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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Thanks for linking the proof
Flags of convenience for local people elected to powerless neighborhood boards do not indicate the party itself actually did anything. It’s actually not even that. They claim any win by a member of the Green party who’s not a member of another party is a Green party win. So the criteria is more about the candidate themselves giving money to the Green party than any effort in the other direction. And no, winning neighborhood board seats is not the level of foundation needed to launch a presidential run.
Like I said, my state is a prime target for contesting elections from the left, but they do less than nobody parties organized around niche local issues. We’ve got low turnout, plenty of uninspiring neoliberal Democrats that are to the right of many voters (or even outright conservatives), and no real Republican party to worry about spoiling for. I’ve never even received so much as a flier from them. I had no idea they even fielded any candidates until well after the fact. This is possibly the best possible environment for Greens to come in and challenge the Democrats and it’s hard to even call their level of effort an afterthought. They fielded candidates in two whole races in the entire state.