This theme is too small to support broad conclusions: four quotes from three voices in three videos. Three of the quotes come from Center voices and one from the Left. No Far Left or right-leaning voice appears.
The clearest data point comes from the Democrats of Greater Tucson. In one race the group analyzed, a Green Party candidate took about 2% of the vote, drawing more from the Democrat than the Republican.
Scott Carney supplies the other two relevant quotes, both from personal experience. He said he voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, believing Gore would win anyway, and then watched Florida decide the election by a razor-thin margin. On 2024, he said that if a few more people had voted for Kamala Harris, the country would have a different president.
The fourth quote, from International IDEA, is about corruption in political finance and doesn’t bear on protest voting. The study’s classifier grouped it here, but it adds nothing to the argument.
What four quotes can show
These quotes can’t show that protest votes decided the 2024 election. That would take precinct-level analysis the study doesn’t include. They show that a local organizer and one commentator raised the issue, and that nobody else in the study took it up, either to agree or to defend protest voting.
The editorial 2×2 places this theme under External and Tactical. The party can’t directly control how protest voters behave, but it can plan for that loss in close races.
The same thing for the Republican all three years, right around that 50% mark. But as you can see, there was a third-party Green candidate that took votes away from the Democrat more than the Republican. That is very notable, having that 2% shift go to a Green candidate.
Democrats of Greater Tucson
