As of today we don’t have full vote totals in New Jersey. In some of the districts they’ve only counted 90% of the votes. Ultimately, it looks like it will be recorded that almost 50,000 voters will have cast a vote for one or another Green Party candidate in our state this year. Our US Senate candidate got well over 40,000. That’s the highest total ever. We ran candidates for US House in every congressional district and almost all of them received the highest total among the third-party and independent candidates.
So we feel encouraged. In regard to the presidential race: Our national ticket of Jill Stein and Butch Ware was energetic but, as usual, was shut out of the debates, the mainstream media, the “serious discourse,” and most polling. In one sense the vote total for Jill was disappointing — only 0.5% nationally (though it was 0.9% in New Jersey and that was the highest percentage among all the states, which shows that running many down-ballot candidates can help get votes for the national ticket). But it should be noted that this was the first election where we “came in third” . . . in other words, Jill got the most votes among all alternatives; for the first time (except for Nader in 2000) the Green candidate got more votes than the Libertarian Party candidate.
Jill got less than a million votes. Her total was quite a bit more than what Howie Hawkins received in 2020 (407K votes, 0.3%), but quite a bit less than she got in 2016 (1.5 million votes, 1.1%).
It’s clear that the “alternative vote” this year, unfortunately, went to Donald Trump instead of to truly alternative candidates. The Libertarian Party vote total was down by 70% from 2020. Cornel West got fewer than 100K votes in the whole country. The total percentage for all alternative presidential candidates in 2016 was over 5%; in 2020 it was around 2%; this year it was only 1.6%. Jill Stein got more than a quarter of those votes. But her total was suppressed due to only appearing on 38 state ballots this year (and the Democrats found a way to keep her votes in Ohio from being counted even though she was on that ballot). The Democrats hated Jill from her supposed “spoiling” for Hillary Clinton in 2016. So in 2024 they were brutal in terms of ballot suppression. They changed the ballot access laws in New York State (where the Greens used to get a relatively large number of votes) to keep off all third-party candidates. And the alternative vote this year was unusually split — among Jill, Cornel, RFK, the Libertarian, and the PSL candidate.
Greens were encouraged to see that Jill Stein emerged as the most prominent third-party candidate. With her at the top of the ticket we did relatively well down-ballot. Meanwhile, progressives in general were disappointed with the showing of the Democratic Party nationwide. They were appalled to see AOC and Liz Cheney sharing the same stage with their presidential candidate. Going forward, as they come to appreciate the enduring presence and superior program of the Green Party, they will increasingly be open to considering casting an “outside of the box” vote. As for the electorate as a whole: Trump is bound to flounder (again) and the Democrats will continue to disappoint. It’s only a matter of time until the sentiment for “more voices and more choices” gains enough momentum as to demand the kind of electoral system reforms that will enable a transition toward a true multi-party democracy.
Interesting that there is fairly consistent polling showing that Americans want a “third party” yet when given choices on their ballot most Americans still vote for the duopoly.