Jill Stein: The Green Party candidate fighting to reshape America's 'broken' two-party system

On 5 November, voters across America will select their next president in what has been described as one of the most risk-laden elections in US history. The latest polling suggests the main two parties' respective candidates, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, are in dead heat.

The outcome will be decided in swing states, some of which are home to large numbers of Arab and Muslim American voters, who are traumatised by the US-backed Israeli war on Gaza and Lebanon. To them and many progressive voters, the choices on the ballot present a dilemma.

A vote for Harris could be a vote for the status quo in the Middle East, while a vote for Trump could bring about a much worse outcome, given the kind of transactional approach to foreign policy, music to the ears of the likes of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition. 

Many are considering voting 'uncommitted' in protest against both candidates. Others are considering 'third-party' figures, led by Jill Stein, the Green Party’s presidential candidate.

Third-party candidates like her, Cornell West, and Ralph Nader before her, were in the past blamed by Democrats when they lost for siphoning off votes in favour of Republicans. This time is no different. 

Recently, the Democrats ran their first ad campaign criticising the Green Party candidate. The television advertisement, issued by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), is running in the swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and says that “a vote for Stein is really a vote for Trump”.

But to Jill Stein, this is an argument she's all too aware of, and she dismisses it as scapegoating by the Democrats instead of looking into their own failure to listen. She recently said her supporters would never consider voting Harris anyway.

In a wide-ranging interview with The New Arab, Stein said if elected, her immediate priority would be a long-overdue “single call to end the war in Gaza and free Palestine”.

Stein’s Green Party has distinguished itself from the Democrats and Republicans over the past year by being the only party consistently calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, and now Lebanon, and urging an immediate end to arms sales to Israel.

While polling on average at around 1% nationally, Stein’s policy approach may yet have a significant influence in key battleground states such as Michigan, Arizona, and Wisconsin, where large Arab American and Muslim communities were instrumental in President Joe Biden's 2020 electoral success. That year, Stein did not run.

In Michigan, home to one of the largest Arab American communities in the country, Stein’s calls to change US foreign policy and hold Israel accountable for war crimes in Gaza has resonated with cities like Dearborn profoundly scarred by the deaths of relatives in Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon.

While polling data is always contested, research conducted in August by the Council on American-Islamic Relations found that 40% of Muslims in Michigan backed Stein’s Green Party, with Trump at 18% and Harris at 12%.

Yet in early October, data from J.L. Partners showed nationwide support for Harris was at 42% among American Muslims and 9% for Stein, while new polling conducted by the Saudi-owned Arab News Research and Studies Unit, along with YouGov, showed that Arab Americans are more likely to vote for Donald Trump (43%) than Kamala Harris (41%), with 4% backing Stein.

Fixing America's broken political system

From her early days, Stein says she tethered her political mission to the existential threats faced by people and the planet.

Just a year before his assassination, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that his country was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defence than on programs of social uplift - was one approaching spiritual death.”

From the moment she first absorbed MLK’s visionary address at 17 years old, Green Party presidential nominee Dr Jill Stein said his words struck a chord that has never faded. And now more than ever, the politician says, do these sentiments lay bare the stakes of the upcoming election.

Stein, 74, was born in 1950 in Highland Park, Illinois, a neighbourhood with a rich Jewish history dating back to the 20th century and one deeply impacted by the legacy of the Holocaust.

“There were lots of people in my community who had lost family or who had been in the death camps,” she told The New Arab.

“So this was a very defining generational question for me ... Is there life after genocide?” she asked. “And how do you ever find that sense of security and healing again?”

After graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1979, her activism grew, a result of her post-World War Two era upbringing anchored in human responsibility, as she says.

A young, conscientious Stein found solace in reform synagogues and the harmonies of a children’s choir. It was here where she began channelling her grief into a powerful communal promise of public service.

“I kept coming back to this very deep well of community strength, and I see us building it here now,” she said. “Once you have seen the imminent threats to humanity that we face, you cannot unsee them.”

For third-party candidates like Stein, who prioritise the integrity of their funding through grassroots contributions, the race for ballot access remains an ongoing impediment.

The Green Party is up against strongholds who welcome campaign cheques in the form of corporate bribery, PACs, super PACs, dark money, and “the many legalised forms of corruption that practically run our political system,” the presidential candidate said.

“This is all very dirty politics,” she stressed. “The problem is that we, as Americans, are a wholly owned subsidiary of big money. It’s the pay-to-play system. If you pay in, you get to have your own policies.”

Stein isn’t wrong. US presidential elections are increasingly expensive, “at this point, a billion-dollar enterprise,” Dan Weiner, director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s elections and government program, has said. 

Until now, the Green Party has made its mark on most state ballots and is featured in all battleground states vital to the election, except for Georgia and Nevada, where the party is actively pursuing legal action for inclusion. Still, nearly a dozen other states including Wyoming, North Dakota, and Kansas have denied her a spot on their voting slips.

Stein has accused the Democratic Party of hiring an "army of lawyers” to expel the Green Party from the ballot in at least three states back in August. 

With no write-in campaign to turn to, Stein’s campaign tracker paints a grim picture of her November presidential prospects. However, as she told The New Arab, “Even if we do not win the elections, we can ‘win the day’ by building the political momentum needed to end the genocide in Gaza and put an end to the imperial foreign policy that the war on Gaza represents”.

The most essential objective in this year’s campaign goes beyond securing the seat. “What many might not know,” she said, “is that we can ‘win the day’ by achieving 5% of the popular vote”. 

Such an achievement, difficult as it may be, would ensure automatic future ballot access and qualify her for public funding in 2028, enabling her to confront the legacy of the traditional two-party system and strengthen her pro-peace, pro-worker platform, and ultimately, usher her closer than ever to the Oval Office.

“Our political system has been entirely bought and paid for,” Stein said, referring to the widely regarded view of America as a for-profit war enterprise.

According to a report by Brown University’s Costs of War project, the Biden-Harris administration has given nearly $18 billion in security assistance to Israel for its wars on Gaza and across the Middle East over the past year alone.

“AIPAC and the Zionist lobby are in control. They’ve been in control for a long time,” she added. “In the same way that our health care is controlled by big pharma and the health insurance industry; in the same way that we have a housing crisis. And half of all Americans cannot afford to keep a roof over their head and are within one or two paychecks of getting evicted.” 

She labelled the state of domestic despair as the “American paradigm,” where, much like the persistent student debt and housing crises, empty promises and passive speeches of a ceasefire run rampant within the walls of the White House, failing to deliver any real resolution. 

Arab and Muslim Americans: Ignored by the two-party system

Despite her modest polling, the Green candidate’s policies on Gaza have popular backing across America. According to a June poll conducted by CBS, more than half of Americans are in favour of an end to Israel’s war. And it is exactly these people who have been abandoned by the current administration.

“Democrats are choosing to stay the course with genocide, rather than win these key swing states, and thereby the election,” Stein said. “How crazy is that? I mean, how incredibly screwed up are those values?” she added.

“They could lay down their arms, they could stop this horrific genocide right now, and abide by international law,” yet “they would rather remain resolute in maintaining the status quo”, she said, referring to when former US president Ronald Reagan famously dubbed Israel the ‘unsinkable battleship’ for the US in the Middle East.

“Here in America,” Stein emphasised, “[Israel] is regarded as a military base - a strategic perch from which we can conduct operations, exert influence, and control the flow of oil, deciding who has access and who doesn’t”.  

Still, Arab and Muslim Americans are broadly divided on which way to vote, with no candidate engaging in good faith with their concerns. Though some groups have endorsed Harris, such as Muslim Women for Harris and Emgage, others have come out against Trump without endorsing her. Some are even considering voting for Trump.

Yet many who previously voted for the Democrats say they cannot accept "another nose-holding November" this time, even if Trump would be worse for Gaza, as Bob McMurray, a Stein campaign volunteer told The New York Times.

Some younger Arab Americans agree.

For Ruby Darwish, 21, a Palestinian-American student majoring in journalism who also serves as vice president of SJP at Cleveland State University, this presidential election offers her a bittersweet milestone.

It marks her first opportunity to make her voice heard as an eligible voter, and she says there’s no better way to inaugurate this moment than by voting for a candidate like Jill Stein.

“The fact that she acknowledges Palestinians in general, with so much genuineness. That’s what creates that trust between our community and her,” Ruby said. “It’s all about the candidates who truly show up for us, who humanise us, unlike Kamala and Trump who think they are on a high horse, they don’t even acknowledge us.”

Maysa Constandinidis, 20, chair of Miami University’s SJP, is a first-generation Palestinian-American. She too has navigated the complexities of her identity in a mostly white, middle-class environment in Beaver Creek, Ohio - a dual identity shaped by her grandparents' exile from their villages in Beit Jala in 1948 during the Nakba, and yet again in 1967, during the Naksa.

At a Gaza relief dinner in Dearborn back in May, Maysa met Stein and described her as one of the most “humble, down-to-earth candidates” she had encountered in politics. “I hardly thought she was a presidential candidate; she was so sweet,” Maysa added.

The 20-year-old expressed her disillusionment with the two-party system and its limitations for voters seeking to break the duopoly and fight for a just order where every voice bears equal representation. “The system we have, the government we have, it's not built to have a third party. They just created it to make people less pissed off,” she said.

Laila Sheikh, 20, a first-generation Palestinian-American organiser and founder of SJP at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, agrees. “The imperialist system isn’t broken, it’s working exactly as it was designed to.”

Among many young Arab and Muslim Americans, there is a growing feeling of dismissive belittlement of their views by the two-party system, perpetuating a cycle of disengagement within their communities.

Many begin to suspect their ballot might not really matter in the grand scheme of US elections, Laila said, undermining their fundamental right to feel empowered by their voting choices.

Maysa described the concentration of biased consensus within monopoly media and its role in shaping public perception, “You're either a Republican or a Democrat. You're either on the right or left side. That's all many see. Because that’s what our media wants them to see. No option for the middle.”

As a result, many Americans feel trapped in a cycle that works only for the elite. “If you talk to most registered voters my age, they're really leaning towards the middle, they just don’t know if that’s really a viable option or a waste of a vote.”

In this stubbornly binary red and blue system, Stein’s approach resonates as a call for change in a political terrain long overdue for a reckoning.

This generation of Americans, Stein told TNA, was going to make liberation, the kind worth waiting for, a reality, one way or another. 

“The need for deep political change has never been so urgent, and the potential for that change has never been so close at hand. We must continue resisting, if we are to have a fighting chance for the world we deserve.”

Stein has been subjected to a barrage of criticism from within the Democratic Party, who, in tandem with prominent mainstream media outlets have portrayed her as a "Russian asset". In the past, she has also been criticised for her position on Syria’s civil war and perceived support for Bashar Al-Assad.

Stein has, however, since clarified her stance, saying "We have never taken a position in support of Bashar al-Assad”.Labelling the Syrian leader a “dictator” with a “long record of human rights abuses”, she added that “we are against intervention because intervention has all sorts of unintended consequences, which are very long-lasting and tend to make things worse”.

Stein told The New Arab that deliberate efforts to erode her credibility no longer faze her; the sharpness of their orchestrated campaigns had dulled out by this point.

“I know that the alternative that we are building is so much stronger,” she told TNA. “At the end of the day, all their malicious attempts reflect the empire’s weakness that they feel they must engage in such rhetoric. Our job is to organise their stupidity into oblivion. I just stay very focused on the task,” she added.

“They will try to smear me and blame it on me, [if the Democratic party loses]. But the choice is theirs. And we should not drink from that Kool-Aid. We should not accept their propaganda, not for a minute.”

Despite wave after wave of public vitriol, Stein has managed to build a solid coalition of human rights-focused groups, including the Abandon Harris campaign, the American Muslim 2024 Election Task Force, and key members of the National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) movement.

Back in August, Kamala Harris framed her own vision for America around patriotism at the Democratic National Convention (DNC). “In the enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny, I know where I stand,” Harris said. Met with raucous applause, it was heralded by legacy media.

For others, however, her words rang hollow. The Democratic Party, for many Americans, has spent the past year contorting the rules-based order and international humanitarian law to unconditionally support Israel’s war on Gaza, which has led to accusations of genocide at the world’s highest court, a charge which the US itself has tried to subvert.

Some are finding it difficult to discern how Harris would significantly differ from Biden in his legacy of disaster in the Middle East and beyond. While ‘We’re not going back’ has evolved into Harris’s clarion call in the battle against Trump’s MAGA contingent, many Arab-American voters are wondering where, exactly, they are heading.

Meanwhile, Stein has painted a more compelling picture of American progress that centres and empowers human welfare, one that passionately challenges an America that remains entangled in a lucrative web of war-profiteering interests.

“We're going to have excitement and discovery and joy,” the politician asserted, “a real joy because we're going to stop the genocide. You know, the Kamala Harris joy? I don't know what that's about.”

And whatever the results, the 74-year-old anti-war, pro-environment, and human rights activist of 20 years says she will remain committed to expanding her influence well beyond the campaign trail, assuring The New Arab that she was in this for the long haul.

“These are the people who are bending the arc of the universe right now. That all of us together are making something absolutely historic happen,” Stein said, smiling.

“So, the honour to fight alongside them is all mine.”

Hoda Sherif is a social justice writer with a master's from Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. Her work explores US foreign policy, Middle Eastern affairs, and the enduring legacies of historical trauma within marginalised populations, paying particular attention to the repercussions of war on children's psycho-social development

Follow her on X: @hodassherif