Jill Stein Wants To Punish You

We wish she would stop!

Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein has been spending a lot of time campaigning in Dearborn, Michigan, lately.

On Sunday, Stein was in town to accept the endorsement of the “Abandon Harris” campaign. The group co-founded by Hassan Abdel Salam, a former professor at the University of Minnesota's Institute for Advanced Study, says their goal is to “punish” the Democratic Party. They say the Biden administration ignored their demands of an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and arms embargo on Israel. She was there again on Wednesday. We assume she’ll be there (checks calendar) 25 more times.

“The Democrats are running scared, and they should be scared,” Stein said to a crowd on Sunday of reporters and fewer than 100 people at Dearborn's Bint Jebail Cultural Center.

After the event, people were ushered into the lobby so the main hall could be reset for a funeral service. The deceased, I was told, had recently been killed in Gaza.

Stein has been courting voters from the area’s Arab and Muslim American communities. Dearborn has the largest concentration in the US. There’s about 100,00 voters in Dearborn, but hardly any participated in the Democratic primary. Out of the 11,340 who did, 4,526 voted for Joe Biden, and the other 6,432 voted “uncommitted.”

Polling, for whatever it’s worth these days, has been scant.

One poll released last week by the Arab American Institute shows Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump virtually tied at 42 percent to 41 percent, with another 12 percent supporting third party candidates. Another poll from the Council on American-Islamic Relations show shows 29.4 percent support for Vice President Kamala Harris, 29.1 percent for Stein; 11.2 percent for former president Donald Trump and 16.5 percent percent undecided. Those numbers are better for Harris than they were for Biden, but not by much. CAIR’S poll was conducted in late July/early August, right around the time Biden stepped aside from the race. A number of groups have announced they'll be voting for Harris, including Muslim Women for Harris and Emgage Action, and on Sunday, the leaders of the Uncommitted movement announced their support for the vice president.

But not Abandon Harris.

Stein was, “willing to take the blame when the vice president loses,” Salam said during Wednesday’s press conference. Abandon Harris leaders had met with other third party candidates, Salam said, and found “a partner” in Stein. Abandon Harris would “punish the vice president,” Salam said, and Stein will “take credit” were Harris to lose Michigan in the 2024 presidential election.

Stein famously got more votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in 2016 than the margin by which Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton. And yet she never seemed to want to take that blame or victory lap.

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein speaks during an event with Workers Strike Back and Abandon Biden endorsing her at the Bint Jebail Cultural Center in Dearborn, MI on Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024.

And yet when asked point-blank if she’s a spoiler, Stein says this is nothing more than “smears” by “the establishment.” She calls journalists asking difficult questions “plants” by the Democratic Party, and accuses people of attempting to sabotage her campaign. When questioned over the allegation that her campaign has been funded by groups aligned with the GOP, Stein tenses up, wrinkles her face and leans in. She waves her hand and says there's no evidence to support the claim, and even if it were true, she's not aware of it (FEC reports show Stein has less than $2 million heading into Election Day). And the claims of Russian internet fuckery? She doesn’t know anything about it, and it’s overblown.

Except she does, and it’s not.

In 2018, the Senate Intelligence Committee detailed how in 2016 Russia's Information Research Agency deliberately targeted Black voters in a campaign to either discourage them from voting at all, or to encourage them to vote for Jill Stein. The report specifies that right-leaning candidates didn't receive similar treatment. During the investigation, Stein’s campaign objected to subpoenas for documents from “Russian persons, or representatives of Russian government, media, or business interests” connected to her campaign, arguing that subpoenas targeted people who, “happen to be Russian immigrants or of Russian descent.”

Stein’s campaign is confident she can defy the odds and logic to win in 2024. And, for the sake of argument, let’s just assume she did: Politics is all about building coalitions, and in a bitterly divided House and Senate with razor-thin margins, it’s unlikely Stein would ever pass anything. Republicans detest every position she espouses, even if they never openly acknowledge her candidacy. Democrats publicly loathe and deride her, like a contemporary Marion Berry without a constituency, or comical shenanigans.

The congressional make-up during the first two years of the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations were overwhelmingly skewed in favor of those newly elected presidents, and they still had trouble passing any signature bills. Obama's universal coverage plan was murdered by Sen. Joe Lieberman and insurance companies, and they compromised with a nationalized version of Romneycare with the employer-mandate. Trump's desire to build a wall along the US-Mexico border was repeatedly defeated by Nancy Pelosi, his attempt at repealing Obamacare was shot down by Republican Sen. John McCain, and the only thing he really got through was Rep. Paul Ryan's massive corporate tax break that they simply rebranded as the “Tax Cut and Jobs Act.” Joe Biden did magical things with a plus-none Senate and a barely there House, but as good as the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS and Science Act are, we could have had home health care, an expanded Child Tax Credit, and so much more, if he had a couple more Democrats in the Senate who weren’t Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.

But there aren’t any Green Party legislators in Congress. And there really aren’t any at the state level. Much of Stein’s agenda requires congressional legislation to be enacted, whether it’s climate policy, budget and tax policy, renegotiating international treaties, a retrenchment of NATO in Eastern Europe, a reduction in the US protection maneuvers protecting international trade routes …

But people voting for Stein don’t seem concerned with any of this.

JIll Stein speaks at an Abandon Harris press conference at the Henry Ford Centennial Library's veterans memorial plaza in Dearborn, Michigan, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024.

They’re not concerned with whether not a second term by Trump could see an expansion of the “Muslim Ban” (Executive Order 13769, signed on January 27, 2017) as recommended in Project 2025. But it's something former Trump officials have discussed over the past year.

“Multiculturalism is, at its core, an anti-Western philosophy,” said Theo Wold, a former Trump DOJ official at the 2024 National Conservatism Conference in Washington DC. “It’s time not just to end mass immigration, but to reverse it. To rediscover American culture, not to multiculturalize it, to decolonize, then re- Americanize this country.”

Tom Homan, Trump's acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), took it a step further in his NatCon speech, wrapping it up with, “Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation operation this country has ever seen. They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”

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