AOC is right: Jill Stein’s campaign is not serious
AOC is right: Jill Stein’s campaign is not serious
For democracy’s sake, the Green Party must grow. Stein won’t do it in 2024
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently made headlines for calling perennial Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein “predatory” and “not serious.” AOC is right.
Giving voters more choices is a good thing for democracy. But third-party politics isn’t performance art. It’s hard work — which Stein is not doing. As AOC observed: “[When] 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 be clear: AOC was not critiquing third parties as a whole, or the idea that we need more choices in our democracy. In fact, AOC specifically cited the Working Families Party as an example of an effective third party. The organization I lead, MoveOn, supports their 365-day-a-year efforts to build power for a pro-voter, multi-party system. And I understand third parties’ power to activate voters hungry for alternatives: I myself volunteered for Ralph Nader in 2000, and that experience helped shape my lifelong commitment to people-first politics.
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These third party types always claim that they want to reform the system. That's bullshit. If you want to reform this system then you need to start at the bottom. You need to recruit candidates and invest in winning at local and state level first. Those are the most winnable offices for an outsider/independent. Hell, win a few critical states and you can get enough states in the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact which, while not an ideal solution, would be a good first step in reforming the system.
Once you have some power and recognition at the state level, you need to aim for Congress. Start winning seats in the House and Senate and you can really start making change. That is where the real power of change resides. How many times have we seen a president with a divided House and/or Senate have their policy goals effectively neutered by legislative antagonism? Without support from the House and Senate, a 3rd party president would be powerless.
Stein cannot possibly enact positive change even if there were a literal miracle and she became president. The only thing, literally the only thing she can do by running for President is get Trump elected.
113AOC is correct indeed.
92If Left-Wing Third Parties are serious, they will start by running their candidates as spoilers in the Democratic Primary and appealing to voters to listen and add their platforms to the list of priorities to push the Dems on. They'd simultaneously work hard to get Ranked Choice passed nation-wide as that system is the most compatible with our country's political system. Once they get that passed, they would join efforts to reform the Electoral College so it doesn't require 270 votes, an then implement a more effective voting system for President that ensures that left-wing voters don't get a Right-Wing president elected voting for Third Party options. They would also push hard to win at the City, County, and State levels, as well as in the Congress, so the Jill Steins of the world have friendly legislators to rely on.
Ocasio-Cortez is right to call this out.
81How long has stein been campaigning and didn't know basic information about Congress.
She's either not serious, an imbecile, or porque no los dos?
That means why not both, Jill.
49Go watch her breakfast club interview. So transparent that they are pandering with hollow buzz word mention. The hosts call her out pretty well. If they are real about an issue like ranked choice voting, then I want to see you become the face of that issue publicly for the next 4 years, until it's passed into law through consensus and politicking, in a way that the green party clearly earns a place in a tangible victory.
You won't, that's not what you're being funded for, but that's what you'd do if you actually cared.
41It's pretty much completely impossible for a third party candidate to ever win. You have to get 270 (just over half) of all the electoral votes. If any third party made a huge amount of headway it'd still be almost impossible to take enough votes from the repubs or democrats to hit 270, and anything less than 270 means the House gets to decide who becomes president. Obviously, the house filled with democrats and Republicans, would never select the third party candidate.
27<astronaut gun meme>
It never was.
26Yeah, I feel like a serious candidate for president would know how many Representatives are in the House.
21I'm commenting this a few times, but Alaska has implemented ranked choice, has a number of environmentalists and does outsized damage to the environment. If they were serious they'd run in state elections there, and four congress there. They are not.
19At her peak, Jill Stein broke just above 1%.
18Exactly this. That woman is always vapor until an election year.
11John Oliver convinced me that Jill Stein is a dumbfuck back in 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3O01EfM5fU
10This is a lot of reading for so early in the morning. I’ll wait for the Jon Oliver expose on her. His RFK episode didn’t disappoint.
6Neither is trumps but he gets all the airtime
3🔫👩🚀 "Never was."
2Our of curiosity, and because I couldn't immediately find anything. Is MoveOn actively trying to change the voting system itself?
1She should change to democrat so people start taking her seriously and unceremoniously dump her vulture ass along a lonely highway
-4Salon - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report)
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https://www.salon.com/2024/09/16/aoc-is-right-jill-steins-campaign-is-not-serious/
-7The post-Nader Green Party is a joke, but the DNC is the party of Reagan and Cheney, so... Those in glass political parties that serve only to undermine the left electorate's political power shouldn't throw stones
-19This thread is sitting on the front page of Lemmy for a while now so I'll share my thoughts.
I will only ever vote for a 3rd party. I made that promise to myself after 2016, so I don't really care if people think that means it's effectively a vote for Trump. Because I wasn't going to vote for the Democrats anyways.
A slow slip into facism doesn't appeal to me.
-20Unfortunately the Democrat, and Republican parties, are both Traitors to the Republic. As much as I've liked her positions on issues I care about. AOC needs to sit down and shut up. She's in a party of Traitors.
-36AOC is not serious. She went to the border to see the conditions under trump and cry on camera but never went back to see if conditions were still bad under biden. She doesn't care about border conditions it was just a partisan stunt.
She's clearly running defense for kamala by ridiculously claiming that kamala is "working tirelessly" for a ceasefire in gaza.
Jill Stein and the green party do not "just show up" every 4 years, they are always putting in the work but they only get media attention once every 4 years because there's a presidential election.
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