Trump is a fascist. Harris is problematic. The third-party options aren’t great either.

I wonder if elections around the world always feel like Groundhog Day, or if that’s just something uniquely American. If you thought 2024 would be a repeat of 2020, now that it’s Trump versus Harris and not Trump versus Biden, we’ve been dragged back to the horrors of 2016. Part of that repeat effect is the Jill Stein’s Green Party campaign.

When Hillary Clinton lost, liberal politicians and commentators made that loss about everything except the candidate they chose and the platform on which they ran. They blamed voters who wanted Bernie Sanders, a candidate and campaign that arguably changed the litmus for what progressive policies could be integrated into presidential elections. Even more vitriol was spared for those who voted for Stein as a protest vote after Sanders conceded to Clinton; Clinton actually Stein exclaimed in her 2017 memoir.

This time there are already several pieces floating all around the internet preemptively blaming third-party candidates and the voters interested in them for the Democrats’ potential loss, calling them a de facto vote for Trump. The Democrats, that one have previously largely ignored Steincame out swinging, running advertisements call her a “spoiler,” showing that they are threatened by the potential margins they fear could flip in swing states. The Washingtonpost reported last week that Stein’s campaign is receiving funding from a GOP-linked PAC, suggesting they think this could work to their advantage as well. (I’ll note that here WaPo owner and Amazon overlord Jeff Bezos decided that the publication would not receive support in the election, leading to legitimate concern that Bezos is trying to pave the way for a more corporate interest-friendly admin with Trump, which he denies.)

These screeds about Stein don’t really dig into her politics at all; fair enough, since she has no chance of winning the presidency. She never held any position except one local position in Massachusetts more than a decade ago, and her record is one of consistently losing elections and then doing little except prepare for a rematch. (Stein took a break as a Green Party candidate in the 2020 election, which, as you may recall, was a 20-person Democratic primary.) David Faris of Slate states: “The Green Party is not a particularly serious political operation. The candidates have never won a federal election, and the vanishingly small number of successful candidates have been mostly at the municipal or state level.”