Jill Stein Is Killing the Green Party

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.