No, Jill Stein Isn’t Responsible for Our Current Predicament

There were plenty of other opportunities to avoid judicial tyranny, outside of 2016…

Even as we head into what could be the most pivotal election cycle of our lifetimes (and this time, that isn’t hyperbole!), certain people still insist on finger-wagging and basking in learned helplessness. Perhaps nowhere is that more prominent than amongst the acolytes of Hillary Clinton who primarily blame Jill Stein for Clinton’s 2016 Electoral College loss.

A similar dynamic exists toward Ralph Nader from those who glorified Al Gore during the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election. But that’s an entirely separate article for another day.

Okay, pro-Gore / anti-Nader folks — are you triggered, yet?

If so…good! Because you need a reality check.

For those of you who don’t remember her, Jill Stein is a Massachusetts physician who was nominated by the Green Party to be their presidential nominee in 2016. After Stein’s share of the popular vote exceeded the difference between Hillary Clinton’s and Donald Trump’s vote totals in the three key battleground states of Wisconsin (my state!), Michigan, and Pennsylvania, partisan Democrats held Stein singlehandedly responsible for Trump’s ascent to the White House.

Well, maybe not singlehandedly. They also blame the 1.4 million of us who cast our presidential votes for Stein.

And, some of them blame the 4.4 million Americans who voted for Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson.

Or the nearly 63 million people who directly voted for Trump.

Or the 110 million eligible voters who stayed home altogether.

Basically, they blame anyone who didn’t fall in lockstep behind Hillary Clinton.

But, apparently, us Jill Stein voters are disproportionately to blame because “we should have known better.” Trump voters and Johnson voters — and the non-voters — supposedly were “lost causes.”

Now, according to them, everything Trump has done since then is on our shoulders.

All of the MAGA violence and cult-like thinking…our fault.

The right-wing judicial activism led by Mitch McConnell? Yep, our fault too!

The broken institutions of poverty, systemic racism, misogyny, electoral corruption, agricultural delivery, fossil fuel dependency, Wall Street crimes, crony capitalism, and supply-chain outsourcing. That blood is on our hands.

Because all of that would have gone away with a wave of President Hillary Clinton’s magic wand.

Why I Voted For Jill Stein

I’m going to be very candid about my thought processes when I cast my vote for Jill Stein on November 8, 2016. It wasn’t due to anger over how Bernie Sanders was treated (although I stand behind my belief that the 2016 Democratic primaries were a joke). Nor was it due to some delusion that Democrats and Republicans are “basically the same.”

Going into 2016, my single issue for the General Election was agricultural sustainability. After all, if our food supply goes down — so do all of us.

Trump, of course, didn’t utter one iota about sustainable agriculture throughout his campaign.

But, for the most part, neither did Clinton. She, instead, ran her campaign largely based on her gender, on regurgitated milquetoast talking-points directed at the Democratic base, and on the fact that she wasn’t Donald Trump.

Had she included a robust platform on domestic agriculture and food security as part of her presidential platform (while interweaving it into the debates), I would have voted for her.

But she didn’t…so I didn’t.

Sorry, but that’s the way political campaigns work. You ignore a voter’s anxieties at your own peril, when you run for office.

I agreed with less than 75% of Stein’s own platform. But I agreed with even less of Trump’s, Clinton’s, and Johnson’s approaches to the presidential campaign.

About a year before the 2020 presidential primaries, I met up with my old college friend/roommate, Andrew — who is now a city councilman in our old college town. Our dinner date was to brainstorm strategies for how to get Democrats elected up-and-down the ticket in 2020.

When he found out I’d voted for Stein, he was shocked. After I told him the reason for my vote, he remained incredulous.

“That’s what you based your vote on?” he balked, disapprovingly.

I proceeded to bring up many of the points I’m about to highlight throughout the rest of this article. But Andrew was unmoved. He insisted that those of us who’d declined to vote for Clinton needed to “take responsibility for” how we voted.

To this day, I’m still not sure what exactly he meant by that. I may never find out, if indeed that day marked the end of our friendship.

In hindsight, the only thing I “take responsibility for” is my regret that I’d never reached out to the Clinton campaign, many months before the primaries even began, and asked them to prioritize agricultural security on the campaign trail. But, even if I’d tried, I have my doubts as to whether they would have listened to me.

So now that you have a clearer idea of why I voted for Jill Stein, let’s move on to things Democrats have done wrong before and after that particular election…

Downticket Races in 2016

Due to what I refer to as “The Folkloric Infallibility of Hillary Clinton,” Democrats assumed she would be able to automatically provide coattails to their downticket candidates based on the historic nature of her potential presidency.

This was boosted by an underlying belief that Clinton possessed this mythical ability to “cut deals” and hypnotize Republicans into going along with pragmatic compromises. They assumed that all they needed to do was put Clinton at the top of the ticket and they could replicate the excitement that had trickled down to Democrats during the 2008 election when Barack Obama was running for the first time.

Guess what? They were wrong.

Democrats centered the entire 2016 campaign narrative around Hillary Clinton’s aura of perceived royalty. They thought they could piggyback off of her reputation (“She’ll get it done, because she’s HILLARY!”), and, if anyone pushed back against that narrative, the accusations would fly…

You’re selfish.

You’re childish.

You’re privileged.

You’re misogynistic (or “self-loathing,” if you’re a woman).

You’re just a Millennial with your head in the clouds.

You’re being unrealistic.

You don’t understand how politics works.

And then, those same partisan Democrats acted all flabbergasted when their bullying tactics backfired. (And, let me be clear: it wasn’t Clinton herself who was engaging in this name-calling and gaslighting — it was largely her self-appointed surrogates on social media, on TV, and along the campaign trail).

Maybe, instead of making everything “All Hillary, All The Time,” Democrats could have run a more inspiring assembly of House and Senate candidates to generate regional enthusiasm.

Maybe some of that enthusiasm would have “trickled up” to benefit Clinton herself on some voters’ ballots?

In Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race, Pat Toomey defeated Katie McGinty by less than 87,000 votes. Could McGinty have pulled out a win if she’d gotten support from a chunk of Pennsylvania’s 44,000 Stein voters, plus a bunch of Clinton voters who ended up crossing over to support Toomey, plus a critical mass of voters who got “ballot fatigue” and skipped the downticket races right after pulling the lever for Clinton?

I guess we’ll never know.

Same concept applies to our 2016 U.S. Senate race here in Wisconsin, where Ron Johnson defeated Russ Feingold by a little more than 100,000 votes. What if Feingold had gotten more of our 22,000 Stein voters, plus the Clinton/Johnson crossover drones, plus the “ballot fatigue” sloths?

For my part, I combined my Stein presidential vote with a downballot vote for Feingold in the U.S. Senate slot. When, months later, my county’s Democratic Party Chairman accused me of being “part of the problem” (after he found out I’d voted for Stein), I said to him:

“Well, I also voted for Feingold, downticket. So does that mean it’s ‘my fault’ Clinton lost Wisconsin, but it’s NOT ‘my fault’ Feingold lost our state?”

Downticket Races in 2018

Once Trump was in the Oval Office, the dumpster fire that became his presidency turned out an unprecedented number of voters who supported Democrats during the 2018 midterms. This resulted in the Democratic Party taking back the U.S. House of Representatives by 40+ seats.

However, they would go on to lose more than half of that net gain during the 2020 election (we’ll get to that, in a moment). Democrats also LOST two seats in the U.S. Senate during the 2018 cycle, even while winning back the House.

Missouri (where Josh Hawley defeated Claire McCaskill by less than 142,000 votes) and Florida (where Rick Scott defeated Bill Nelson by barely 10,000 votes) were both salvageable. But when I saw Trump holding rallies in Missouri and Florida less than a week before Election Day, I had a bad feeling Democrats were going to let those races slip through their fingers.

McGinty. Feingold. Nelson. McCaskill. That’s four U.S. Senate seats the Democrats could have occupied, today, if they’d funneled more resources to those candidates.

If they’d actually emphasized downticket synergy.

Subbing in Biden for Clinton

Unfortunately, national Democrats simply repeated this same ill-begotten recipe all over again in 2020. The difference was that they replaced Hillary Clinton with Joe Biden on the ticket, under the assumption that Biden was a “safe” choice due to being White, male, relatively centrist, and Obama’s vice-president.

Biden narrowly defeated Trump, but Democrats also suffered a net loss of U.S. House seats — retaining the chamber by only single digits.

Again, the DNC turned the race into “All Uncle Joe, All The Time!” rather than recruiting and creating superstars when it came to the downballot races.

The only reason I voted for Biden in November 2020 was to “stick it to” Bitch McConnell after he replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Amy Coney Barrett. In terms of agricultural policy, Biden has been consistently tone-deaf when it comes to the necessary solutions. It’s now up to his policy advisors — and Democrats in Congress — to help him see the light.

Democrats recaptured the U.S. Senate by the skin of their teeth — largely due to the tireless coalition led by Stacey Abrams and other Black women who propelled Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff over the top in the Georgia runoffs.

But how might the results have been different if more grassroots power had boosted Theresa Greenfield, Barbara Bollier, and Steve Bullock prior to Election Day? (or, if Chuck Schumer hadn’t cleared the field for a dumbass senatorial candidate who ended up having an extramarital affair in the middle of a presidential campaign season?)

The half-baked Biden-centric emphasis wasn’t helped by the excessive performative rhetoric that guilt-ridden liberal White people engaged in, following the murder of George Floyd.

I’m convinced that a big part of the reason why Democrats didn’t construct an alternative hashtag to #DefundThePolice was because they were trying to pander to Black voters by acquiescing to what they (mistakenly) assumed was a message embraced by BLM.

Gee, how’d that work out for everyone?

Mitch the Bitch

The point is: all of this underperformance by Democrats throughout 2016, 2018, and even previous election cycles, set the stage for Mitch McConnell to ram through a plethora of Trump’s unqualified right-wing judicial nominees.

Denying a single hearing for Merrick Garland, half a year before the 2016 election…and then promptly pushing through Amy Coney Barrett mere weeks before the 2020 election — what does such hypocrisy and mental gymnastics tell us about McConnell’s shameless nature?

If Clinton had become President in 2016, but Republicans had retained control of the House and Senate — what makes anyone so certain McConnell wouldn’t have stalled every single Clinton judicial appointee humanly possible? All while Congressional Republicans sabotaged her agenda at every turn?

In fact, we could probably cherrypick umpteen individual races that Democrats lost throughout 2010, 2012, and 2014. Virtually every single Republican pickup for the past twelve years has enabled the shilling for evangelicals and corporatists that remains alive to this very day.

But, apparently, none of those voters are to blame. Only those of us who pulled the lever for Jill Stein.

The Takeaway

Until Democrats acknowledge their own sectarian privilege — and get over their cult-of-personality, worshipping the likes of Hillary Clinton and Al Gore — we’re going to keep going around in circles.

I find it appalling how many of the same people still steeped in bitterness about Clinton’s loss of the Electoral College are some of the same ones so masochistically embracing “Dystopian Porn.”

Instead of rallying the American people to support a rebalancing of the judiciary, they just pout and whine about how “it’s going to take generations” to get things back to the pre-Trump status quo.

If you guys are serious about winning this year’s midterms, you’ll need to shed those canned talking-points and self-fulfilling prophecies.

Such elitist antipathy is a major part of the reason why Hillary Clinton lost the Electoral College in the first place

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