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Imaginary Math with David Axelrod
Buying into the conspiracy theory re: Russia pushing Green Party nominee Jill Stein to take votes away from Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump win the 2016 Presidential Election, former Obama advisor David Axelrod tweeted that Stein's vote totals in Michigan and Wisconsin would have been enough to push those states over to Hillary's column.
According to Wikipedia, Trump beat Clinton in Michigan by 10,704 votes, whereas Jill Stein received 51,463 votes. Obviously this vote total would have given Clinton the victory in Michigan.
The problem with this analysis is that it assumes that these votes would have automatically gone to Hillary in Jill Stein's absence, which is no guarantee. Plenty of Jill Stein voters simply wouldn't have voted, like the majority of voting-age individuals in the country, or would have voted for someone else. Some may have even voted for Trump, as unlikely as that seems. The fact is that it's impossible to say what would have happened in this alternate reality, so Axelrod's implication that those votes would have given Hillary a victory in Michigan seems baseless.
If we're making up nonsense, however, let's assume that every single Jill Stein voter in Michigan would have voted for Hillary Clinton in Stein's absence. This would have given Hillary a win over Donald Trump by 40,759 votes. This would have changed the electoral college math to 290 to Donald Trump and 248 to Hillary Clinton. Not enough to change the result by itself, obviously.
Let's turn our attention to Wisconsin, which is also referenced by Axelrod in his tweet. According to Wikipedia again, if we add Jill Stein's 31,072 votes to Hillary Clinton's 1,382,536 votes Hillary would have defeated Donald Trump with a margin of 8324 votes. This would have made the electoral college count to 280 to Donald Trump and 258 to Hillary Clinton.
In other words, assuming that David Axelrod is correct that Russian influence took all of these votes from Hillary Clinton and gave them to Jill Stein, giving both Michigan and Wisconsin to Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton still would have lost and Donald Trump would still be President of the United States today. You might argue that it's the principle of the thing that matters, and that's fair enough, but if we're going to give all of Jill Stein's votes in Michigan and Wisconsin to Hillary Clinton I think we ought to be logically consistent in our absurd retelling of what happened and give all of Gary Johnson's votes to Donald Trump.
If we accept that all of Stein's votes should go to Hillary and that all of Johnson's votes should go to Trump, then Trump would have won Michigan by a margin of 131,377 votes and he would have won Wisconsin by a margin of 98,350 votes. In both cases Trump would have drastically improved his performance over Hillary in those states and won them more handily than he actually did in reality.
The simple point to be made here is that even in David Axelrod's impotent imagination we'd be celebrating Presidents' Day today with Donald J. Trump sitting comfortably in the White House and Hillary Clinton, David Axelrod, the media, and the Democratic Party establishment whining about Russia to no end.