The Protest-Voter's Case Against Jill Stein
The American Left deserves better than the Green Party
The first vote I ever cast for President was for Jill Stein. I had been volunteering for the Green Party since I was 15. By my senior year of high school I was involved at the local, state, and national levels, and was on the Editorial Board for the party’s internal newsletter. So when I was finally old enough to participate in a Presidential election in 2012, I proudly voted my conscience.
My views on lesser-evil voting have softened over time. By 2016 I was living in Pennsylvania and voted for Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump, despite feeling even less that she represented my values than Barack Obama had four years earlier; ditto for Joe Biden in 2020. Yet I remain sympathetic to the idea that you should vote for the candidate who most shares your beliefs, regardless of how they’re polling. More to the point, I know from personal experience that treating disaffected folks with contempt instead of as valued coalition members is a bad strategy for winning their support.
All of which is to say that what follows is not a screed against third parties, nor an admonition that “a vote for Stein is a vote for Trump,” a common refrain that is not just condescending and unproductive but mathematically untrue.1 I understand the logic of protest-voting — which is why I know it deserves a better outlet than the strategically and ideologically aimless 2024 campaign of Jill Stein.
The arguments I have heard, and made, over the years for voting third-party can be broadly sorted into three categories. (To those who are preemptively rolling your eyes: You will be more effective at convincing these voters to join your coalition if you take their motivations seriously.) The first is that the major parties do not represent their values, and that fully participating in the democratic process means not compromising your principles. Second, even if a candidate does not have a prayer of winning the current election, reaching the support thresholds to qualify for federal funding or state ballot access are tangible goals that would give the party a boost for future campaigns. Finally and most importantly, it is about leverage. If a candidate stubbornly refuses to heed calls to — for example — stop offering material and rhetorical support for the unconscionable slaughter of an oppressed people, refusing to support the party until they listen may be the only way to force the issue.
If you are an American progressive, you are probably closer to Stein than Harris on many of the most important issues of our day. A ceasefire in Palestine is a given. The Green platform includes explicit support for policies that liberals would like to think Democrats stand for: Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, projecting contrast with Dick Cheney on foreign policy. Even in the realm of realpolitik, Stein is more vocal about solving the procedural hurdles plaguing the Democrats than they are themselves, from packing the Supreme Court, which Biden has refused to consider even as the judiciary governs by minoritarian fiat; to abolishing the Electoral College, which Tim Walz briefly endorsed before the Harris campaign slapped that down; to ranked-choice voting, which would remove the risk of third-party spoilers (like Stein) tipping elections to the GOP.
Yet Stein also holds some very disturbing views. Much has been made of the infamous photo of her having dinner with Vladimir Putin in 2015, though I’m more bothered by her refusal to call Putin a war criminal just last month. She cited her own medical training to spread misinformation about vaccine safety, arguing that there are “real questions that needed to be addressed.” She celebrated Brexit as a “victory”, in stark contrast to how most leftists in the UK (including their own Green Party) saw it. She claimed Wi-Fi is harming children’s brains. Who knows how much of this she actually believes and how much is reflexive antiestablishment contrarianism. It’s alarming either way.2
Your mileage may vary on how to weigh the candidates’ respective flaws, and whether the heinousness of Stein courting anti-vaxxers and downplaying an autocrat’s atrocities supersedes all other considerations. (In which case I assume you apply the same moral standards to Pete Buttigieg and Michael McFaul, respectively.) Regardless, voting for Stein is not a rejection of the lesser-evil trap but an extension of it. Perhaps it is a compromise you find easier to stomach, but supporting such a shameless charlatan is not the expression of ideological purity that she would have you think.
Of course, voting Green is not just about Stein. A vote share in the mid-single digits would be a step towards true competitiveness in the medium term. Every state in which she does well enough to qualify for minor-party status lets subsequent Green campaigns skip the arduous task of securing ballot access. Reaching five percent nationwide would unlock millions in federal funds for the party in 2028. (Note that this is over 10 times the 0.4 percent vote share the Greens have averaged since 2004.) However, that wrongly presupposes that the Green Party cares about building power.
A common critique of the Democratic Party is that they have little interest in actually legislating. Far too many sloganeers who urged us to “vote for Biden, then push him left” immediately lost interest in the second part. Future historians will write volumes about the aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson, when the ostensibly pro-choice party held a federal trifecta, yet the only response from Biden — who had campaigned on codifying Roe v. Wade, promised to consider SCOTUS reforms, and pitched himself as uniquely skilled at bridging polarized gaps to get things done — was to urge Americans to vote for the same impotent leaders again.
But if you think the Democrats are allergic to the work of politics, consider how long it’s been since you’ve heard anything from the Greens between their vanity Presidential campaigns.
As much as it may feel otherwise right now, over the last few years the American Left has gained strength and influence unlike I’d ever seen in my lifetime. A self-described socialist was the runner-up in each of the last two seriously contested Democratic Presidential primaries, and both times was well-positioned to win in the general elections. The Squad are among the most-visible legislators in Congress. The growth and influence of grassroots groups like DSA, Reclaim, Sunrise, Black Lives Matter, and the Uncommitted campaign (to name a few) shows that there is ample appetite for leftist organizing and enthusiasm in our current political environment.
So where the hell have the Greens been? I’d wager that I follow Green Party news far more closely than the average voter, and I can’t recall a single substantive thing the national party has done since Biden’s inauguration besides sponsoring Stein’s campaign. Why hasn’t the party been visible in supporting any of the myriad recent protest movements? What efforts have they made towards organizing, canvassing, and building coalitions? Do they think that doing nothing but scavenge for disillusioned liberals once every four years is a realistic path to victory?
The candidates will tell you that third-party campaigns are about the movements they represent, but most of their voters would tell say it’s about leverage, or making a statement. If a politician does not respond to ordinary forms of pressure from their constituents, the nuclear option is to not vote for them until they acquiesce. It’s an electoral game of chicken: Stein supporters generally understand what’s at stake with a Trump presidency, but insist it is Harris’ (or Biden’s or Clinton’s) job to come to them, not the other way around.
Tactics aside, the belief that our leaders owe us more than we do them is a bedrock principle of representative democracy. The modern Democratic Party seems to have this backwards. Liberals once rolled their eyes at Republicans voting for George W. Bush because they wanted to have a beer with him. Now they do the inverse, projecting strategic intelligence and personal goodness onto politicians just for being on the blue team. It manifests as refusing to hear criticism of Biden or Harris, because don’t you know the alternative is worse? This mindset is alienating to those who do not already share it. Engaging productively with Stein sympathizers means swallowing this parasocial defensiveness — like the vitriol Chappell Roan received for saying she would vote for Harris but was not enthusiastic about doing so — which only reinforces the feeling that the Democrats are not sympathetic to their issues.3
But if refusing to vote for a party is only way to make them hear critiques they’ve dismissed as unimportant, then supporting the Greens is enabling them, too. Because a political group whose only visible project is sponsoring Jill Stein for President is in desperate need of a wakeup call.
Who could possibly think running Stein a third time will be productive? Does anyone really believe that a candidate who managed just one percent of the vote against the least-popular set of major-party candidates in modern American history can reach five percent this time around? Are there people who see Stein, who demurred on vaccine safety and condemning Putin, as offering a uniquely inspiring vision for the future? How in the world can Green Party organizers reflect on their stunning failure to capitalize on widespread frustration with the major parties and a resurgence in grassroots organizing throughout the Stein Era and conclude: We should do this again?
I want to believe there is a path for a third party to effect change and move our Overton window to the left. Not only is today’s Green Party demonstrably disinterested in this goal, but by insisting on stalling out in the main left lane, Stein is actively impeding the development of a more-visionary alternative. If you accept the argument that a party will never change if you continue to vote for them, then supporting the Green Party is enabling their indefinite irrelevance.
The Greens had an opportunity to change course this summer. Before selecting Butch Ware as her VP nominee, Stein recruited Palestian activist Noura Erakat to be her running mate. Erakat had a condition for joining the ticket: Stein would offer to drop out of the race if the Democrats committed to a ceasefire in Gaza and an embargo on arm shipments to Israel. The Greens said no, and you can understand why. It is not their job to help Harris’ campaign, whether by conceding the election or by compelling her to adopt an overwhelmingly popular policy position.
Yet rejecting these terms perfectly encapsulated the myopia that plagues the Green Party. Erakat’s proposal would have connected Stein’s campaign to the energy of the spring’s Uncommitted movement. It would have flipped the eternal appeals to pragmatism back onto the Democrats: If they don’t want the Greens siphoning off their support, they just have to compromise. The odds of Harris accepting such a deal and Stein needing to suspend her campaign were been extremely low, which as Erakat noted meant there was nothing to lose by offering it.
And if by some chance the Democrats caved, it would establish the Greens as a serious constituency whose issues cannot be ignored. More urgently, it would end the genocide in Gaza, doing infinitely more good for the world than Stein could otherwise ever hope to achieve. It’s revealing that she was not interested in that.
I don’t expect to convince you to vote for Harris, and if you don’t live in a swing state I don’t particularly care to. I certainly would not deign to tell Arab and Muslim citizens, who are disproportionately likely to prefer Stein, that they must support the status quo that is killing their families and communities.4 But if you see your ballot as a statement of ideals rather than a method of harm-reduction, please consider what exactly you want your vote to stand for. I believe that a better world is possible. A party represented by Jill Stein isn’t interested in building it.
For the record, I wrote this passage before the DNC turned this inaccurate aphorism almost verbatim into a campaign commercial.
In my own defense, she said all of these things after 2012.
Understanding this is a useful signal for who actually cares about building a coalition to defeat Trump, and who is just punching left for sport.
If your reflex is to admonish them that Harris losing would bring them even greater harm, I would suggest instead considering how much pain the Biden administration has caused them if they are nonetheless unwilling to vote for continuity over Trump.