Votes for not-Trump are not votes for Trump, abstention is not voting for Trump
An elementary observation that supposedly strategic voters and commentators refuse to understand
There is mileage in spelling out the supposedly obvious. My very first postletter on Substack, “Must consequentialists vote for Joe Biden?”, made the should’ve-been-obvious point that a consequentialist weighing their vote should vote according to all predictable consequences of their vote, not just the first four years of predictable consequences of their vote.
I posted that inaugural long-form splain back on (end-of-)election day 2020, and one presidential election later I find I must spell out another, more basic observation: voting for anyone who isn’t Trump is literally not a vote for Trump, and not voting for anyone is literally not a vote for Trump either.
These are such fundamental facts that to even attempt an explanation is liable to prove insulting, but I’m sorry to report that fully grown strategists and voters are actively denying the fact.
Here’s Democratic National Committee campaign ad “CRUCIAL”, published on YouTube a month ago.
And here’s a transcript of the 30-second ad:
Jill Stein, Green Party candidate for President. So why are Trump’s close allies helping her? Stein was key to Trump’s 2016 wins in battleground states. She’s not sorry she helped Trump win. That’s why a vote for Stein…is really a vote for Trump. “Jill Stein? I like her very much, you know why? She takes 100% from them.” I’m Kamala Harris and I approve this message.
(The quoted “I like her very much” interjection is an embedded clip of Donald Trump speaking in Philadelphia on June 22.) The ad’s claims about Trump’s allies helping Stein, whether Stein actually was key in Trump’s 2016 victory, and whether Stein feels sorry about 2016, are empirical claims with enough wiggle room that reasonable people could debate them (who knows whether Stein truly, in her heart of hearts, feels sorry about 2016?). But even if we accept each of those premises — that Stein was key to Trump’s 2016 win, that Trump’s allies are helping her now, and that Stein doesn’t feel the least bit sorry about either of those things — they do not back up the conclusion that “a vote for Stein…is really a vote for Trump”.
I write that confidently because “a vote for Stein…is really a vote for Trump” is literally false. Literally obviously false. Break it down and think it through like a 4-year-old: marking Stein’s name on your ballot adds a vote for Stein, and only Stein. It does not add a vote for Trump; in any functioning mark-one-bubble-only voting system, it is impossible to add a vote for Stein and for Trump simultaneously. There is no reasonable mechanism by which a vote for Stein somehow raises the chances of Trump winning above what Trump’s chances would’ve been without that vote for Stein.
One can certainly contrive weird, indirect scenarios by which strengthening Stein somehow leads to Trump being strengthened. Maybe one more vote for Stein lifts her over some crucial threshold (the 5% vote-share threshold for additional public campaign funds, maybe?) that grants her resources that she then, for some bizarre reason, uses to support post-election litigation by Trump to steal the presidency from Harris. But I do not think anyone seriously has such scenarios in mind when they allege that a vote for Stein is a vote for Trump. The actual concern is overwhelmingly with supposed vote-splitting, or Stein being a “spoiler”, and the arithmetic done by anti-Stein Democrats (and anti-minor-party partisans generally) is to take the number of votes obtained by Stein (or whatever minor-party candidate) in 2016 (or whatever presidential election) and compare that to the gap between the two major-party candidates.
Of course, such arithmetic does not even come close to showing that a vote for not-X is secretly truly a vote for X. One should be able to see this immediately by considering a concrete case; I’ll use the example of Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Jill Stein in 2016.
Partisan Democrats (including the DNC) sometimes point out, correctly, that Stein won enough votes in Michigan, in Pennsylvania, and in Wisconsin to have pushed Clinton ahead of Trump in those key states, if all of Stein’s votes had instead gone to Clinton. True, but that doesn’t prove that Stein votes amounted to Trump votes, because one can point out, equally correctly, that Clinton won enough votes in MI, in PA, and in WI to have pushed Stein ahead of Trump in those key states, if all of Clinton’s votes had instead gone to Stein. But who would argue that a vote for Clinton was therefore really a vote for Trump? If this kind of arithmetic could prove that a vote for not-X was really a vote for X, then it could prove that in multiple directions, giving ridiculous results: one would have to conclude that a vote for Clinton was really a vote for Trump, and that a vote for Stein was really a vote for Trump.
In short, the DNC’s key conclusion, that “a vote for Stein…is really a vote for Trump” is obviously false, and it’s so obviously false that I have to consider the DNC’s pushing of the falsehood a lie. It is literal election misinformation! The ad even compounds the misinformation by presenting a clip of Trump saying something transparently false (“[Stein] takes 100% from [Democrats]”, as if the Green Party never attracts disaffected Republicans or potential abstainers). Yet the Democratic Party was so proud of the ad that it put out a press release promoting its disinformation.
The Democratic Party even cut a half-length version of the ad and uploaded it to Facebook. The first 6 seconds of the 15-second ad are a clip of Trump’s “She takes 100% from them” falsehood (Democrats literally spreading Trump misinformation!) and the next 6 seconds show the words “A vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Trump. Trump knows it”. Absolutely false, patently false, as I’ve just tediously explained.
As well as the falsehood that voting for not-Trump is somehow a vote for Trump, another popular canard is that voting for no one is somehow a vote for Trump. Last month, one “person close to the Harris team” told CNN, and CNN dutifully quoted them as saying, that when “Black men, Hispanic men” “don’t vote at all”, that’s actually a “vote for him” (meaning Trump). Alexandra Lustig, with 8,752 followers on Threads, posted there that
A vote for Jill is a vote for trump
Abstaining is a vote for trump
This election is between 2 candidates. Don’t make one issue your hard line in favor of a dictatorship.
False, of course. PufTheWrestler xeeted that “Not voting is a vote for Trump”, getting over 900 likes; Kenneth Roth, who was executive director of Human Rights Watch for 29 years and has over 610,000 X/Twitter followers, xeeted that “Abstaining is a vote for Trump”.
All bogus. One word explains why the claim that abstention is a vote for Trump is bogus: symmetry.
Abstention treats every candidate for President the same: none of the candidates get any votes added to their tallies. By symmetry, then, abstention cannot be a “vote for” just one candidate; it’s either a “vote for” all candidates equally or a “vote for” none. If the latter, it obviously can’t be a vote for Trump. If the former, one could argue that it’s technically a vote for Trump as well as a vote for everyone else, but no partisan actually believes that. A Democrat lecturing you that “Abstaining is a vote for Trump” is not going to be mollified if you correctly respond, “Just as much as it’s a vote for Harris”. So the abstention-is-a-vote-for-Trump claim is false by any reasonable definition that people actually use.
I recognize I’m belaboring very, very rudimentary points here, but when partisans deny what ought to be trivial truths, that unfortunately renders it necessary to break things down as if addressing kindergarteners. I am assuming, perhaps optimistically, that everyday partisans who assert this garbage are just thinking badly due to partisanship hurting their ability to reason logically, rather than being lying liars who lie. (I give the DNC little such credit. Isn’t Donald Trump supposed to be the avatar of election disinformation? Why on Earth is the DNC content to platform him and his disinformation just to score a cheap rhetorical boost?)
In this situation, the obvious takes are the correct ones. Doing something distinct from a thing is literally not doing the thing, voting for someone who isn’t Trump is literally not voting for Trump, voting for no one is literally not voting for anyone. I can only hope that this kindergarten-level lesson sinks in today, the conclusion of Trump’s third run as a Republican, and I hope I don’t have to figure out how to rewrite this at an infant’s level if the Republicans run Trump’s head in a jar in 2028.