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The spoiler effect is at best a bad hypothesis, and has never been proven to effect actual votes.
People voting third party just would not vote if there was no third party option. This means there is no spoiler.
No, it's well understood, and very clearly exists. Here is an example using randomly generated voters ans candidates:
The problem is that these are in effect venn diagrams. There will always be overlap, and that's the problem. That's what leads to election results being changed by the entrance of an irrelevant candidate (the spoiler effect).
That's because the spoiler effect most easily happens in races that are already close, because we don't do much actual real life testing with actual elections because of the uncountable number of variables, and because doing it the python data science way is significantly more meaningful because of the aforementioned number of variables problem.
If that's really true, then this whole idea about the democratic party trying to earn the votes of green voters is bunk. Either there is no overlap, in which case it's bunk. Or there is overlap, in which case we have a spoiler effect.
You went to a lot of effort here to present that very clearly, and I salute you. I’d like to think others here are just blinded by their own ideals, and that’s why nobody is answering, not because they were just arguing for a side they didn’t believe in and don’t have response to that.
Thank you. I'd hesitate to speculate exactly why it hasn't been addressed.
But at least part of it is because arguing against what I've presented is akin to arguing that 2 + 2 != 4
You have just proven my point, it's not a thing that happens in reality if it were you'd point to actual data, not randomly generated test cases where the hypothesis works assuming everyone has to vote and is going to vote.
To your second point, they not trying to win voters, Dems have never attempted to court anyone left of Reagan voters, ever. The point is demoralization. Non voters are better than energized voters that will never vote for you; the latter group protests, riots, threatens your monopoly on power.
I already explained why this is a terrible goalpost. But even under this terrible goalpost you're still not correct.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect
See the section under "Notable unintentional spoilers"
Additionally the 2000 election:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader_2000_presidential_campaign
That's already accounted for. The gray dots are non voters. Including non voters doesn't actually change the math, because the math is the overlap of circles. It is already only accounting for the subset of people who are voters.