Jill Stein, Vanity Candidate for Suckers
Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images
This is not a plea to vote for the Democratic Party. Whether you vote for them this fall is none of my business and is dependent on Kamala Harris’s campaign incentivizing you to do so. What I am asking for here is that if you do decide not to vote for the Democrats, you can do a lot better than Jill Stein and the national Green Party. Have some self-respect and at least write in Mickey Mouse for president.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has taken a lot of legitimate heat lately, but almost everything she says here about Jill Stein and the national Green Party is correct.
When I saw this video about Jill Stein in AOC’s stories yesterday, I was shocked.
Not because I thought AOC was a major Jill Stein fan, but because she used much stronger language than I expected.
AOC says that Jill Stein’s approach to politics is “predatory” and “not serious.”… pic.twitter.com/IhN39fMb4s
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) September 2, 2024
Where I push back just a teensy bit is on her assertion that the Green Party has not added “city council seats, and down ballot candidates and state electeds,” as it seems its number of elected officials has increased since 2016, albeit not by much. The Green Party asserts that “at least 143 Greens hold elected office in 20 states across the United States as of July 1, 2024, according to these criteria of who qualifies for inclusion in this list.”
“These criteria” essentially boil down to needing to not be registered as a Democrat, Republican or Libertarian, and having some kind of allegiance to the Green Party, whether it be an explicit campaign on its platform or an amorphous one tethered to it through an ideological ally. I did not cross-check how many of those 143 were true Greens, but Wikipedia lists eight Green Party members holding state-level office, eleven mayoral positions, seventeen city and county councils, and 24 other local officials for a total of 60 as of April 18, 2023.
There is reason to doubt the 143 figure too just by the Green Party’s own website touting its “featured elected officials.” Samba Baldeh is touted for his election victory in Madison’s District 17 in 2019, but by 2020, he was a registered Democrat winning Assembly District 48’s seat and his website in the Wisconsin State Legislature makes no mention of the Green Party in reference to being Elected City of Madison alder for District 17. There are many others who have quickly switched party affiliations from the Greens after taking office, which demonstrates its inability to organizationally compete on any level with the establishment.
The other featured elected officials on the Green Party’s website are impressive, but reading through the accomplishments of Cam Gordon, Leland Pan and Alvin Clay makes it clear that these individuals were the catalyst for their Green campaign victories, as evidenced by their longstanding interest in helping their communities. The Green Party is simply one vehicle outside the two-party system that these people used to try to affect change.
And it’s a shitty vehicle. Returning back to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s rant against Jill Stein and the national Green Party’s “bad leadership,” she may be a bit off on making it seem like there are no real Green Party state-level elected officials, but she’s right that they don’t get any help from a national vanity project who only swoops in once every four years to tell everyone including Vladimir Putin how much she supposedly cares about changing the system.
There are local Green Party candidates doing their best with a party whose only real value comes in what little name-brand that Jill Stein has not destroyed. Those candidates deserve your attention, but Stein has had three election cycles now to demonstrate that she is serious, and she has proven she is not. Green Party adherents may call foul over the Democratic Party trying to sue them off the ballot in many states this year, but that’s no excuse for not building any power in the interim when these legal challenges were much less pervasive. No one gives a shit if you only complain about the state of things once every four years.
AOC’s critique that Stein “has not grown [her] movement” is spot-on, and calling what she does “predatory” is about as nice of a description of it as it gets. Jill Stein is the political version of your friend’s lazy Facebook multi-level marketing scheme where they forget to post about it for months on end then bug everyone to buy their scam in small bursts during those moments when it slips past the veil of their own ego.
You can do better than Jill Stein as a protest vote. If there’s a down-ballot Green Party candidate you like, go for it, who am I to judge what to do when all politics really is local. But as a professional national political observer over the course of the entirety of the Jill Stein experiment, I’m begging you to demonstrate more self-respect than to throw your vote away to a vanity campaign for a huckster with no proven interest or acumen in expanding the power of her party.