800K votes for Jill Stein should be somewhat encouraging

Votes for alternative-party candidates get counted relatively slowly. Write-in votes get counted slowest of all (most likely a lot of them are either never counted or never reported). At the end of the process this year Jill Stein will wind up being credited with about 800K votes.

If you’ve followed this kind of thing over the years you know that during the campaign people tend to get carried away with high expectations. We heard many Jill Stein supporters talk about a goal of 5% . . . but no alternative-party candidate has gotten 5% since billionaire Ross Perot did it twice during the 1990s.

2016 was a year when the electorate seemed to be unusually willing to vote “outside the box.” Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson (a former Republican governor of New Mexico) got almost 4.5 million votes (3.3%) and Jill Stein got almost 1.5 million. Johnson’s total in 2016 was the only time during the last twenty years that a non-establishment-party candidate received over 2 million votes:

2004 Ralph Nader (independent) 466K
2008 Ralph Nader (independent) 739K
2012 Gary Johnson (Libertarian) 1.276 million
2016 Gary Johnson (Libertarian) 4.489 million
2016 Jill Stein (Green) 1.457 million
2020 Jo Jorgensen (Libertarian) 1.866 million
2020 Howie Hawkins (Green) 407K
2024 Jill Stein (Green) about 800K
2024 Chase Oliver (Libertarian) about 650K

So Jill’s vote total this year should not be discouraging. It was almost twice the Green Party’s total in 2020. It was the highest among all independent candidates. It was achieved despite massive ballot suppression efforts on the part of the Democrats (who kept all independents off of the large-vote-total New York State ballot). There were several counties where Jill beat the Dem candidate among Muslim voters.

When we look at the results over the years and also take into account down-ballot candidate totals, it seems clear that about a million voters in this country are aware of and supportive enough of our party to at least occasionally vote Green. That’s a good base to keep building from. Recent new-party initiatives like No Labels, the Forward Party, the Peoples Party, Justice for All, and We the People have been getting little traction while the Green Party continues to advance, even if only incrementally. No party within our milieu is yet close to the 5% that will garner federal funds and considerable gravitas, but with continual advancement it’s just a matter of time.