GUEST WORDS - Jill Stein doesn’t give, as the old saying goes, a flying f*ck about democracy. Instead, she’s all about how famous she can become and how much money she can grift off her repeated presidential campaigns. It’s a damn dangerous game.
Fresh off her 2016 political quacksalvery, in which she handed that year’s election to Donald Trump, this professional grifter — who’s been doing real damage to the Green Party for over a decade — is trying to get Trump back into the White House.
As her Wisconsin campaign manager, Pete Karas, told Politico:
“We need to teach Democrats a lesson.”
Arguably, Democrats have already learned that lesson.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost Wisconsin to Trump by 22,748 votes; Stein carried 31,072 votes. In Michigan the story was similar: Clinton lost to Trump by 10,704 votes while Stein carried 51,463. Ditto for Pennsylvania, where Trump won by 44,292 votes and Stein pulled in 49,941 votes.
Had Clinton carried those three states she would have become president.
The Green Party — that I safely voted for in 2000 when I lived in non-swing-state Vermont — deserves a candidate who’ll work to produce real change rather than simply run repeated vanity campaigns that cripple our admittedly flawed electoral system.
Those slim margins may be a distant memory, however, given how hard Stein is pounding on Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania Democrats against President Biden’s unfortunate support of Israel’s brutal bombing campaign in Gaza. As Newsweek reported last week:
“In Michigan, a battleground state where the Greens are campaigning hard, and which has a large Arab American community, 40 percent of Muslim voters backed Stein versus just 12 percent for Harris and 18 percent for Trump, according to a late August poll by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
“Michigan has more than 200,000 Muslim voters and 300,000 with Middle Eastern or North African ancestry. Biden won there in 2020 by 154,000 votes, while Trump carried the state with a victory margin of just 10,700—or 0.23 percent—in 2016.
“In Wisconsin, the CAIR poll showed Stein on 44 percent and Harris on 29 percent, while she also leads the Democrat candidate among Muslims voters in Arizona.”
I moderated the 2012 presidential debate between Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson; she and Johnson both had the smell of cheap political hustlers to me then, a feeling that’s only been reinforced in the years since.
Stein certainly hasn’t done much to advance the stated goals of the Green Party. Back in the day, it was the Greens leading the charge against climate change and in favor of instant runoff voting, having considerable success with the latter.
David Cobb, a Texas environmental attorney, ran on the Green ticket in 2004 and was a regular on my radio program that year. He explicitly told people listening to my show in swing states to vote for John Kerry instead of him, calling it his “safe states” strategy.
He refused to campaign or even appear in battleground states, a statement of both high integrity and real patriotism.
Stein has neither. This is her third run for president (Howie Hawkins was the Green candidate in 2020 and was not on the ballot in most swing states.)
Instead, she’s bragging about how she’s going to hand the 2024 election to Donald Trump. Presumably she’ll be spared the imprisonment that Trump says he’s preparing for the rest of us in politics and the media. As Stein boasted to Newsweek:
“Third Way found that, based on polling averages in battleground states, the 2020 margin of victory for Democrats would be lost in four states — Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin — because of third party support.
“So they can’t win. There’s a fair amount of data now that suggests the Democrats have lost. Unless they give up their genocide.
“We’re doing outreach all the time to a lot of different groups, but it’s really been the Muslim Americans and Arab Americans who have really taken this campaign on like it’s theirs — like they have enormous ownership over this.”
Running for president and keeping an iron grip on the once-noble Green Party has become Stein’s singular mission. And she’s killing the Party — and its once-sterling reputation — in the process. As Alexandria Ocasio Cortez said:
“If you run for years in a row, and your party has not grown, has not added city council seats, down ballot seats and state electives, that’s bad leadership. And that to me is what’s upsetting.”
As Peter Rothpletz wrote for The New Republic in an article titled Jill Stein Is Killing the Green Party:
“As of July 2024, a mere 143 officeholders in the United States are affiliated with the Green Party. None of them are in statewide or federal offices. In fact, no Green Party candidate has ever won federal office. And Stein’s reign has been a period of indisputable decline, during which time the party’s membership—which peaked in 2004 at 319,000 registered members—has fallen to 234,000 today.”
Stein brought along a Fox “News” film crew when she crashed the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, cementing her reputation as a hustler who’ll hook up with anybody who’ll provide her with fame or fortune.
There are, apparently, no Democrats in America clean or pure or virginal enough for Stein; as Rothpletz reports, she even attacked Bernie Sanders for being a “DC insider” and “corrupted” by corporate money.
Meanwhile, her campaign, theoretically opposed to giant monopolies and defense contractors, has taken money from Google, Lockheed Martin, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and McKinsey.
Stein is working hard to win the votes of disaffected Muslims in Michigan and Wisconsin, among other swing states, and could well deny Harris the White House this year just like she so proudly did to Clinton in 2016.
The unfortunate reality is that our system of democracy — created way back in 1789 — essentially requires a two-party system because we have first-past-the-post, winner-take-all elections. The result is that third parties always tear votes away from the major party with which they are most closely philosophically aligned.
And the Electoral College, by creating swing states, amplifies the problem.
Until America adopts proportional representation nationwide (which would require a constitutional amendment) or instant runoff voting (which could be done by law), a vote for a third-party candidate will always damage the party most closely aligned with it. Jill Stein understands this well, but chooses to ignore (or to intentionally exploit) its consequences.
Most other advanced democracies use a parliamentary or proportional representation system where the party that gets, for example, 12 percent of the votes gets 12 percent of the seats in Parliament. This allows for multiple parties and a more vibrant democracy.
However, it wasn’t until the year the Civil War started, 1861, that British philosopher John Stuart Mill published a how-to manual for multi-party parliamentary democracies in his book Considerations On Representative Government.
It was so widely distributed and read that nearly all of the world’s democracies today — all of them countries that became democracies after the late 1860s — use variations on Mill’s proportional representation parliamentary system.
The result for those nations is a plethora of parties representing a broad range of perspectives and priorities, all able to participate in the daily governance of their nation. Nobody gets shut out.
Governing becomes an exercise in coalition building, and nobody is excluded. If you want to get something done politically, you have to pull together a coalition of parties to agree with your policy.
Most European countries, for example, have political parties represented in their parliaments that range from the far left to the extreme right, with many across the spectrum of the middle. There’s even room for single issue parties; for example, several in Europe focus almost exclusively on the environment or immigration.
The result is typically an honest and wide-ranging discussion across society about the topics of the day, rather than a stilted debate among only two parties.
It’s how the Greens became part of today’s governing coalition in Germany, for example, and are able to influence the energy future of that nation. And because of that political diversity in the debates, the decisions made tend to be reasonably progressive: look at the politics and lifestyles in most European nations.
But until America adopts proportional representation nationwide (which would require a constitutional amendment) or instant runoff voting (which could be done by law), a vote for a third-party candidate will always damage the party most closely aligned with it. Jill Stein understands this well, but chooses to ignore (or to intentionally exploit) its consequences.
The Green Party — that I safely voted for in 2000 when I lived in non-swing-state Vermont — deserves a candidate who’ll work to produce real change rather than simply run repeated vanity campaigns that cripple our admittedly flawed electoral system.
It’s time to say “good bye” to Jill Stein and rescue — and then improve — our democratic republic.
(Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print. This article was first published in commondreams.org.)
