Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attacks “predatory” Jill Stein

In an Instagram story posted on Sunday, New York Democrat and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein “predatory” for running for the White House multiple times while struggling to build the third party at the grassroots level.

In 2016, Stein played kingmaker in several key swing states. In Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, she outvoted Donald Trump by more votes – which sparked strong reactions from Democrats and political pundits. Not only was Stein widely condemned as a spoilsport, but former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee in the 2016 election, later accused her of being a “Russian agent.”

Ocasio-Cortez accused Stein and the Green Party, which achieved its current status in 2001, of focusing exclusively on presidential elections. To date, no Green Party candidate has held federal office, and only a handful have been elected to state legislatures.

When asked by an Instagram follower about Jill Stein's candidacy, Ocasio-Cortez said, “It's a little juicy, but I have thoughts on it.”

“If you run for years in a row and your party hasn't grown, hasn't gained seats on the city council, hasn't gained seats in the lower districts, hasn't gained seats in the state districts, that's bad leadership. And that's what annoys me,” the congresswoman said of Stein.

According to Ballotpedia's latest update, Stein will be on the ballot in Arizona, California, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington and West Virginia.

She will also be on the ballot in Montana, Utah, Nevada, Alaska, Arkansas, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Maine, Maryland and Missouri, Stein's campaign manager Jason Call said earlier. News week.

The Greens are now running in Mississippi, South Carolina and Hawaii.

The reason Stein is on the ballot in some states and the Greens in others is because of voting access procedures.

On its website, the Green Party states that “at least 144 [party members] will hold elected office in 20 U.S. states as of February 15, 2024.” The list includes Green Party members on local school, zoning and tax committees, as well as several city council members.

The New York Democrat said Stein had been the Green Party's candidate for 12 consecutive years, but in 2020, Howie Hawkins ran as the party's candidate.

“If you've been your party's nominee for 12 years in a row and you can't grow your movement at all and you can't have a winning strategy… and all you do is show up every four years to talk to people who are rightfully pissed off, then you're not serious. To me, that doesn't read authentic, it reads predatory. I'm sorry, I'm just saying,” Ocasio-Cortez said in her Instagram story.

She also stressed that she has nothing against third parties in principle and that she has supported and will continue to support some third-party candidates, even against the Democrats.

“What I don't understand is that when you run for president, you are the de facto leader of your party. I have publicly criticized the two-party system. That's not what this is about,” the congresswoman added.

A spokesman for Stein referred Newsweek to the Green Party candidate’s posts on X (formerly Twitter) in response to Ocasio-Cortez.

The Massachusetts native wrote in a post: “What's truly predatory is pretending that your candidate is 'working tirelessly for a ceasefire.' [in Gaza] while in reality they are actively arming and financing genocide.”

In a second post, she wrote: “The Democrats sue to get us off the ballot, hire agents to infiltrate and sabotage us, lock us out of debates, fight ranked-choice voting, and then pretend to be concerned because the Green Party has only won 1,400 elections. So which party is authentic and which is predatory?”

Newsweek sent Ocasio-Cortez's office an email Sunday afternoon seeking comment.

The Democratic Party has made significant legal efforts to prevent third parties from appearing on the ballot.

Before independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. abandoned his campaign and endorsed Trump, he had used Democratic-funded lawsuits to remove him from the ballot in New York and had also failed to remove him from the ballot in North Carolina and New Jersey.

On Monday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected an attempt by David Strange, an official with the Democratic National Committee (DNC), to exclude Stein from the state's ballot this year.

Strange said the Green Party should not be entitled to nominate presidential electors in Wisconsin because it has no state legislative officers or candidates who could nominate those presidential electors. However, the court ruled that “plaintiff is not entitled to the relief he seeks.”

Michael White, co-chair of the Wisconsin Green Party, said the complaint was “a sign of fear on the part of the Democratic Party.”

In her 2017 book What happenedClinton wrote: “So there were more than enough Stein voters in every state to influence the outcome.”

At the national level, Stein received one percent of the vote in 2016, or just under 1.5 million votes. In the election between Trump and Joe Biden in 2020, the Green Party candidate, Hawkins, received only 0.2 percent of the vote.

In response to the question from Newsweek If she feared a similar backlash after Trump's 2016 election victory, when Clinton and many in the Democratic Party accused her of winning decisive votes in several swing states, Stein said these “smear or fear campaigns by the Wall Street parties have never stopped.”

“Post-election polls showed that the vast majority of our voters in 2016 were abstainers,” Stein said, explaining that it was nonsense to claim her party took votes away from Clinton. “This campaign has never stopped and does not affect my thinking. My thoughts are on the climate catastrophe, economic hardship and ending endless wars.”

In addition to Stein, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris could also lose votes in key states to Cornel West, the presidential candidate of the Justice for All party.

According to the Associated Press, a group of Republican strategists, lawyers and supporters across the country are trying to influence the upcoming November election in a way that might benefit Trump. Their goal is to support third-party candidates like West who offer liberal voters another option, potentially siphoning off Harris' vote.

The source of funding for this initiative remains unclear, but it has significant potential to change the outcome of elections in states where Biden won the 2020 election by extremely narrow margins.

West's campaign team supported the effort. Last month, the academic told AP that “American politics is a highly gangster-like activity” and he “just wanted to get on the ballot.”

Trump praised West, calling him “one of my favorite candidates.” The former president highly values ​​Stein for the same reason.

“I like them very much. You know why? She takes 100 percent of them. He takes 100 percent,” Trump said.

Update: 09/01/2024, 9:31 PM ET: This article has been updated with additional information.