Jill Stein is again looking to shake up the two-party domination that she blames for turning the government away from the working class and leading the nation astray at home and across the globe.
The presumptive Green Party presidential nominee is offering an alternative vision for voters who are less than thrilled with President Biden and former President Donald Trump, or in her words: “the zombie candidates that are being rammed down your throat.”
“The American people are clamoring for other options,” Ms. Stein said in a recent interview on WXXI radio in Rochester, New York.
Vowing to end foreign entanglements, cut ties with NATO, and push for a Green New Deal, universal health care, and looser ballot restrictions, Ms. Stein says she sees both parties through a similar, problematic, lens.
“I find the argument that Joe Biden is the lesser evil, I reject that,” Ms. Stein said in the radio interview. “I don’t see the parties as the same. I see them both as deadly and lethal and a curse that we need to overcome.”
Clearly, much of her message is aimed at drawing away Democratic voters from Mr. Biden, at 81 the nation’s oldest president. Polls have consistently shown that many Democrats want another option.
She says Democrats do not deserve much credit in the fight for abortion rights because the party passed up opportunities to codify abortion rights into law when they controlled the three branches of the federal government.
She says Democrats repeatedly fail to live up to their anti-war, and pro-climate agenda, and push to expand health care access to millions because they are “servants of the neoliberal agenda” and “corporate America.”
“To my mind, saying it is a problem, but then sneaking in the destruction policies, that is even, according to Malcolm X, that is the wolf in sheep’s clothing, which is more dangerous than the out-front wolf,” she said. “I do not subscribe to the view that there is a lesser evil and a greater evil. In my view, we have two greater evil parties and our job is to get moving with the greater good.”
Accusing Mr. Biden of enabling “genocide” in Gaza, Ms. Stein says the U.S. should stop funding and providing diplomatic cover to Israel until they “end the genocide” in Gaza. She says Russian President Vladimir Putin was wrong to invade Ukraine, but says the U.S. forced his hand by supporting efforts to install nuclear warheads on its border.
“That war was ginned up and it was an inevitable consequence of the eastward expansion of NATO,” she said. “We need to stop being the guy who decides the relations of the whole rest of the world.”
Ms. Stein has been here before. She ran for president in 2012 and 2016, when she framed the choice between Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton as “two ways to commit suicide.”
The 73-year-old’s message challenges accepted political orthodoxy. It resonated with enough voters that a lot of Democrats accused her of peeling votes away from Mrs. Clinton in 2016, thereby helping elect Mr. Trump.
Ms. Stein won 51,000 votes in Michigan, 49,000 in Pennsylvania and 32,000 in Wisconsin – more votes than Mr. Trump‘s margin of victory in those states. This year, in averages of nationwide polls, she is pulling in about 1.5%.
David Dulio, a political science professor at Oakland University in Michigan, said voters expressed dissatisfaction with the top presidential contenders in 2016, when roughly 250,000 cast their ballots for third-party contenders – about four times more than in the 2012 election.
“That speaks greatly to the unpopularity of both of those presidential candidates, and I think that has relevance for 2024,” Mr. Dulio said. “Trump and Biden are both incredibly flawed in different ways and the American public is clamoring for another option.”
“I don’t know if Jill Stein is that person simply because she has been around the block a few times on this, but can she and other third-party candidates hold the outcome in the balance of their vote totals? Absolutely,” he said.
That reality is renewing fear among Democrats that Ms. Stein, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and other third-party contenders could tip the scales for Mr. Trump this fall. Green Party candidates have never come close to winning an election; Ralph Nader performed the best by capturing 2.7% of the vote in 2000.
Mr. Trump‘s allies hope to elevate the third-party candidates to siphon votes away from Mr. Biden. The Democratic National Committee, meanwhile, has created a team focused on taking the wind out of the sails of the third-party contenders.
The DNC declined a request for comment.
For her part, Ms. Stein chalks up the “spoiler” storyline to the fearmonger tactics that Democrats have relied on to get people out to the polls and shame them from supporting third-party candidates.
“I don’t think Democrats get off as the guys who are going to save democracy,” she said.