“[If] 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.” This was how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez characterised Greens Party leader Jill Stein’s third run for US president. “To me, it does not read as authentic. It reads as predatory.”
It seems that the Democrats, having largely ignored Stein’s candidacies in 2012 and 2016, are looking to swiftly discredit what they are calling a “spoiler” campaign. Stein, a physician until she decided to pursue politics in the early 2000s, managed more than 1 million votes in 2016. The evidence suggests, however, that she did not have a similar effect to Greens Party candidate Ralph Nader in 2000, whose performance in Florida arguably won George W. Bush the US presidency, who claimed Florida’s electoral votes by fewer than 600 ballots.
Who is Jill Stein?
In this campaign, Stein has targeted voters who are furious with the Democrats’ stance on the Middle East, saying that the horror visited on Gaza by Israel is a “very dire situation that will be continued under both Democrats and Republicans. So we say there is no lesser evil in this race”. She has been rewarded with the endorsement of Abandon Harris, a group dedicated to voters disillusioned on that issue.
Indeed, the Democrats’ attack on Stein stems largely from her greater urgency in preventing them from taking office than Donald Trump. In 2016 she told Politico that if Trump won, he would “have a lot of trouble moving things through Congress … Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, won’t … Hillary has the potential to do a whole lot more damage, get us into more wars, faster to pass her fracking disastrous climate program, much more easily than Donald Trump could do his”.
Beyond partisan attacks, Stein has been criticised for the Greens’ lack of growth under her leadership (the party holds no state or federal office, and membership has dwindled from a 2004 peak of 319,000 to 234,000), as well as for failing to condemn dictators such as Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the latter of whom she shared a table at the 10th anniversary of Russian state broadcaster RT.
Then there are the gaffes. Stein didn’t appear to know how many members of Congress the US had, and application mistakes made by the party in Nevada rendered Stein ineligible for the ballot in the state. But perhaps the most on-brand thing we could find about Stein is that she was part of a folk-rock duo called Somebody’s Sister in the mid-’90s.
Trump’s distinct Musk
The Apprentice, the biopic of Donald Trump’s rise to celebrity as part of the New York real estate scene in the ’80s, hits cinemas this week. Trump, predictably, has tried everything he can to discredit it, calling the film a “pure fiction” and “election interference” and threatening to sue.
Ali Abbasi — the Iranian-born Danish director who couldn’t enter the US thanks to Trump’s Muslim immigration ban when he was first offered the project — has insisted the film is “trying to understand Donald Trump as a human being”.
Meanwhile, Trump held a rally over the weekend at the same spot where he was nearly assassinated in July, sharing the stage with the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. Musk cavorted and jumped around like he was only just learning about the body’s capability to temporarily lift both feet from the ground.
You know the drill from there. Musk then told the crowd about the dangers facing democracy at the hands of Democrats, as the platform now known as X fills with misinformation (much of it amplified by Musk) and hate speech.
Harris’ heart belongs to Daddy
Demonstrating the continuing loss of relevance of mainstream media, Vice President Kamala Harris — who has largely shunned sit-down interviews with the major networks on the campaign trail so far — recently went on the immensely popular podcast Call Her Daddy.
It was a departure for the show, with host Alex Cooper opening by noting, “I do not usually discuss politics, or have politicians on this show,” and has previously said she rejected overtures from President Joe Biden’s team. The interview was relatively friendly, delving into reproductive rights in the US and Harris’ upbringing, while also giving the presidential nominee a chance to kick at Republican VP candidate JD Vance’s comment about “childless cat ladies”.
Helen Lewis in The Atlantic sums up the strategy of Harris’ appearance thus:
Call Her Daddy, which began as part of the notoriously fratty Barstool Sports network, has mellowed along with Cooper. Its listeners are neither anarchist feminists nor aspiring tradwives, but the great middle of American Gen Z straight(ish) women, who think sex before marriage is fun but also dream of settling down with Mr. Right. This group definitely leans Democrat, but Cooper’s Barstool connection means there will be conservatives listening too, as well as many women who might not vote at all.
