AVELLINO: Beware Stein's siren call
This presidential election is going to be frustratingly close.
Most polls show Vice President Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) with a meaningful, but not insurmountable, national lead against former President Donald J. Trump (R-Fla.).
Those numbers narrow considerably when looking at the relevant swing states. Nate Silver, an elections pundit, considers Pennsylvania to be Harris' "tipping point state," the prize that would guarantee Harris 270 electoral votes. It is a dead heat, and so are a lot of other swing states Harris hopes to carry in November.
This is quite upsetting to me. The Republican Party is committed to banning abortion, raising taxes for the poor to cut taxes for the rich and rejecting the results of a democracy if they do not like what America chooses.
That is pretty bad!
But we have an electoral college bias in favor of Republicans and most Americans (wrongly) say they are worse off than they were four years ago. Vice President Harris and the Democratic Party basically have to run a perfect race with no room for error and still have to get lucky. There is no room for anyone to spoil this election.
Enter Jill Stein.
I am sympathetic to not liking Vice President Harris or the Democratic Party at large. Like some Rutgers students, I voted uncommitted in the New Jersey Democratic primary when Israel crossed a "red line" and began a ground assault on Rafah without punishment. I do not love a lot of the misguided strategic and substantive positions Democrats take.
Dr. Jill Stein, an unqualified and unserious person who has already handed the presidency to Trump once before, is not the solution.
There are a lot of reasons to dislike Stein. As someone with an eye for policy, I find her to be completely unserious in any of her proposals. Her campaign website issues page is a giant wishlist of proposals that neither she nor I have any idea how to pass. And a lot of it seems to just be messaging potshots at progressive Democrats.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) proposed Medicare For All? Stein has "Nationally Improved Medicare For All."
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced the Green New Deal? Pfft. That pales in comparison to Stein's "Real Green New Deal"!
These will both presumably be passed after she unilaterally "Abolish(es) the Electoral College" and passes a "Homes Guarantee." Do we know what any of these proposals substantively mean or how they will get passed? Of course not.
This kind of unseriousness caught her in 2016 as well when she got called out by John Oliver for not understanding what quantitative easing is or if the President can even "do" quantitative easing (they cannot).
It also caught her on The Breakfast Club, a popular New York radio show co-hosted by Charlamagne Tha God, when Angela Rye questioned her inability to correctly answer how many U.S. Representatives there are or how many of them are Stein's allies.
Part of that is because she is much further left-wing than most Democrats. But even progressives are probably turned off by her history of vaccine skepticism, which has indirectly killed thousands of Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic and reintroduced measles into the public.
Or maybe those progressive Democrats are turned off by her friendly stances toward Russia. Stein has repeatedly blamed the U.S. for Russia's invasion of Ukraine and claimed she would end proxy wars (of which she claims the Russia-Ukraine War is one). Not that I am surprised, given her relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which is quite strange for an American doctor.
Or maybe those progressive Democrats do not like her because they see the phoniness for what it is.
In an Instagram interaction that went viral, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) was asked how to convince a user's friends to not vote for Stein. AOC pulled no punches:
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. To me, it does not read as authentic, it reads as predatory."
What has Stein actually accomplished for left-wing politics in those 12 years? I have no idea.
I know that, in 2016, Stein's margins in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan potentially cost Hillary Clinton the election.
I know that after Stein's peeling away of progressive votes cost Clinton the election, she raised $7.3 million for recount efforts, which nearly $1 million never got spent or filed as of 2018.
And I know that none of that time, effort and money went to building a real alternative to the two-party duopoly.
Because Stein does not care about left-wing politics, creating a ceasefire in Gaza or giving people healthcare. This is not the behavior of a serious left-wing candidate for President of the U.S. This is a pro-Russian vaccine-skeptic who charades as a progressive populist and only shows up to try and steal votes from Democrats for the benefit of the Republican Party.
Two candidates fit that description: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Jill Stein. And when the fight for democracy, dignity and a woman's right to choose is on the line, no one should waste their time with either.
Noble Avellino is a senior in the School of Arts and Sciences majoring in economics and minoring in political science. Avellino’s column, “Noble’s Advocate,” runs on Mondays.
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