I wonder if elections around the world still feel like Groundhog Day, or if it’s just an American quirk. If you thought 2024 would be a rehash of 2020, now that it’s Trump versus Harris and not Trump versus Biden, we’ve been taken back to the horrors of 2016. Part of that repetition effect is the Jill Stein’s Green Party campaign.

When Hillary Clinton lost, liberal politicians and commentators lost everything except the candidate they chose and the platform they ran on. They blamed voters who wanted Bernie Sanders, a candidate and campaign that was arguably a game-changer for progressive policies that could be incorporated into a presidential election. Even more vitriol was reserved for those who voted for Stein as a protest vote after Sanders conceded to Clinton; Clinton actually called Stein in his 2017 memoir.

This time, there is already several pieces floating around THE Internet preemptively blaming third-party candidates and voters who care about them for the Democrats’ potential loss, characterizing them as a de facto vote for Trump. The Democrats, who have previously mostly ignored Steincame out swinging, ad serving call him a “spoiler”“, showing that they are threatened by the possible margins that they fear could tip in the swing states. THE Washington Post reported Last week, Stein’s campaign received funding from a GOP-linked PAC, suggesting they think it could work in their favor as well. (I will note here that WaPo Amazon owner and overlord Jeff Bezos decided the publication would not support the election, leading to legitimate concern that Bezos is trying to lead the way for an administrator more friendly to corporate interests with Trump, which he denies.)

These speeches about Stein do not touch on his politics at all; that’s fair enough, considering she doesn’t have a chance in hell at the presidency. She has never held a position beyond one local post in Massachusetts over a decade ago, and her record is this: she has consistently lost elections and has only been preparing to run again. (Stein took a break from running as the Green Party candidate in the 2020 elections, which, as you may recall, had a 20-person Democratic primary.) David Faris of Slate states: “The Green Party is not a particularly serious political operation. Its candidates have never won a federal election, and the tiny number of elected candidates are mostly at the municipal or state legislative level.