Jill Stein Isn’t Even Pretending to Not Be a Spoiler

Seriously: What the fuck is she doing?

Photo by Justin Sullivan via Getty.

Major parties hate third party candidates for obvious reasons. Imagine if in football, it was legal for the camera man to occasionally run on the field and sack your quarterback — that’s what third parties feel like. It’s a disadvantage that comes out of nowhere and disproportionately affects one side. To make things even more annoying, in modern presidential politics, the only possible outcomes of a third party candidacy are: 1) Total irrelevance, and 2) Tipping the election to someone whom the candidate has denounced as the offspring of Josef Mengele and Satan.

Even so, I can see things from the third party’s perspective: How are they supposed build their party if they never run for anything? Building a sustainable party was Ralph Nader’s stated goal in 2000: If he had gotten five percent of the vote, then the Green Party would have qualified for electoral matching funds, and from there it would’ve been a short hop to full communism. Of course, Nader didn’t get five percent; he got less than three percent, including 97,000 votes in Florida, which Bush won by 537. But even though Nader ended up achieving the worst intent-to-result ratio since Catherine O’Leary went for a refreshing glass of milk and ended up burning down Chicago, his stated goal at least made some sense.