Jill Stein thinks that promising to abolish student debt by creating money from a magic trick entitles her to 42 million young voters casting their ballots for her. This is her plan for a pathway to the White House. That same plurality of the electorate would also magically usher in a wave of Green Party and progressive Democratic legislators all of whom will fall lock-step with Jill Stein's intent to gain "emergency measures" to singlehandedly stop climate change.
This revolution will launch the "Green New Deal" which promises to somehow force entire industries to suddenly and radically reorient themselves to take steps to stop climate change. Stein likens this mobilization to the mass transition to a war economy during the Second World War and says that climate change presents the same urgent existential threat to America that the Axis powers did. We will awake one day to find ourselves working in companies that have all uniformly democratized their decision-making and management. In a Stein administration, we would live in a country where monetary and energy policy would be subject to the whims of populism through similar “democratization” initiatives.
By opening up offices that will offer “public sector jobs which are ‘stored’ in job banks in order to take up any slack in private sector employment”, 20 million jobs will open up and immediately generate a rapid decline in unemployment and transitioning the United States to fully renewable energy sources in less than 15 years.
A President Jill Stein would direct the Environmental Protection Agency to unilaterally halt all new fossil fuel and nuclear energy infrastructure and grind large sectors of the economy to a halt in the interest of fighting climate change. She would argue that climate change presents a large enough threat to people's health that the EPA would have the authority to take these drastic measures in the interest of public health. Nevermind similar logic used by the Obama administration for its proposed Clean Power Plan regulations that are under litigation following a lawsuit by 24 states. A regulation, mind you, that is designed to do far far far far less than what Stein is proposing.
Her Green New Deal proposals are ignorant to the political realities of policy crafting and appear to be completely tone deaf to what actual legal authority she would have as President, the powers the Executive Branch has, and how passing major legislation in Congress works. If anything it is a glaring example of how drastically unprepared she is to get anywhere close to the presidency, yet young voters are coming to her in record numbers and are threatening to place Donald Trump into the White House.
I’m 22 years old and have followed the 2016 campaign closely, ever since Jeb Bush’s non-candidacy fundraising in 2015. I was an ardent Bernie Sanders supporter; I believed in his message, his policy priorities, and saw that he could foster together substantive proposals and plans that were rooted in a base of reality to champion progressive causes. Though, as the primaries drug on I saw that my peers were less invested in the messianic image of Bernie Sanders and more in-tune with the flailing negativity around Hillary Clinton. To them any vanguard of anti-Clintonism was where their political interests lay, no matter who it was that embodied them.
I was never under any guise that Bernie Sanders would be able to topple Clinton’s machine and understood that he would face an incredibly tough battle in the general election had he made it that far. It was promising, though, and we accomplished a lot more than anyone thought we could: mobilization of young voters, incredible fundraising records, top-notch political organization initiatives, and the springboard of a backbench senator into the leader of the American progressive movement. We saw victories in the Democratic platform and in a shifting of positions to the left by our party’s nominee.
Yes, Bernie’s loss was tough to swallow, but it wasn’t out of the blue. Even into March, most were predicting that Hillary would still come out on top as the nominee. Unfortunately, young voters were not convinced by Hillary’s campaign and have fled to third party candidates in record numbers – most to Gary Johnson and a sizable portion to Jill Stein.
I’m not trying to brand Jill Stein as a “spoiler”, but as FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten in the most recent episode of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast explained, Hillary Clinton would be doing measurably better had she gained the support of 18-to-24 year old voters away from third parties:
I got some good data from SurveyMonkey and what it basically shows is that Hillary Clinton is that where is really falling where Obama did well four years ago with that 18 to 24-year old bracket, where’s she’s only winning the low-teens where Barack Obama won that group by 30 percentage points and whose approval ratings are higher than anywhere else in the electorate. What’s going on, or what the data indicates is going on, is that they’re not going for Donald Trump, but they’re in fact they are voting for either Jill Stein or Gary Johnson – and if Hillary Clinton was winning those under the age of 25 by the same margin Obama had, Obama’s net approval rating is in the thirties, if that was in fact the case her national margin would go up by two percentage points.
Young people deserve a candidate who cares enough to put forward real policy proposals designed to fight climate change, not a fantasy of a Green New Deal. Millennials deserve a president with a real plan to tackle student debt, not to use a magic trick to “cancel” it out.
I can only hope that my fellow Millennials will see Jill Stein for who she really is: a good activist who is very skilled at Occupy-style campaign messaging, but woefully unskilled and unprepared for the presidency and the difficult job of governing.