein's voters would do if it were her not on the ballot paper.

On the left, the view is that Stein cost Hillary Clinton the presidency in 2016. She didn't, but it's understandable why this myth took hold. People come to this conclusion by taking Trump's margins in a given state and adding up Stein's votes there. If Stein's raw vote count exceeded Trump's margin, then voila: She must have denied Hillary Clinton victory in this state and thus the presidency. However, this is a misinterpretation of how third-party voting works, which political scientists like me have repeatedly criticized. For example, the myth that Reform Party candidate Ross Perot cost Republican George HW Bush the election in 1992 does not hold water upon closer inspection. Perot received more than 18 percent of the vote in an election that Democrat Bill Clinton won by less than six points, but you can't just hand the Texas billionaire's spoils to Bush. Election polls showed Clinton and Bush were there equally probably the second choice of Perot voters. And recent analysis from Split Ticket's Harrison Lavelle and Armin Thomas counterintuitively argues that Perot received more votes Clinton.

And perhaps most importantly, many third-party voters would not show up at all on election day if their preferred candidate was not on the ballot.

Political scientists Christopher Devine and Kyle Kotko published an article in 2021 about the 2016 election and concluded that around 53 percent of Stein voters simply would not have voted if it had not been on the ballot. According to the study, around 35 percent of Stein's votes would have gone to Clinton and eight percent to Trump. So, yes, it may have “contributed” to his margins in some states. But the only state where Stein's candidacy may have actually taken place decisive In 2016, Michigan was where Trump was ahead by fewer than 11,000 votes out of more than 5 million 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 wouldn't have come close to helping Clinton win.

However, in 2024 Michigan could actually decide the entire election single-handedly. Forecaster Nate Silver gives Michigan its second-highest odds of being the “tipping point state” in the election: the state where the winning candidate receives over 270 electoral votes. The Harris campaign is privately quite concerned about this. If we assume a similar turnout to 2020 – about 5.5 million votes – and if we believe Stein's RealClearPolitics average of 1.0 percent in multi-candidate polls in the state, she will likely get about 55,000 votes in Michigan. But if we also assume that Stein's actual Election Day total will be about half of her poll numbers on election eve, which is what we generally saw in 2016 for third-party candidates, including Stein, and which has been a consistent pattern in American elections, then that is the case The number is reduced 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 decline for third-party candidates and assume that Stein wins 0.5 percent in Michigan, that 53 percent of her voters at home 35 percent would have gone to Harris and 8 percent to Trump. If so, Harris would have received just over 3,000 more votes without Stein on the ballot.

Could Michigan be that close? It definitely could. But even at a time of intense polarization, where the share of voters switching sides between elections has plummeted, only a handful of states were decided by fewer than 3,000 votes. This century, only New Hampshire (in 2016) and Florida and New Mexico (in 2000) have been so close. Increasing the margin to 5,000 votes or less does not add many states to the list.

The best thing you can do here, however, is not to stew in your fear of Jill Stein, but to reach out to friends and family who are considering voting for her and try to gently dissuade them, rather than towards them insults on social media or by accusing them of naively helping Donald Trump. Vote shaming not only doesn't work, but it will almost certainly cause people to back down. And that, ironically, could become Jill Stein's worst recurring nightmare Reality.