Jill Stein may have cost Hillary Clinton the election. Ben Schreckinger at Politico explains.
In Michigan, Stein garnered more than 51,000 votes, while Clinton lost by fewer than 11,000. In Wisconsin, Trump’s margin was 23,000 votes while Stein attracted 31,000. And in Pennsylvania she attracted 50,000 votes, while Trump won by 44,000.
The case that Stein played spoiler isn’t nearly as strong as it was for Ralph Nader in 2000, when Bush won Florida by 500 votes while Nader racked up close to 100,000 votes there. And Stein points to national exit polling that shows the majority of her voters would have stayed home rather than vote for Clinton, while others would have sooner voted for Trump.
This article in Mother Jones reports that Jill Stein has no regrets about her role in the election. She claims that she just happened to be seated as the same table as Vladimir Putin and Michael Flynn when she attended a gala celebration of Russian news outlet RT's tenth anniversary in December 2015. Stein says that she had no interaction at all with Putin and relatively little interaction with Flynn. It was, if we are to believe Stein, sheer coincidence that she ended up seated at the same table as Putin.
Is this credible? Let’s not try to figure out the odds that she would just happen to be at the same event that Putin was at. It seems unlikely that any given American would end up at the same event as Putin by mere chance. But let’s ignore this. We won’t factor in this improbability when considering the odds that she would end up at his table.
Instead, we will try to figure out this question: Given that both Putin and Stein were at the same event, what was the probability that she would happen to end up at his table by chance alone? We can only begin to answer this if we know how many tables were at the event. An article at the Daily Mail says there were about 200 people at the event.
And here is a picture showing that there were 10 people sitting at Stein’s table, including Stein and Putin.
Assuming every table had 10 people and that there were 200 people at the event, there must have been 20 tables at the event. That means there was only a 5% chance that Stein just happened to be seated at the same table as Putin.
And that is assuming people were seated randomly. In fact, it would have been considered a privilege to sit at Putin's table. Not just anyone would be seated at his table. I'm sure getting a seat at Putin's table would be almost impossible without connections. Therefore Stein's odds of winding up at the same table as Putin and Flynn would have been considerably less than 5%. . . unless someone in power WANTED Stein to sit near Putin.
And it just so happens that this person who improbably ended up at Putin's table was so blind that she could see little moral difference between Trump and Clinton. This person may have, wittingly or not, helped Putin exact his revenge on Hillary Clinton. All a coincidence? I don't think so. I liked Stein at one point, but I'm calling her out now on her BS.
Update 7/22/17: There is some reason to suspect that Stein either actively colluded with the Trump campaign and/or Russia to take votes from Hillary Clinton and throw the election to Trump, or that she was a useful idiot who unwittingly helped Putin's master plan to deny Clinton the presidency. (My money is on useful idiot). The Senate Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump demanding that they produce documents "to, from, or copied to the Trump Organization relating to" . . . Jill Stein. Adam Khan provides some interesting observations about Stein, Julian Assange, Sean Spicer, Putin's record of backing extreme right and left candidates in Europe to destroy the center, and the CalExit movement (the fringe movement for California to secede from the U.S.) I encourage you to read his thread, click on the images embedded in his tweets, and form your own opinion. You can see Michael Smerconish interview Stein about her dinner with Putin and her role in the 2016 election by visiting this Newsweek article.
Update 12/25/18: A recent report commissioned by the Senate shows that Russian trolls worked hard to support Stein's campaign in order to either siphon votes away from Clinton or to suppress turnout among voters--especially Black voters--who were likely to vote for Clinton. NBC News reports:
Two days before the 2016 presidential election, an Instagram account called @woke_blacks posted a message in support of long-shot Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
“The excuse that a lost Black vote for Hillary is a Trump win is bs,” it read. “It could be late, but y’all might want to support Jill Stein instead.” . . .
Building support for Stein was one of a “roster of themes” the Moscow-sanctioned internet trolls “turned to repeatedly” in their effort to disrupt the election, according to a research team led by the New Knowledge cybersecurity firm. The researchers also found that the campaign to bolster Stein gained in intensity in the final days of the presidential campaign and largely targeted African-American voters.
The reports, prepared by separate groups of cyber experts, add to the growing body of evidence that the Russians worked to boost the Stein campaign as part of the effort to siphon support away from Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and tilt the election to Trump.
News of this report prompted Israeli historian, Gershom Gorenberg, to ask a very pertinant question.
Given Jill Stein's close tie to Russia, investigative reporting should ask whether she was unknowing dupe or knowingly got Russian help.
— Gershom Gorenberg (@GershomG) December 23, 2018
