I have never heard of Jill Stein until just a few months ago when I saw some article about her on the Lemmy homepage. Then I saw more and more articles about her. However, I don’t really know why the media is paying so much attention to her. She is just a third party candidate, right? There are other third party candidates that aren’t constantly popping up in the news. So why Jill Stein? I hear its something to do with Russia and a general sense of her goal being to take votes away from Kamala.
The Russia thing goes beyond the dinner. She had attempted to (maybe actually has?) meet with him privately. She has also vacillated on Ukraine.
She’s had weird stances on vaccines, food (edit: GMOs), and even energy. It’s my understanding she’s privately invested in fossil fuels.
I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I voted for Jill Stein in 2016.
In my defense, I didn’t think Trump had a chance, and I definitely didn’t expect him to be as terrible as he eventually proved. I was feeling salty about the DNC not giving Bernie a fair chance in the primaries (how and why, I don’t remember) and Hilary just felt like she was constantly condescending and not even trying to earn the presidency. It felt like someone decided it was her turn and they’d just slide her into her rightful throne.
My vote for the green party was official record that they hadn’t earned my vote, even though I would never vote for Trump.
I’m sure my one single vote wouldn’t have changed anything, but I bet there are plenty of others that felt the and did the same, and still regret it.
I’m still salty about Bernie being sandbagged. Not a big fan of how Kamala was shoved in either, but she’s impressing me more than I expected, I just hope it’s enough.
Since she’s the VP, it doesn’t feel dirty. Joe stepped down, she steps up, that’s what we hired her to do.
I just hope it’s enough.
Yeah that was really some trash and made me furious. The one guy just directly stating all the ways we need to help the working class and also saying basically fuck the rich, with the career-long credentials to back it up, and instead we got force-fed Hillary. She was so unlikeable and entitled, it set the Dems (and shit, maybe even women in leadership as a whole) back by like 10 years. Cuz she acted like a shitty stereotype about women that fed right into the misogynists. Such a colossal fuck up, and that really is putting it mildly. I deleted a whole screed of even more forceful complaining, lol.
I did similar, I’m ashamed to admit, except slightly worse - I actually just didn’t vote at all, thinking I was really making my dissatisfaction clear that way. What a dumbass I was, and for the same reasons you described. And while a lot of that was undeniably true and a problem, I also now feel fairly sure the “don’t vote / vote 3rd party” push was an op, and I fell for it like a dope.
I’ve voted in every election I’ve been eligible for before and since 2016, and I will never allow myself to drop the ball like that again. Fuck the DNC but we gotta fight like hell to keep things from getting even worse and they’re all we’ve fuckin got at the moment.
Don’t feel guilty it depends on where you lived. I voted green party I believe but I live in Delaware and that won’t affect the race outcome at all
I did the math after someone else said the same thing.
Green votes handed Pennsylvania to Trump.
Jill Stein is a Green candidate which means she’s going to pull left leaning support away from Kamala Harris.
If she pulls away enough people in a handful of states, she could throw the election to Donald Trump.
2016 is a primary example:
Pennsylvania:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election_in_Pennsylvania
Trump - 2,970,733
Clinton - 2,926,441
Difference: 44,292
Stein? - 49,941Michigan:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election_in_Michigan
Trump - 2,279,543
Clinton - 2,268,839
Difference: 10,704
Stein? - 51,463Wisconsin:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election_in_Wisconsin
Trump - 1,405,284
Clinton - 1,382,536
Difference: 22,748
Stein? - 31,072If Clinton had won those three states, Trump would not have been President.
Stein is not the only factor, Clinton had other issues. She badmouthed coal miners which guaranteed a loss in PA and utterly failed to campaign in MI and WI which was not helpful.
But the Clinton fans who can’t accept how deeply, deeply flawed Clinton was as a candidate want to blame Stein…
And Putin. There are issues with Stein getting support from both Republicans and Russia, anything to hurt Democratic candidates.
Why do your figures show a question mark after stein?
The question being “What did Stein get?”
Nader, bush, gore
Here are some of the common complaints about Jill Stein:
As the Green Party candidate she will pull in more third party votes than most (if not all) of the other parties. While those views are usually trivial in number in the grand scheme of things, they can have a big impact in let seeing states.
She has not gone out of her way to criticize Trump, and has instead treated both Trump and Harris as being equally bad, even though Trump is arguably much more anti-environmental than Harris.
This isn’t her first time coming in as what’s seen as a Democrat vote-spoiler candidate.
From the perspective of some, she pops up every four years to try to take votes off the Democrat candidate and then seemingly disappears for another four years.
She has a bit of a cult of personality thing going on - arguably moreso than either Harris or Biden.
She’s in her mid-70s, and so no spring chicken. This has become more of a concern this cycle because a) she’s for years older than she was in 2020 (obviously), b) age has become more of a point of concern given how both Biden and Trump have apparently seen marked cognitive decline at less than 10 years her seniors.
There’s some evidence to suggest she is cozy with Putin, who is clearly does not have America’s best interests in mind. For example, she was photographed at a fancy dinner sitting at the same table as him and several of his ‘crew’ (among others). The common excuse for this is “she didn’t choose her seating!” But equally there’s no reason she couldn’t have got up and moved or left the event.
Photo of the dinner in question, with labels:
I’m sure there are other points I’m missing. But those are the ones that spring to mind.
She has not gone out of her way to criticize Trump, and has instead treated both Trump and Harris as being equally bad…
I’m sold.
Funnily enough in 2016 I looked into her platform after Bernie was pushed out. And honestly I agreed with just about everything she was running on, except for one thing. She was pushing anti vax stuff and it was enough for me not to vote for her. I feel that strongly about vaccines and public health concerns.
Her intentions is not to be a spoiler, she’s not, she’s filled all the legal requirements to run for office of president and is allowed to be on the ballot. She is just getting a lot of attention in this current race because the margin is razor thin between the two main line candidates and that has people nervous Kamala could lose like Hillary did in 2016.
Personally as an independent voter that feels continually ignored by the by the right and left, third parties can be an attractive choice for some. Honestly, if the left or right want to court my vote they could produce better candidates. Let me say Kamala is a great choice, my issue is how she got there. I feel if Biden had decided to not run for reelection before election campaigning started and allowed other democrats to throw their hat in the ring it would have the appearance of a properly run election cycle for democrats. As for republicans they need to drop trump and his brand of mean spirited politics and have an honest return to the middle right vs where they are now at the far right. Anyways those are my thoughts on Jill Stein, third parties and the left and right. I already did early voting so my choice is done, if you care at all about the direction this country is going or needs to go, GO FUCKING VOTE! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GO VOTE!
I had that all written and had one last thought. Now I do actually think Stein could spoil NC, she is on the ballot and the person most likely to win the governor in NC also has the last name Stein. A conversation I actually had while standing in line with an aging neighbor, she has a tough time getting around and asked if I’d take her early voting when I was going absolutely not a problem. But in line looking over a sample ballot I had to explain to her that Jill Stein and Josh Stein are not related in any way. So the fact there are two Stein’s on the ballot might make it confusing for some voters. Ok enough out of me, go vote.
as an independent voter that feels continually ignored by the by the right and left
A party in the U.S. of any relevance that could be described as “left-wing” would be news to me.
You’ve got a corrupt conservative party and an extremely corrupt "pro"gressive(regressive?) anti-democratic party.
third parties can be an attractive choice for some
Third parties are never an attractive choice for anyone in a first-past-the-post voting systems with two extremely dominant parties, regardless of what any of those parties stand for. The only sensible choice is the (in your opinion) least bad option that still has a realistic chance of winning.
Russian shill trying to siphon votes from Harris so that trump can get an undeserved win.
There is a meme going around blaming Jill Stein for “spoiling” the 2016 race. I was developing an relatively simple analysis to show how and why its ridiculous to propose that Jill Stein “spoiled” the 2016 election. Specifically, in no race did the green party candidate get more votes than the libertarian candidate. A great example is the headline meme that was up about a day ago here: https://lemmy.world/post/21038666?scrollToComments=true
https://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president/
So in Michigan, ~50k voters went to Stein. In that race, 170k went to Gary Johnson.
Pennsylvania, 48,912 to Stein, and for Gary Johnson, 142,653.
Wisconsin, 30,980 to Stein, and for Gary Johnson, 106,442.
So taking these three as an example, in none of these races, if you were to ‘remove’ the 3rd party candidates, would Hillary have won.
Likewise, the meme assumes that “all” of Green Party voters go to Hillary, and some how the Gary Johnson voters just evaporate.
It doesn’t really make sense at any level. Its part of a broader pattern of voter intimidation that seems to be mostly focused on defending a candidate that has been shown to be lacking, not at all different than what we saw in 2016. I didn’t bother finishing the analysis after a very brief look at the data, because it was so patently absurd to suggest that Jill Stein spoiled anything for anyone in 2016, when she literally did not beat Johnson in a single race.
