Unpopular opinion I'm sure, but I'm not certain the Amash candidacy hurts Biden like people assume it will. If you keep in mind how tribal American partisanship is, you know there is a certain percentage of the Republican vote that is precisely that: tribal.
There are voters who chose Trump because they love his hateful energy, those who chose Trump because they hated Hillary Clinton and were relatively indifferent to Trump and those who chose Trump because they are simply Republicans by tribe and would have voted for ANY Republican.
Seems to me that the third set includes the thing @justinamash is: tea partiers--basically far right libertarian types who fancy themselves "conservatives before Republicans" but are basically just Republicans. Amash could pull some of those voters away from Trump, right?
He is unlikely to pull many Biden voters who are either tribal Democrats, hardcore Never Trumpers for whom saving the country from Trump > their ideology and Democratic-leaning (meaning moderate or more liberal) independents. I doubt there are many Tea Party Biden voters to pull.
And the "Bernie or Bust" people were never going to vote for Biden (or Warren or Kamala or Jesus The Christ) anyway and if Team Biden is putting them into their turnout calculations they are insane and going to lose anyway. They'll get like 85% or so of the Sanders vote like HRC.
And there's a reason Gary Johnson doesn't get the shade Jill Stein and her weird Kremlin support vibe gets even though he did twice as well as she did, pulling 3% as the libertarian candidate: theguardian.com/us-news/2016/n…
I mean there's always a libertarian candidate. And don't they generally pull voters who might normally vote Republican, meaning it's @realDonaldTrump who should be nervous about @justinamash? And if Stein runs again the only people who will pay her attention would never vote D.
But of course I could be wrong! Would love to see some polling with Amash named as the third party option rather than just "third party." And will get some actual expertise working on this for this weekend's show. (Smiles in "Bitecofer...")
