Though Ralph Nader's supporters urged those in Gore's camp to be pragmatic, reminding them that voting for a major party candidate in most states would be pointless and that building the Green Party was important for advancing progressive goals, but too many of them wouldn't listen. Though Nader had enough support to receive 5% of the vote, which would have given the Greens increased ballot access and federal matching funds in the next election, thanks to Gore he lost that opportunity. Democrats have since tried to deny this mistake, falsely accusing the Greens of swinging the election to Bush, but they just can't escape it; because of the unnecessary number of people who voted for Gore in 2000, the country has paid a terrible price.
Thankfully, though, Americans have a chance not to repeat that mistake in 2016.
To be clear, I do not want Donald trump to win any more than I wish George W. Bush had become president. Bush was by far less competent and responsible than Gore, and in the case of Hillary Clinton vs Donald Trump, that difference is of course magnified a hundredfold. You just can't expect to admit an erratic, overtly tyrannical figure like Trump into the center of the republic's power structure without there being possibly fatal consequences for its future.
But as a great deal of people have become aware of since 2000, the other option isn't much better. While Trump denies climate change, Clinton's approach to addressing it is not at all adequate. While the prospect of having Trump make foreign policy decisions seriously introduces the possibility of a third world war, Clinton's plans for handling the situation in Syria could very well have similar consequences. While Trump's presence on the world stage and economic ideas would likely lead to an economic collapse, Clinton's pro-Wall Street policies would result in a repeat of the 2008 banking crisis. While Trump's proposals for cutting taxes on the wealthy would hurt the middle-class, Clinton's neoliberal stances on many other economic issues would increase inequality as well. Both are in service of big business and the military-industrial complex, both are opposed to reforming the system in a positive way, and while Hillary may be safer, both will take us on a dangerous path.
And if we again choose to give into the demands of the lesser evil because we're told it's the only way to stop the greater evil, evil will win either way.
You may or may not agree with my assessment that stopping Trump is the most important thing, but in the majority of cases, voting for Hillary Clinton will not be necessary to do so. The rules of the Electoral College make it so that the outcomes of presidential elections are determined by how many electoral votes, not popular votes, a candidate gets, which means that in all the forty or so non-swing states, voting third party will not pose any risk of swinging the election. In other words, unless you live in a battleground state, you should ignore anyone who tells you that a vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Trump.
This brings us to another tactic the Clinton camp is using to discourage people from voting Green: spreading the notion that there aren't enough Stein supporters to make a 5% vote share for her possible. While the online polls that show Stein having as much support as the major party candidates are of course completely unreliable, so are the conventional polls that put her around 2%; as I made the case for in a past article, mainstream surveys too often under-sample groups like young people and independents or involve asking participants questions which make them less likely to answer that they support third parties.
Additional evidence that Stein in fact has more support than is being reported comes from how 12% of independents, 13% of former Bernie Sanders supporters, and 16% of young people support her. These are all major chunks of the electorate, and if a poll were conducted which represented them adequately, I think it would very likely find that Stein has the backing of 5% or more of the electorate.
Sadly, this by no means guarantees that the Greens will receive that much of the vote two days from now. Nader had enough support to get him 5% of it as well, but many of those who wanted to vote for him were swayed by the Democratic spin that doing so would help Bush in every case. And barring something unprecedented, it looks like Democrats are about to spoil another election.
Except that's where the main point of this article comes in: something unprecedented is in fact at work.
This is not the same country it was sixteen years ago. Back then, politicians like Al Gore and the Clintons could promise to overturn the economic and political status quo, do everything they could to uphold it, and still rely on the loyalty of their base. But naturally, this dynamic could not survive for much longer; throughout the third millennium, the irresponsibility and greed of America's leaders has done too much harm for the pubic to ignore, and something in the political environment has shifted.
Since 2000, the leaders of both major parties have subverted the constitution and turned America into a surveillance state. They've made the world more dangerous and wasted trillions of dollars by engaging in a campaign of endless war. They've driven up economic inequality to historic levels by giving into the wishes of their wealthy donors. And most consequentially, they've caused the atmosphere's carbon levels to reach what may well be the breaking point for the future of climate stability. Thankfully, though, the injustice and danger of the situation that these decisions have created is only matched by the drive that the public has to change things for the better.
As was the case sixteen years ago, the polls show that the majority of Americans want to solve the problems mentioned above. What's different now is that they've grown so big that the public has become compelled to seek out alternatives to the established political paradigm. In recent years, populist sentiments in both America and abroad have reached a boiling point, with voters in much of the industrial world taking serious action to challenge the broken political and economic system. Though this revolt has too often taken a reactionary rather than progressive form, with the rise of demagogic figures like Donald Trump and Marine La Pen, the political climate has nonetheless become dramatically more favorable to leaders like Jill Stein since the beginning of the century.
Already, there are many signs that the Greens are in a better position than ever to pull off an upset. The party's ballot access is higher this year than in any previous election cycle, and as I've iterated throughout this article, their support is at a level not seen in a long time. Andrea Merida, co-chair of the Green Party of Colorado, has described these and other positive signs as "a mandate for the Green Party." And she's not the only Green leader expressing hope; Jill Stein published an op-ed recently which treated a 5% vote share for the Greens as a serious possibility and compared the position her party is currently in to where the Republican Party was in 1854.
So long story short, this is the first election cycle ever where Greens have the potential to break through the obstacles which have been put up against them and other third parties, and we must take advantage of that. If you are not in a swing state, I highly recommend you vote for Jill Stein, and if you are and still plan to do so, my own opinion shouldn't stop you. Because as Democrats like to say, we must not forget what happened in 2000.
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