Jill Stein, a physician and former Lexington Town Meeting member who ran twice for governor of Massachusetts and once for secretary of state, is currently seeking the presidency as the nominee of the Green Party, which also nominated her in 2012 and 2016.
Stein recently spoke with GBH News reporter Adam Reilly about how her experiences in Massachusetts politics shaped her worldview, her thoughts on claims that she’s a “spoiler” candidate, whether she’s hoping to deny Kamala Harris the presidency, why she thinks the United States is responsible for the war in Ukraine, and whether she’ll run again in 2028. An edited transcript follows.
You had a lot of experience running in Massachusetts before you went national. Did you take away any lessons from those campaigns that inform the way you practice politics right now?
Absolutely. I entered politics back in 2002 as a very distraught organizer and healthcare advocate. We had just passed campaign finance reform with Clean Elections — we saw that repealed on a voice vote by the progressive Democratic Legislature. We had tried to pass Healthcare for All through the single-payer referendum in the late 1990s — we saw that beaten back by a huge infusion of cash from big pharma and the health insurance industry. There’s huge support for fundamental political reform, but the the system has enormous power to silence political opposition and thwart the will of the voters. So that’s how I started this.
The speaker of the Massachusetts House when Clean Elections was thwarted was Tom Finneran, a Democrat who most people would call conservative rather than progressive. And that’s interesting, because it sounds like your experience with the Massachusetts Democratic Party, in particular, shapes the way you think about Democrats generally.
It does. Clean Elections wasn’t only rejected by the speaker. An effort was made year after year to move it through the Legislature, and that never got anywhere either. For that to be the case in progressive Massachusetts was just a really bad sign for the Democratic Party in general. To me, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
As a physician and former instructor at Harvard Medical School, what was your reaction to the reversal of Roe v. Wade?
It’s a horrible thing. We have seen perinatal mortality go up substantially: the last numbers I saw were something like 25%, and 40% among women of color. But at the same time, there were opportunities for decades to codify Roe at the level of Congress — not only when Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, but also when Democrats had a majority and had an option to change the rules, as Republicans have done in the past. Barack Obama and Joe Biden both came to power saying this was going to be the first thing they would do, but they managed never to get to it. Furthermore, it’s a problem that could be fixed right now simply by opening reproductive health care clinics on federal land. I do not by any means accept that this is the result of challenging Democrats. This is a dereliction of duty on their part.
Doesn’t the fact that Roe’s reversal happened because of justices appointed by former President Trump suggest that there are, in fact, big and meaningful differences between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party?
Well, right now we see it’s the Democrats who are charging forward on a genocide [in Gaza] and also on the very real potential for World War III. This is not to say that Trump and the Republicans are going to be any better. We need another option where we’re not trying to split hairs about which is the greater evil, when Israel is on the verge of attacking Iran and bringing in Russia, potentially, which is networked with Iran.
You seem more critical of Harris than of Trump when it comes to Middle East policy.
The focus is on who’s in power now and the presumption that Harris is your friend. The dangers of Trump, he wears them on his sleeve, and Democrats do a pretty good job of critiquing him. But what do we hear from the Republicans? We hear that the Democrats are basically too far left — a completely ludicrous critique that badly needs to be debunked.
If Trump is reelected, won’t he take an even more hawkish stand on Israel and Palestine than Biden has?
Trump is completely unpredictable, and you never know. That’s true for Harris as well. Right now, she cannot draw a line between herself and Biden and say what will be different. My very overarching view is that we the people are endangered and impoverished by the current foreign policy, which is bipartisan. And the rub is that we do not have the money that we need to have [single-payer] healthcare and address the housing emergency, the climate emergency, the crisis of education.
Are you hoping that your candidacy denies Harris the presidency?
I’m actually hoping that my candidacy denies Harris and Trump the presidency. You can say, “Well, what are the odds of that?” I don’t know. What are the odds that we’re in a full-blown war with Iran in the next two weeks? Young people out there, men between the ages of 18 and 29, you are in the database and the draft knows how to find you. This could go very big, very quickly, in a way that basically goes nuclear. This is one of the absolutely critical reasons why we need to be in this race.
You take issue with the idea that you were a spoiler back in 2016. You’ve said that many people who voted for you weren’t going to vote for Hillary Clinton, and there’s research that bears that out. But if your candidacy did deny one of the two major-party candidates the White House, who would you prefer it be?
Let me just reject that framing. In the last presidential race, one out of every three eligible voters declined to cast a vote. Who are those people? They tend to be younger, of lower income, and of color. These are the people who have been marginalized and would be best served by our agenda of healthcare as a human right, the right to a job, a $25 an hour minimum wage, rent control. That’s predominantly who we appeal to.
But you were recently endorsed by a group that’s actually named Abandon Harris, right?
First it was Abandon Biden, then it was Abandon Harris. So you have this huge demographic that has already left the Harris base [over Israel’s war in Gaza]. The question is: Are they going to vote for Trump, or are they going to vote for me? And what the polls seem to be showing is that the more I am visible, the more those votes are removed from Trump, and they come to our campaign.
You’ve described the Democratic Party as fascist. But Trump has said that, if reelected, he’ll preside over the mass deportation of about 11 million migrants. He’s also suggested he’d use the military against domestic opponents on the left. Aren’t those steps far more fascistic than anything Democrats have done or are contemplating doing?
Joe Biden exceeded Trump on deportations in the same way that Barack Obama exceeded George Bush on deportations. [Editor’s note: This claim is contested.] So you have the issue of what people say, and then you also have the issue of what people do. And I want to point to the fact that under Democratic municipal administrations, we are looking at a proliferation of these cop cities where cops are being trained … in the most brutal, abusive techniques possible, and you have military equipment which is already flowing. There are very fine lines here about what is militarized policing and what’s the military. None of it is OK.
When it comes climate, which is a Green priority, a lot of people see the Democrats’ policies as far better than the Republicans’.
The Inflation Reduction Act, which is used as a shining example of great things being done for the climate, is actually a fossil fuels–first bill. Before any major renewable projects can be built, 60 million acres of offshore waters and 2 million acres of onshore public lands have to be auctioned off for fossil fuel extraction. That’s every year. This is absolutely devastating to the climate. Furthermore, it’s actually under Joe Biden that fossil fuel production has skyrocketed more than under Donald Trump, and the same thing is true for Barack Obama versus George Bush before him. Yes, Democrats build more renewables and that’s a great thing, but renewables don’t actually fix the climate. And Kamala Harris herself has said, you know, frack away.
On X, a few people who I’d call sympathetic to the Green Party’s goals asked me to ask you what you’ve done between presidential campaigns to build the party. What’s the answer?
My answer is that it’s the media that goes away. It’s not me and it’s not the Green Party. We have elected candidates to local office including school committees, mayors of small towns, select board members. We have a city councilor that we elected in Portland, Maine, who was part of Maine’s taking a very principled position and passing a a divestment bill against investing in destructive industries that enable the Israeli genocide. So I am immersed, believe me, 24/7.
[Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] launched this idea that I’m a predatory candidate because I only come out every four years to run for president. But this is absolutely false. I only stepped up at the last minute here to fill a gap that was left when Dr. [Cornel] West decided he wanted to run as an independent.
There’s a famous photo of you in 2015 sitting at a Russia Today event at the same table as President Vladimir Putin. You’ve said that people don’t know the full context of that photo. What do you want them to know?
It’s not online in the U.S., because Russia Today was taken down. But basically, I was there to promote a global Green New Deal, because we do have a massive climate crisis, and Russia in particular needs to get with the program on that. I was there to promote a peace offensive in the Middle East: Russia had just begun bombing Syria, and I was there to take them to task about that bombing run, to say that’s as productive as US wars in the Middle East, which have not been productive. And we need global support for the nuclear test ban treaty. The U.S. is in violation, as is Russia. That photo has been thoroughly debunked.
If you had a chance to sit at the same table as President Putin again or to give a speech when he was in the audience, what would you say to him about the war in Ukraine?
The war is illegal, criminal, brutal, murderous, all of that. But this is a war that was ginned up over the course of decades by NATO and the U.S. Russia appealed repeatedly for dialogue and compromise. What Russia wanted, what Russia was absolutely dug in about was neutrality for Ukraine, like Austria was neutral after the Second World War. I would urgently and desperately appeal for Vladimir Putin to sit down now with the U.S. in good faith, because the U.S. really has not allowed these negotiations to take place.
So you see the war as driven by the United States rather than by Russian expansionism.
Fundamentally, yes, This is like the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse. We should know why Russia doesn’t want nuclear missiles on its border. We didn’t want it either.
The Washington Post recently reported that a super PAC with Republican ties is boosting your candidacy in Wisconsin, where Vice President Harris and former President Trump are running neck and neck. Do you want support from Republican-aligned groups?
Absolutely not. Whenever we have been alerted to Republican malfeasance, we have always rejected it and condemned it. And we do not condone super PACs, not for ourselves and not for others. But I will say the dirty tricks are done routinely by the Democrats. In 2022, they were caught red handed impersonating Greens, conducting something which I don’t know how it’s not labeled fraud and election interference. They were found guilty in court. The problem is the way the whole system is run. It’s extremely corrupt and the Democrats are a part of it.
If you’re not successful in winning the presidency in this election cycle, would you be back in the next one?
I don’t know what my role will be. I would not have been the candidate in this election had there not been enormous pressure and necessity, so my impression is that I’m probably not going to be running again in four years, at least not at that level. But I’m not ruling anything in or out. I am committed. I describe myself as a mother on fire, because our kids are at risk. They do not have a livable future right now, and once you see that, you can’t unsee it. So until my dying day, I am going to be working to try to change our trajectory.
