Democrats are still obsessed with Jill Stein. They should start obsessing over nonvoters instead.

Millions of Americans didn't vote last year — and no one cares

A man casts a ballot in Florida.
(Image credit: ROBERT SULLIVAN/AFP/Getty Images)

In early June, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein took to Twitter to lament President Trump's decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord. "It's largely your fault, you imbecile," Keith Olbermann responded in full view of his nearly one million followers — nearly four times the number of users who follow Jill Stein on the platform.

It was a neat illustration of the Stein paradox. The Green Party is a gadfly that buzzes by every four years, while the Democratic Party is a hulking semi-state institution whose priorities and indifferences delimit the nation's political agenda. Despite this obvious imbalance, Democratic Party loyalists peer down from the seat of power and condemn the relatively inconsequential Stein as a devastating spoiler. Their logic is unspoken but transparent: Every vote for Stein in 2016 was in effect stolen from the Democrats.

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Meagan Day

Meagan Day is a journalist covering politics. She was a Ben Bagdikian Editorial Fellow at Mother Jones magazine. Her debut Maximum Sunlight was chosen for The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017.