Two-time Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein announced Thursday she plans to seek the party’s nomination for the White House in 2024.
“The political system is broken. The two Wall Street parties are bought and paid for,” Stein said in a video posted on social media announcing her candidacy.
“The Democrats have betrayed their promises for working people, youth and the climate again and again, while Republicans don’t even make such promises in the first place,” she said.
Stein was the Green Party nominee for president in 2012 and 2016. Her 2016 candidacy drew the ire of Democrats, who blamed her for drawing traditionally Democratic voters away from their presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, in key swing states.
Stein’s announcement comes amid growing questions about the strength of President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign. A recent CNN poll showed former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 GOP nomination, narrowly leading Biden in a hypothetical rematch.
The same poll also showed independent presidential candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at 16% and Cornel West at 4% in a four-way race. Support for third-party candidates in polls rarely translates to equal support in elections – and Stein will likely cannibalize West and Kennedy votes – but her name alone will be enough to infuriate liberals still angry over her 2016 bid.
Stein has always rejected the claim that she played a “spoiler” in the election that sent Trump to the White House.
The reality is complicated: In the key swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, her vote total exceeded Trump’s narrow victory margins. But it is – and will remain – unclear whether Stein voters would have turned out for Clinton, long unpopular with far-left voters, had the Green nominee not been on the ballot.
Stein is well-versed by now in addressing those accusations, including unfounded claims suggesting she knowingly aided Russian interference in the 2016 election, a connection derived from her attendance at a state-owned “Russia Today” party in Moscow in 2015 and Russian troll farm activity boosting her campaign.
Speaking to CNN in July, when she was advising West’s presidential campaign during its shift from the little-known People’s Party to the Green Party (and before West ultimately decided to run as an independent), Stein made the case for third-party insurgents.
“People who challenge a corrupt and vindictive system are not new to its efforts to protect itself,” she said. “The abolitionist party that preceded the Civil War, that preceded the modern-day Republican Party, that party was also demonized as a spoiler because it was advocating that the abolitionists take political power.”
At the time, Stein was talking up West and the work that she and others aligned with the Green Party, including her former running mate Ajamu Baraka and journalist Chris Hedges, had done in bringing the famed intellectual into the party structure.
Now though, it will almost surely be Stein – again – as the Green Party standard-bearer.
This story has been updated with additional information.
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