Over the last several years, much ink has been spilled over the fact that one of America’s political parties has been captured—if not contorted into an outright cult of personality—by an aging, megalomaniacal autocrat apologist and repeat loser who cares about little outside accruing power and personal enrichment. You are probably conjuring the image of Donald Trump. You’re not wrong, but this dynamic actually applies to two of America’s political parties: the GOP under Trump and the Green Party under Dr. Jill Stein.
Stein, now in the midst of her third long-shot bid for the White House, has been largely ignored by both major-party nominees—that is, until recently. As reported by The Bulwark’s Marc Caputo, in just the last few days, Democrats appear to have launched an effort to snuff out her campaign. Last Monday, DNC spokesperson Matt Corridoni released a statement reading: “Jill Stein is a useful idiot for Russia. After parroting Kremlin talking points and being propped up by bad actors in 2016 she’s at it again. Jill Stein won’t become president, but her spoiler candidacy—that both the GOP and Putin have previously shown interest in—can help decide who wins. A vote for Stein is a vote for Trump.” Corridoni’s criticism was likely spurred by a recent Stein event in Tampa, where she championed the cause of three members of the African People’s Socialist Party indicted back in April for participating in a “malign influence campaign” on behalf of the Russian government.
On Thursday, famed comms knife-fighter and DNC operative Lis Smith tweeted a video of Stein floundering in response to a question from Angela Rye on The Breakfast Club about the number of members in the House of Representatives. “WOW” Smith wrote, “Jill Stein doesn’t know how many members of the House there are in Congress. 600?!?! Just the latest sign she’s a deeply unserious candidate only there to help Trump win.”
Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined the fray as well, circulating another clip from The Breakfast Club interview with the caption: “Nobody needs talking points to know Jill Stein hasn’t won so much as a bingo game in the last decade and if you actually give a damn about people, you organize, build power and infrastructure, and win.” It was the second broadside AOC sent Stein’s way last week. On Sunday, the congresswoman posted a now viral video to Instagram eviscerating the Green standard-bearer.
“Y’all, this is a little spicy, but I have thoughts,” Ocasio-Cortez began. “What I have a problem with is the fact that if you’re running for president, you are the de facto leader of your party.… Trust me on this, I’ve run as a third-party candidate in New York. I’ve also run as a Working Families Party candidate in addition to running as a Democrat.… I’ve been on record about my criticisms of the two-party system, so this is not about that.… If you run for years and years and years and years in a row, and your party has not grown and you don’t add city council seats and you don’t add downballot candidates and you don’t add state electeds, that’s bad leadership. That, to me, is what is upsetting. If you have been your party’s nominee for 12 years in a row, four years ago and four years before that and four years before that, and you cannot grow your movement pretty much at all and can’t pursue any successful strategy, and all you do is show up once every four years to speak to people who are justifiably pissed off, but you’re just showing up once every four years to do that, you’re not serious. To me, it does not read as authentic, it reads as predatory.”
How has Stein fared as a leader? By AOC’s perfectly reasonable standard, she’s done abysmally. 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.
This meager coalition can’t possibly kick-start a legitimate political movement, capable of organizing voters and advancing ideas outside of perennial electoral events. It’s just large enough, however, to spoil the work of those who put in this kind of work. That’s why even if you put aside Stein’s toxic brand of leadership, Democrats’ broader disdain for Stein is understandable. Back in 2016, had Pennsylvanian, Michigan, and Wisconsin voters cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton in lieu of Stein, Trump never would have entered the Oval Office. Naturally, reasonable people can argue that Clinton herself should have been capable of doing more in those states to win (at the very least, she could have stepped foot in Wisconsin). Fair enough: But unleashing the MAGA king on the American people is far from the only reason many find Stein detestable. Leaving the complaints and condemnations of Democrats aside, the people who should be most aggrieved with Stein are anyone who aspires to have a functional, effective Green Party. As long as she’s mixed up with it, it’s dead in the water.
The Ivy League–educated doctor is less an earnest political practitioner than a cynical narcissist addicted to media attention—much like the man she put in the White House. In 2016, to much fanfare, she crashed the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia with a Fox News crew in tow. Later that year, she used an interview with Politico to describe Clinton as a far greater threat to the American system than Donald Trump: “Donald Trump, I think, will have a lot of trouble moving things through Congress.… Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, won’t.... Hillary has the potential to do a whole lot more damage, get us into more wars, faster to pass her fracking disastrous climate program, much more easily than Donald Trump could do his.” Curiously, in earning her two Harvard degrees, it seems Stein never took time to learn how the Supreme Court works, or who gets to appoint replacements to it. When Stein hasn’t been busy lobbing patently deranged criticisms at centrist Democrats, she’s worked to smear progressives. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, for example, is a D.C. insider “corrupted” by corporate money, according to Stein—a bizarre charge, given that she herself has received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Google, Lockheed Martin, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and McKinsey.
Indeed, Stein has long had a complicated relationship with money. As Yashar Ali reported for The Daily Beast in 2017, the Green Party icon has a particular penchant for railing against big banks, Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Carbon, and defense contractors while simultaneously holding sizable investments in them via mutual or index funds. Ali noted that “on October 26, 2015, Stein’s campaign sent out a statement calling for Exxon to get the death penalty for its ‘climate-change fraud.’ Yet, according to her financial disclosures, Stein has invested $995,011 to $2.2 million in funds such as Vanguard 500 that maintain significant stakes in Exxon and other energy companies like Chevron, Duke Energy, Conoco Phillips, and Toho Gas.”
To be clear, making use of mutual and index funds is an extremely common practice in Washington—even by avowed progressives. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, for a time, was even invested in the same Vanguard fund as Stein. However, the Green Party leader’s predilections for hard-line purity tests and uber-priggish rhetoric are difficult to square with her wealth management.
Always quick to forgive herself for the sins for which she excommunicates others, Stein has defended herself in the past by asserting that she has no control over the investment decisions of the mutual and index funds that are enriching her. That is correct, but as Ali observes, “she did have a choice of whether to invest in these funds to begin with.” He continues, “While Stein claims that she had difficulty finding funds that aligned with her values, she didn’t explain why she chose to remain in funds that are completely disjointed from her values.”
Ali ends his piece by noting that Stein retired from teaching and medicine in 2006 in order to fully dedicate herself to politics—a decision likely only possible because of the payoff from investments in companies she claims to abhor.
Stein’s ethical compromises have led to meaningful results, as long as you’re not invested in the success of the party upon which she has so famously forced herself. The Green Party is arguably weaker now than it’s been in years. It’s quite literally become a laughingstock; social media erupted this week after it was reported that the Nevada Green Party inadvertently filed forms to put up “Jill Stein” as a public referendum question instead of as a candidate for president. It is to be hoped that the Green Party’s been so enfeebled by Stein’s leadership that it won’t end up electing Donald Trump president once again.
Perhaps one day the Green Party will blossom and become a real player in American politics, instead of the host body for a malignant egomaniac to cling to in perpetuity. Our politics could use some alternatives: With young people’s growing concerns around climate change, it would be beneficial if the Greens could send a candidate to be one of the House’s 435—not, as Stein would have you believe, 600—members in the next decade. For that to happen, though, the party will need to summon courage and good sense to dump Jill Stein once and for all.
