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In reply to the discussion: Go F*ck Yourselves: Bill Maher Goes Off on Liberal Purists Who Didnt Vote for Clinton [View all]JHB
(37,156 posts)Last edited Sat May 6, 2017, 10:26 PM - Edit history (1)
...because, jeebus krismas, they're responsible for Trump too.
Both the Greens a Libertarians got about three times as many votes in 2016 as in 2012. However, the Libertarian vote continued to be about three times that of the Goobers.
Most of the Greenie boost is assumed, with good reason, to be from lefty purists who refused to vote for Hillary.
But what about the Libertarian boost? Who suddenly decided to switch to them? Why, another set who absolutely refused to vote for Hillary, but this bunch wasn't a pack of "purists". Nooooo, these people were supposedly "responsible" people, despite the fact that they had spent years snorting just as much conservative axe-grinding dust about the Clintons and Obama as the MAGAts. They wouldn't vote for Trump because he was too crass for them, but they weren't so concerned about it that they would take actual action to defeat him. What was important to them was not voting for That Woman.
In 1964 plenty of Republicans voted for Johnson because Goldwater was beyond the pale for them. In 2016, they voted for a different Johnson because to them, Trump was merely distasteful.