Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Books are my comfort food!

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

“Let’s not pretend [Trump] wants to engage in high-minded discourse.”

Days Since JD Vance Insulted Women Across America: Zero

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

Come on, man.

Republicans don’t trust women.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Bark louder, little dog.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Can we lighten up on the doomsday scenarios?

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

You are here: Home / Elections / Election 2016 / John Oliver on Jill stein and Gary Johnson

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  4. 4.

    James E Powell

    Neither of them are a factor in this election. Their joint impact is less than that of disaffected Sanders voters who are also not a factor in this election.

  5. 5.

    Matt McIrvin

    Oh, my God, the expression on Bill Weld’s face in that one shot with Gary Johnson. He looks like he’s wishing for an out-of-body experience.

  12. 12.

    hueyplong

    The more “ready” Trump is, the better I feel about things. Trump being Trump is not something designed to broaden his appeal.

    Wednesday is mainly an exercise in determining which Trump footage will go into the next Clinton campaign video.

  17. 17.

    germy

    The John Oliver clip begins with a disaffected voter who complains of all the millions of Americans, the best we can come up with is Hillary Clinton?? And then Oliver says something like “Right!”

    I sort of disagree with that narrative, the “both candidates suck!” narrative. I’m tired of being fed that line.

  19. 19.

    germy

    My PBS station made John Oliver look rather stupid in one of their ads; a flurry of quick cuts from the Charlie Rose show. Charlie asks Oliver “Do you think you could do my job?” (meaning journalamism) and Oliver sputters “No! I’m not qualified!” and then they quick cut to Richard Gere (from a completely different interview, obviously) chuckling condescendingly.

    And of course my local PBS station being what it is (all Antiques Roadshow all the time!) they played that commercial a hundred times an hour.

    Actually I think Oliver could do a better job than Charlie Rose, but I guess the editors just wanted to put him in his place.

  21. 21.

    Botsplainer

    Jared Kushner, A shonda fur die Goyim.

    I actually approve of this, albeit in a negative way: anybody stupid enough to invest in Trump or his grifter kids going forward deserves to lose his shirt, big time.

  22. 22.

    magurakurin

    @gogol’s wife: To be honest, I don’t believe Oliver believes that. That’s just my opinion, of course. But I think that whole segment wasn’t aimed at you. If he hadn’t started with that “both sides terrible,” the people he wanted to have listen would have checked out. I think he really wanted the third party voters to hear out his take down of the two, Stein and Johnson, on policy issues. That’s how I felt when I watched it, and I watched the whole thing.

  23. 23.

    germy

    @James E Powell:

    Neither of them are a factor in this election.

    I never see Stein on broadcast TV news (we don’t have cable TV), but Johnson was certainly given a ton of opportunities to sell himself. Of course he did a ridiculous job.

    But they seemed eager to give him a shot.

  25. 25.

    Matt McIrvin

    @magurakurin: Yeah, Oliver pretty much has to knock Clinton on the standard left complaints to get cred with his audience. If he says nothing but positive things about her, they’ll tune out.

  26. 26.

    germy

    @hueyplong:

    Wednesday is mainly an exercise in determining which Trump footage will go into the next Clinton campaign video.

    The HRC commercials must be expensive as hell to create. First, they need to use news footage from herr drumpf debates and rallies. That must cost a shit ton of money. Then they have to buy the actual primetime TV airtime, which costs another fortune. So the TV executives get paid twice.

  27. 27.

    Taylor

    @magurakurin: Agreed. He was speaking to the Kewl Kidz, and had to appear Kewl himself.

    I did get a sense that the voters complaining that they didn’t like any of the candidates were Not Very Bright.

  28. 28.

    amk

    @germy: Nope, all the teevee time is prebooked. Unless, they want additional time now. As for making commercials on the go, I am sure their contract with the ad agencies took care of that.

  29. 29.

    RK

    @Major Major Major Major: Polling was close for Brexit but it won by about 4%. Columbia’s peace deal was defeated when the polls had a win. Not saying LA Times is right, just that it’s interesting in a year like this one.

  31. 31.

    catclub

    I note that in all the discussion of the media coming out against Trump, the $2B worth of free coverage given to him in the last 10 months…
    is completely forgotten.

  33. 33.

    Alan M

    @RK:

    Those are kind of one-timey votes. Comparing them to something with the amount of background that general election polling has is being either dumb or disingenuous.

  34. 34.

    germy

    @amk: Still costs a fortune to prebook primetime TV airtime. Still costs a fortune for the use of network footage of drumpf rallies and debate.

    I know a documentary filmmaker who wanted to use a tiny snippet of an old TV clip; he was told he’d have to pay a substantial $$$ (I don’t remember the exact figure) to use a ten-second clip.

  35. 35.

    NorthLeft12

    The fact that a voter has not yet figured out who to vote for in this election, is probably the most self-damning statement you could make. And what is the topper to that is that they think it is some kind of badge of honour that they are “independent” and not swayed by emotions or the latest headline. That somehow they are the real political experts and that they hold the key to the election. WRONG!

    What the undecideds need to be told is that their status is more due to their ignorance, laziness, gullibility, and narcissism than any laudable characteristics.

  36. 36.

    scav

    So, margins of error actually mean something? And, a show largely devoted to mockery mocks. Oh dear.

  37. 37.

    magurakurin

    @gogol’s wife: but you said you didn’t watch it. He absolutely destroys Stein and Johnson. He only mentions Clinton in one sentence and doesn’t even say her name. It wasn’t they all suck piece. It was a “nobody is ever perfect but you have to be an idiot to be voting for anyone but Clinton” piece.

  38. 38.

    Starfish

    @germy: This type of argument is rampant on Facebook. The third party candidate supporters act like they are superior to Trump and Clinton voters. Oliver is talking to those people and destroying their candidates.

  40. 40.

    RK

    @Major Major Major Major: Well, I suppose the undecideds were the problem there then. But it still remains interesting (to me at least) that a poll that got it right in 2012 (more right than most) is seeing things so differently than others now.

  42. 42.

    socraticsilence

    @RK:

    The LA Times tracking poll didn’t exist in 2012. Quit repeating the wistful musings of the Breitbart comment section as facts.

  43. 43.

    magurakurin

    @gogol’s wife: But it probably cost Stein and Johnson votes and just may have snagged some of them for Clinton. The whole piece seemed very strategic to me. Targeted…and you weren’t the target.

  44. 44.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Kristin Welker is doing her damnedest to make some anodyne statement Clinton made about government and Wall Street into a disturbing “revelation”. She just invoked, with no trace of awareness, the Cokie Roberts rule– we don’t know if these documents are real, but they’re out there. Tammy Baldwin kind of flat footed in her response

  45. 45.

    Major Major Major Major

    @RK: and Wang links to something addressing THAT in point four. At any rate, unless the pollsters are under some sort of mass hallucination, which does not happen in modern presidential elections, it’s easy enough to see that in aggregate this poll does not matter.

  46. 46.

    Larkspur

    @magurakurin: Yeah, I agree with you and the others, and I watched the whole thing and it was hilarious. Of course, I disagree with his observation that everyone will walk out of the voting booth feeling icky, but his criticism of Clinton was a brief summary of standard complaints about her: trigger-happy, corporate-friendly, both of which are knee-jerk complaints that are easily countered by sense-making folks. It’s not Hillary (this is the implication I get from Oliver); it’s the nonsense-making folks who are the real problem.

    I know a few people I like a lot, two in particular, who are very very dear to me. They are both educated women (unlike me) with financially comfortable lives, and they’re Republicans and neither of them support Trump but they hate hate hate Hillary Clinton with an intensity I can’t comprehend. I don’t talk about it with them because I lost some important friendships during the run-up to the Iraq war and I refuse to let that happen again. They know where I stand, and we do not discuss it further.

  47. 47.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @NorthLeft12:

    What the undecideds need to be told

    Is to cut the crap. I am pretty sure 90% know exactly who they are voting for, IF they get up off their lazy asses and go to the polls.

  48. 48.

    PaulWartenberg2016

    Johnson is a MINOR factor in that he’s polling 6 percent nationally, and he MAY have an affect in small divided states like Utah (although the independent candidate McWhatever is *really* cutting into Trump’s numbers).

  50. 50.

    scav

    @gogol’s wife: Because it’s a true statement that some people are enthusiastic doesn’t mean a lot of people are enthusiastic — and quick turnsoffs after statements that aren’t in conformity with what you want to hear is a fine way to build your own bubble. Genuinely life-saving in some circs, but it shouldn’t become knee-jerk. John Oliver usually has a point with a lot of factual statements woven in a solid broth of mockery and outrage. The point about taking positions seriously as plans that should be workable and not feel-good blah blah is a generally relevant one.

    Not that I’ve a clue what’s goong on with most undecideds. It sometimes just seems a slightly different twist on people just not wanting to think or make decisions, the flip side of always votong for one side, irregardless of the exact candidate and exact stated policies and positions.

  52. 52.

    Kylroy

    @OzarkHillbilly: This. If you’re a low-information, low motivation voter, you can either commit to a candidate and be completely ignored OR say you’re “undecided” and watch the entire political media treat you like one of the most fascinating people on earth. Not hard to see why people choose the way they do.

  54. 54.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Kylroy: As a Hillary (& generic Dem) supporter I feel pretty ignored by the media but not at all ignored by the various campaigns I have sent money to.

  55. 55.

    Major Major Major Major

    @RK: addressed undecideds for Brexit in point one with a link to further analysis. Undecided voters and third parties in point five with a link to further analysis. LA Times poll in point four with a link to further analysis. I’m starting to think you’re intentionally misreading it.

  56. 56.

    Larkspur

    @Kylroy: I think lots of “undecideds” are simply “decline to state”; either way you get to go to a town hall debate or be sought after for commentary.

  59. 59.

    Larkspur

    @delk:

    But Jill Stein’s music career sounded so promising.

    I know: you could put it in the Gitmo wish-list playbook (non-stop, 24 hour loop), but as Nixon once said (leaning close to the recorder under his desk) “It would be wrong, that’s for sure”.

  60. 60.

    geg6

    @RK:

    If there is any poll no one should pay attention to, it would be the LA Times poll. It’s been an outlier the entire season. Mainly because of the way it’s constructed. Not a random sample means it’s not very meaningful. It just shows what the people they poll, a group of specific people that they chose early on and just keep polling over and over, are thinking. Not sure how that translates to the rest of the nation.

  63. 63.

    Jibeaux

    Yeah, it’s a good bit, if you watch it all the way through. Most of us hate the “lesser of two evils” trope because there’s only 1 evil. Oliver turns it into a “lesser of 4 evils”, which is a different point; let’s judge the 3P guys as if they could actually win. Spoiler: they’re nutballs.
    It’s not really aimed at the BJ choir but remains a good point regardless!

  64. 64.

    DesertFriar

    @NorthLeft12:

    I call it “political consumerism”. They are all on the cereal aisle blankly staring at the boxes. They are looking for the “new and improved”.

  65. 65.

    Barbara

    @Major Major Major Major: @RK: Gallons of ink and vast quantities of pixels have been spent explaining why the LA Times poll is not really a poll at all but an experiment that looks, increasingly, like an experiment to validate why modern polling organizations do not do things the same way. Even LAT knows it.

  66. 66.

    Matt McIrvin

    @RK: The Rand poll was the same general type of poll as the LA Times one: a “panel” type where they ask the same voters over and over. These polls are interesting in that they might be able to distinguish rapid changes in opinion more clearly than standard polls, but they’re not really intended to get the overall absolute state of the race right, because any random sampling bias in the original sample of voters is baked in permanently as a systematic error. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything if one of them happens to nail the final result.

  67. 67.

    SRW1

    I was wondering why it was McMullin and not Johnson who was inheriting the votes of displeased Utah conservatives, as Johnson has got to have a much higher name recognition than McMullin. But the proximity of Utah and New Mexico presumably means Uthans have an above average familiarity with douchebag Johnson.

  68. 68.

    Keith G

    @magurakurin: Exactly.

    What made Major Major Major Major and a couple others uncomfortable (the both sides….) was just an entryway into the bit. After that point, Stein,Johnson and even Trump took hits.. Hillary was left alone. The criticism focused on Johnson and Stein was focused and devastating…….and hilarious

  75. 75.

    RK

    @Major Major Major Major: He says the Brexit polls were close but you had a percentage of undecideds and a potential problem inherent in gauging such referenda. While I haven’t read it, I believe the LA Times has responded to that linked criticism. I’ll leave it there and just say again it’s an interesting outlier.

  76. 76.

    Barbara

    @Starfish: Mormons most likely are aware of and don’t like Johnson’s well-known acceptance of marijuana. I have been to Salt Lake City (which is about as progressive as Utah gets) and it’s not easy to find a coffee shop, let alone one that is open after 5:00 pm. They don’t like imbibing non-medical chemicals.

  77. 77.

    Matt McIrvin

    Sam Wang’s argument about Brexit was that there was enough spread in the polls-of-polls that the aggregates’ margin of error was compatible with a miss of the size we saw.

    I spent some time staring at the history of Brexit polling (on Wikipedia) and I think something slightly more interesting (if horrifying) was going on. Just a week before the referendum, which had been this huge contentious thing for many months, a man shouting pro-Brexit slogans murdered anti-Brexit MP Jo Cox at a campaign event. With that event, the polls suddenly jumped a couple of points in the direction of Remain, and they held that lead for the entire last week. But the actual results matched the polls just before the Cox assassination, with Leave narrowly leading.

    I think that the Jo Cox assassination created a real, but short-term, shy-Brexiteer effect that skewed just the last week of the polls. The Leave proponents still went and voted Leave, but they were embarrassed to admit it because a Leave proponent had just committed a shocking act of terrorism. They hadn’t been particularly embarrassed about it before that; Leave had been gaining for months and was slightly ahead when the murder happened.

    Whether this says anything about the effect of violent acts like the NC firebombing, or any other terrorist attacks that might happen in the next three weeks, I don’t know.

  78. 78.

    The Moar You Know

    There are no undecided voters. There are those who are lying, or ashamed to admit who they’re voting for, but there aren’t any undecideds and haven’t been since the beginning of this summer at the least. And it’s an insult to us all to put these people on TV and pretend they’re telling the truth. They are not.

  81. 81.

    Major Major Major Major

    @RK: I’ll agree that it’s interesting there are a few hundred people out there who feel the way they do in that… survey, insofar as the opinions of any few hundred people are interesting, but that doesn’t make it relevant.

  82. 82.

    Barbara

    @The Moar You Know: Yes, I think undecided really means “I don’t like being asked” or “I am not sure whether I am going to vote.”

    ETA: At least at this point in the election cycle, that’s what it means. Earlier and during primary polling, I think people are legitimately not sure.

  87. 87.

    Matt McIrvin

    @magurakurin: I thought Jill Stein came off a little better in it, and Gary Johnson considerably worse, than I expected. But, boy howdy, neither of them come off well.

    Johnson seems unhinged. The way the spoiler-effect question sets him off on a spiraling “how DARE you” tirade is scary.

  88. 88.

    Gelfling 545

    @OzarkHillbilly: The only “undecideds” are still trying to find a way to vote for Trump and retain some self respect. Can’t be done, of course, but they’re still trying and will probably not vote in the end.

  89. 89.

    hovercraft

    @Botsplainer:

    That’s just dumb, as they say in the link, cable TV/News is dying, providers are losing to on demand services.
    So I guess I should say mazel tov, and sit back and watch him fail spectacularly, like he will on November 8th.

  91. 91.

    geg6

    @Matt McIrvin:

    Seriously? You thought Stein came off better? They both came off looking like absolute nut cases (which they are). Perhaps Johnson came off as an angry nut case, but Stein came off looking like someone’s grandma who took too much acid in the 60s and fried her brain and who hasn’t had an intelligent or sane thought since. Even an angry nut case looks better in the face of that.

  92. 92.

    magurakurin

    @Matt McIrvin: well Johnson is worse than Stein. Johnson’s perfect world would be horrible place. Stein’s would basically be a good place except for the measles…she just has no idea how to get there or any awareness of the depth of the opposition.

  94. 94.

    Matt McIrvin

    @geg6: Stein seems like someone I could have a Celestial Seasonings herbal tea with. I’d want to keep her well away from elected office, but still.

  95. 95.

    Applejinx

    He lost me when he said

    “You don’t want him to be able to order the Fed to create money for the most lavish tiger-themed orgy the nation has ever seen”

    The hell I don’t! Bring on the horny tigers :D

  96. 96.

    hovercraft

    @RK:
    The difference here is we actually have these things called campaigns, that actually do stuff like register voters, go door to door getting people to go to the polls, and they also help people do things like vote early, and request mail in ballots. And then as those things happen, there are ways to measure how effective those efforts are or have been. To date the efforts to register new voters has been heavily skewed in one direction, and it’s not towards the orange Shitgibbon. Early in person voting and absentee voting are also skewing towards his opponent in the states that have begun voting with the exceptions of Iowa and Ohio. In this country we only get surprise outcomes in races that haven’t been heavily polled, like the Eric Cantor race, when candidates and their surrogates go out on TV claiming to be confident of a win when all the polling data shows a loss, they are just blowing smoke. Mitt RMoney refused to believe the public polling, his campaign unskewed the polls to give him a more friendly electorate, but in they end they were wrong, the public polls were right. So keep throwing Brexit at us and pretending that it’s relevant. We are voting for people, not an abstract concept in a referendum, the consequences of voting for Trump are not some amorphous sovereignty platitudes, they are real, and they are right in front of us, do we want a racist misogynist, sexist, xenophobic,erratic, immature, abusive, asshole as our president? For most of us the answer is no. So kindly take your concern trolling elsewhere, and let us get back to the business of pointing out the absurdity of Trump and his acolytes. And phone banking, and raising money, and canvassing, and participating in any number of general GOTV efforts.

  97. 97.

    cat

    @RK: You don’t understand how polls work then, statistics, or modeling. Which is OK since most people don’t and it isn’t really taught.

    An election poll isn’t a prediction of an outcome. It is an estimate of the probability of a one-time event. The polls I’ve seen all correctly predicted the Brexit even though it looks like they estimated the vote would not pass and it eventually did.

    I say this because polls have a margin of error. That margin of error dictates the amount of variability in the estimate. For example, Saying 48% remain, 47% leave, and 5% undecided isn’t saying remain will win. The poll is saying these are the most likely values for a range of values centered around 48, 47, and 5 so the “leave” vote winning by 4% falls within the polls ranges isn’t the poll being wrong. The poll was right since the eventual outcome with within the predict range. For the poll to have been “wrong” the eventual outcome would have to either leave or stay winning by 15%.

    Does that make sense?

  98. 98.

    Soylent Green

    @The Moar You Know: There are always people who pay no attention to the news, and don’t get out much. When the Bundy trial jurors were being selected last month, a Portland State University student said he had never heard of the Malheur refuge occupation, which was by far the biggest Oregon news of the year.

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