Last Monday, Kamala Harris campaigned across the Midwest with Liz Cheney while Donald Trump visited Asheville to pretend that he was “not familiar” with Mark Robinson’s campaign for governor.
Meanwhile, at a luncheon in Cary, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein held an intimate and emotional event with an audience of mostly Arab Americans.
“We the people refuse,” Stein said, to applause. “We refuse to be dragged into this genocide, which we oppose vehemently. We refuse to be dragged into this expanding war, which Israel has been attempting to do from the very start, and that genocidal war has now expanded from Gaza to the West Bank to Lebanon to bombing campaigns against Yemen and Syria and Iran.”
Both Harris and Trump have voiced strong support for Israel. Harris has called for a ceasefire in Gaza and Trump has said that “I do want [Israel] to win fast.”
Stein has pledged to end the war in Gaza if she is elected. And while no community is a monolith, Stein’s stance makes her an attractive option to many voters with connections to Palestine.
Over the hours-long event, attendees and speakers grieved the destruction of Gaza and repeatedly insisted that there is no morally justifiable option in either major party candidate.
“I want us to take a moment and just imagine what this country could be if we are not forced to continue to ask for crumbs from the criminal duopoly of Team Blue and Team Red,” said Rania Masri, a controversial pro-Palestine and environmental justice activist who helped organize the event.
This is Stein’s third presidential crusade. With a slate of far-left views—reparations for the descendants of slaves, universal health care, and an “Ecosocialist Green New Deal”—that are especially appealing to young progressive voters, some view her as responsible for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 losses in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, where Stein’s support exceeded Trump’s margin of victory.
The New York Times recently reported that even Stein’s own family has asked her not to run.
“Such is the lot of the third-party candidate, quadrennially scorned by voters who often wish they had options beyond the major parties’ nominees — only to conclude, by election’s eve, that the choice is effectively binary,” wrote the Times.
While it’s difficult to prove that 2016 Stein voters would’ve picked Clinton instead of just staying home, national Democrats have not hesitated to swing hard at Stein this year with the party’s first-ever ad campaign targeting a third party candidate.
“Jill Stein Helped Trump Win Once. Don’t Let Her Do It Again,” read the DNC-sponsored billboards in Wisconsin.
And in purple North Carolina, where Trump won by 1.3 percent in 2020, Jill Stein’s meager 1 percent in the polls is still nightmare fuel for Democrats.
Green party organizers, though, do not care what Democrats think of them. And they are done listening to the “a vote for Stein is a vote for Trump” argument.
“They have us right where they want us if we accept defeat before we even fight,” Anna Dillon Ordoubad, co-chair of the NC Green Party, said in Cary. “If [the] genocidal girl boss is the lesser of two evils, what are we going to do next, y’all?”
The Green Party also has candidates for governor and several local offices including mayor of Raleigh.
Stein, who was raised in a Reform Jewish household, has long been a vocal supporter of Palestine and critic of U.S. support of the Israeli military. This year, those stances won her the support of the Abandon Harris (previously Abandon Biden) campaign, which calls on “people of conscience to punish Kamala Harris at the ballot box and then take the ‘blame’—or claim the credit—for her electoral defeat.”
After her stump speech in Cary, Stein accepted several gifts from the crowd.
A local artist gave her a necklace with a key, referencing the displaced Palestinian women who carry their house keys around their necks. A local teacher gave her the writings of middle-schoolers, many of whom have roots in the Middle East. Masri gave her Palestinian olive oil, saying that Stein is “like our olive trees, rooted in justice.”
During a Q&A, INDY asked Stein to make her case to progressive Triangle voters who like her policies, but are more afraid of the possible impact of another Trump presidency on abortion and climate change.
“I fundamentally reject the notion that there’s any lesser evil, or that Democrats or Republicans could solve the real crises that we’re facing,” said Stein.
“The political elites are very quick to tell you they own your vote—especially the Democrats—and they will blame and shame voters and candidates that will not just stick with the program. If you surrender, if you vote for whoever you think might be the lesser evil…you erase our agenda. [You] erase the progressive agenda.”
Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].
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