Don't Count Jill Stein Out

Camilo Gómez

Politics, Americas

She’s taken the Greens in a more serious direction—and could pull Hillary to the left.

Since 2000, when Ralph Nader was its presidential candidate, few things have been heard about the Green Party. While initially the party promoted itself as beyond left and right, now the party, like its European counterparts, is more or less a left-wing party, or what in America is called progressive. Jill Stein is now their nominee, and while she also ran in 2012, it seems that only since this campaign has she received name recognition and media attention.

Stein has an incredible curriculum vitae, having majored in anthropology, sociology and psychology at Harvard University, then graduated as a doctor from Harvard Medical School, working in private practice for many years. She got into politics in 2000 with Ralph Nader’s campaign. In 2002 she ran as the Green Party gubernatorial candidate in Massachusetts, even making it to the debate against Mitt Romney. In 2011 she was recruited to run for president as the candidate of the Green Party.

In 2012 Jill Stein faced a unsuspected challenge—comedian Roseanne Barr, a relatively famous person—but she managed to defeat her in the primaries, and in the general election, while falling behind the Libertarians, they managed to beat another progressive challenger, former Salt Lake City mayor Rocky Anderson, who ran for the newly formed Justice Party. She ran a more or less average progressive campaign: free college education, universal health care, environmentalism, public jobs programs and an antiwar foreign policy. She called her plan the Green New Deal.

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