How to talk to a Stein voter? [View all]

[BainsBane]

I went door knocking this weekend for the Clinton campaign and Democratic candidates down ballot.

In my city, encountering a Republican is rare. Everyone is a Dem/ progressive, but the city went about 3:1 for Bernie. The people I spoke to were all certain to vote Dem up and down the ballot, except for one young man who intends on voting for Jill Stein. He believes Clinton will win MN anyway, so they don't need his vote to defeat Trump. I cautioned him against that attitude, to not be lulled into complacency by the polls. He wasn't one of those people who thinks Hillary is as bad as Trump. He said he'd watch out for the polls and decide accordingly. I told him I learned the hard way what the consequences of voting third party could be, since in 2000 I voted for Nader--in Florida, in Palm Beach County, on the butterfly ballot. He was too young to have any sense of what the Bush presidency meant and what a departure it was from previous GOP administrations. And then of course we now have Trump, who makes W look like a statesman in comparison.

Later that day I found out that the arrowhead region of MN--which includes the Iron Range--is heavily for Trump. That district had the greatest percentage of Dem votes in 2012, but the Clinton staffer told me that Trump is very popular there because of the blighted state of taconite mining. The fact Trump himself buys Chinese steel doesn't seem to register. He tells them what they want to hear about rebuilding industry. Also the MN-08 congressional race, with Democratic Chris Nolan as the incumbent, is the most expensive House race in the country. This is a region that includes Duluth, the Boundary Waters, the North Shore of Lake Superior, and the Iron Range. They were huge supporters of Paul Wellstone. We're not talking expensive media markets there. But lots of corporations have a vested interest in seeing the Republican challenger prevail to open up the Boundary Waters for development.

If I'd known that MN-08 was going for Trump earlier that day, I would have told the Stein voter that we need every Dem vote we can get to offset the new GOP lean up north.