(Photo courtesy of The Columbia Chronicle) “Jill Stein speaks to small crowd”
Sabine Laurent de Cannon
Connector Editor
Jill Stein, the increasingly recognized Green Party candidate in the current presidential election, has been running for political office since 2002. Her first bid for office was as the Green-Rainbow Party’s candidate for Massachusetts Governor. Stein lost the race, coming in third place to Utah Senator Mitt Romney and then Massachusetts State Treasurer Shannon O’Brien. Stein received slightly above one percent of the vote, getting just under seventy-seven thousand and gaining most of her votes from Middlesex County. In 2010, Stein again ran for the same gubernatorial position, this time receiving significantly fewer votes than in her first candidacy. Middlesex County still gave Stein the most support overall. However, Stein could only scrounge up thirty-two thousand votes, getting eclipsed by the State Treasurer, Tim Cahill. Running as an Independent, Cahill took most of the votes not given to the Democratic and Republican players. It is also worth mentioning that he received a little over 110,000 more votes than Stein in her 2002 race, finishing with 184,395.
Just two years later, despite never winning an election (except for her board position on the Greater Boston chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility), Jill Stein became the Green Party’s nominee for president of the United States. Stein cited several reasons for her candidacy, including then-President Obama’s stance on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security and the general disapproval many Americans had regarding the two-party system. Stein was quoted as calling both Republicans and Democrats “corporate pets” and saying that the government was “frozen” with “democracy needing a reboot.” On election day, Stein received under one percent of the popular vote, a mere 469,627 total, and zero electoral college delegates to show for it. 2012 also happened to be Libertarian Gary Johnson’s first presidential run and, similarly to the previously cited gubernatorial race, Johnson was the third-party candidate who received the most votes from those who did not cast ballots for either Romney or Obama.
Then came the 2016 presidential election, when Stein revived her presidential bid on the internet show Democracy Now. Stein began polling and performing better than her 2012 run, even with the Senate Intelligence Committee’s election interference investigation. The investigation alleged the Internet Research Agency boosted Stein’s candidacy through social media posts that targeted minority and African-American voters in particular. Russian collusion was a huge talking point of the Trump v. Clinton race, and overall, Stein was a minute part of the much bigger picture. Regardless of her higher pre-election performance, Stein finished fourth place on election day, three million votes behind Gary Johnson, with just over one percent of the popular vote and no electoral college delegates. Stein did manage to gain above two percent of the vote share in a few states, but Massachusetts was not one of them. In her home state of Illinois, Stein received around 76,000 votes, placing her well behind Clinton, Trump, and Johnson.
As of September 2024, Jill Stein is running her most successful presidential campaign. She continues her streak of polling just over/under one percent nationally. However, Stein has been making the rounds in news cycles as being a potential threat to Harris and the Democratic Party due to her strategic polling within Arab and Muslim populations. In late August, the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) conducted a poll that concluded Stein was leading Harris among specifically Muslim voters in the swing states of Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The report also showed Harris and Stein tied in total, with 29.4% of the people surveyed saying they had a plan to vote for Harris and 29.1% saying they had a plan to vote for Stein. When asked about the significance of this polling, Department Chair Dr. Joshua Dyck stated “that polling, if true, would [only] matter in Michigan. It is the one state with a large Arab-American and Muslim population.” He continued, “I don’t know if I necessarily believe those polling results. It is a very hard claim to make that Jill Stein is actually doing that…unless you have an oversampling of Muslims…you won’t have enough for a sub-group analysis.”
As election day inches closer, analysts and pollsters agree that the race is still a tossup. Third-party candidates, even without much overall support, can have a very interesting effect on specific parties and candidates. Only on election day can the questions of Stein’s impact on Harris and the overall election be answered definitely. Until then, all candidates must strive to listen closely to their bases as well as the Independent and undecided voters to ensure they put their best foot forward come November 5th.
