“With membership at new lows and no electoral wins to their name, it’s time for the Greens to ditch the malignant narcissist who’s presided over its decline.”
“With membership at new lows and no electoral wins to their name, it’s time for the Greens to ditch the malignant narcissist who’s presided over its decline.”
The issue is she sucks all the oxygen out of the room with her pointless presidential runs and does nothing for the four years in between. There’s an inconsequential number of Greens who run and win elections in small cities and towns or less consequential elections, and none of them have won any federal elections. A real party leader would recruit and foster candidates in large cities and state legislatures— and then get folks to run for the US House, the Senate, state governorships, and then the presidency.
Stein is less a party leader and more a figurehead who basically seems to be in it for the grift. And so US Greens (especially in comparison to those in the EU) are less a party and more just a convenient label for those of a certain bent that want to run as something other than as a Democrat.
My question was more along the lines of the “(not so) the great (wo)man” hypothesis.
Let’s imagine that Jill Stein was permanently abducted by aliens. What do we think would happen?
Would the Green Party just collapse?
Would the former member just join the Democrats?
Would they start a new party?
Or maybe someone new would take over who could do a better job?
I think we’d likely just get someone who’s functionally equivalent.
Maybe vote count is instructive:
Nader 2000: 2,882,955
Nader 2004: 465,650
McKinney 2008: 161,797
Stein 2012: 469,501
Stein 2016: 1,457,216
Hawkins 2020: 407,068
I don’t think the party would collapse without Stein. They have been around for decades and they have a cadre of oranizers who will continue to show up regardless of results. Stein is just the most famous person they can use for a presidential election, and you can see from the above results what happens when they run someone nobody has heard of.
I think they genuinely believe in their core values, and it’s unfortunate that Stein is their only viable candidate. They won’t ever be a real political party until they start winning local/state elections, but they’re looking to secure more federal funding by getting enough votes. If Stein disappeared then they would keep doing this but they’d never breach half a million votes. Maybe a progressive democrat in the House would smell an opportunity and break ranks to run for president with the Greens. That could maybe get them a million or two votes again.
Or maybe it absolutely does not matter who they run and they just get a lot of votes when the Democrats run particularly shitty candidates for president.
Ah, I get your question now. Unfortunately I think it’s impossible to say, but I do know it’s impossible to find out while she’s still there.