The U.S. Green Party’s Flawed Strategy and Problematic Leader is Failing Progressives and the Planet

The U.S. Green Party claims to champion progressive change and push Democrats leftward, but reality paints a far different picture. Led by a problematic figure financially tied to the polluters she condemns, denounced by international Green Parties, and crippled by an electoral system it refuses to adapt to, the party achieves little beyond enabling conservative victories. Instead of building grassroots power, it clings to a futile presidential strategy, dividing progressives and sabotaging the causes it claims to support. In a nation desperate for action, the Green Party isn’t the solution—it’s a dangerous distraction.

Like clockwork, the U.S. Green Party emerges once every four years to run in the presidential election. At its forefront is Jill Stein, a former physician with an environmental activist background. At first glance, the Green Party advocates for everything an American progressive might want. It supports a Green New Deal, calling for a strategic pivot of the economy away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy while providing an equitable transition for communities based around fossil fuels. It calls for a change to US foreign policy toward Israel, appealing to Americans disillusioned by current Democratic support towards Netanyahu’s catastrophic actions in Gaza and Lebanon. It supports the right to unionize and an increase in minimum wage to $25/hour.

Jill Stein’s Financial Ties to Fossil Fuels 

This progressive facade, however, crumbles upon further investigation of the Party’s leader. Jill Stein, touting calls for divestment from the fossil fuel industry, fails to acknowledge that she herself is financially entangled with the industry. According to her own 2024 public financial disclosure report to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, Stein has between $2,500,000 and $7,250,000 USD invested in Vanguard Group products. Vanguard is one of the world’s largest investment management companies, primarily offering ETFs and mutual funds with diversified portfolios to investors. However, it has faced criticism from climate activists for holding over $300 billion USD in fossil fuel assets. Stein’s Vanguard investments, such as in the Vanguard 500 Index Fund, contain significant share holdings in companies such as ExxonMobil, the world’s largest private polluter and the chief architect of decades of climate denial. The portfolio also includes climate criminal Chevron, a corporation known for its aggressive lawsuits against prominent climate activists. Most egregiously, Stein’s Vanguard stock holdings include TC Energy Corp., owner of the Keystone XL Pipeline: a fossil fuel project she herself publicly opposes. Adding up Stein’s investments in Vanguard index funds VXUS, VIG, and VFIAX—which are 10.8%, 5.88% and 8.25% invested into the fossil fuel industry respectively—her holdings translate to an over $500,000 stake in fossil fuels.

The Limited Impact of Stein’s Spoiler Candidacy on Democratic Policy

If Stein personally profits off the fossil fuel industry, then why is she the leader of the designated environmental political party? It’s because the American Green Party’s purpose isn’t to implement progressive change—it’s to “send a message” by sabotaging the Democratic party.

Jill Stein herself acknowledges that she will never win a presidential election. According to her, she is in the race to provide “an alternative to the two parties that are bought and paid for, that are serving Wall Street and the war contractors and definitely not the American people.” In other words, a voter for the Green Party is trying to signal to the Democratic party that they need to implement more progressive policies. But does this strategy actually work?

In 2016, Donald Trump won the election by securing the key swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Trump’s slim margin of victory over Hillary Clinton in these states were 22,177, 10,704, and 67,416 votes respectively. However, Stein received 31,006 and 51,463 votes in WI and MI, a number greater than Trump’s margin of victory. If all Americans who voted for Jill Stein had instead voted Clinton, Trump would never have won office. 

Stein has defended against claims from critics marking her as a ‘spoiler’ candidate—a candidate who siphons off votes from the party that could actually win. She argues that this should force Democratic leadership to “wake up” and embrace more progressive policies.

However, in 2020, the Democratic Party rejected the progressive candidates in the primaries like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in favor of the more centrist Joe Biden. Again, in 2024, the Democratic Party replaced Biden with Kamala Harris without a primary, which many saw as an extension of Biden’s centrism. Indeed, Harris’ campaign focused on reaching out to conservatives. She campaigned alongside influential conservative voices like Liz Cheney. Harris even promised she would “appoint a Republican to her Cabinet if elected.” Yet, as evident from the results of the 2024 election, this approach ultimately failed to gain significant support from either progressives or conservatives.

Schism In The International Green Movement

Days before the 2024 Election, 16 major European Green Parties from Portugal to Ukraine called on Jill Stein to withdraw from the race. In a statement, they declared that in an election predicted so close, Jill Stein’s bid would be counterproductive and lead to an even worse outcome: an environmentally disastrous Trump presidency. “Climate policies require democratic institutions,” they warned, “which we fear would be dismantled if Trump is elected.” But more importantly in this statement, they acknowledge that “the U.S. Greens are no longer members of the global organization of Green parties.” The Parties maintain that this fissure resulted from “their relationship with parties with authoritarian leaders, and serious policy differences on key issues,” especially on Stein’s anti-NATO position on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

However, this division over NATO doesn’t uncover the fundamental ideological difference between the American and international Green parties. In 2013, the International Green parties, including the U.S. at the time, co-authored an international strategy. They explained two different strategies: one for democracies with proportional representation, common in most European countries, and another for democracies with first-past-the-post voting, where a candidate needs to win the largest share of the vote to secure a seat, as is the case in the U.S. and Canada. In proportional representation countries, even a small percentage of the vote can lead to Green seats in government. However, in a first-past-the-post system, a candidate needs to win more votes than any other candidate to secure a seat. To ‘beat’ this system, the document suggests that the Green party must specifically target only a few districts to win a seat in government. Specifically, the document cites an example of a successful Canadian Green victory in 2011 where campaigning was intensely focused on one district.

The Green Party currently holds no seats in any part of the U.S. government: not a single seat in the Senate, House of Representatives, Governorships, or any of the State Legislatures. Instead of following the international strategy of focusing on specific locations, it chose to only campaign for the largest race of them all: the presidency. The Party’s stated reason for its strategy—forcing the Democrats to become more progressive—hasn’t yet worked. 

Lessons From Global Green Party Successes

Let us briefly look at an international example of a successful Green Party. In Australia, there are two main progressive forces: the Australian Green Party and the progressive faction of the main center-left party, Labor. Sometimes, the Labor Party must form a coalition with the Green Party to form a majority in parliament. When this happens, the Green Party can force the Labor Party to adopt progressive Green policies. For example, in 2010, Labor adopted Green policies of carbon taxing to form a majority against the right-wing party. However, this success was only possible due to Australia’s ranked-choice voting system, in which voters can prefer minor parties without fear of siphoning votes from major parties. In this system, both the Green Party and the progressive faction of the Labor Party can work together to implement progressive policies.

In U.S. politics, we also have two main progressive forces: the Green Party and the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) made up of progressives from the Democratic Party. However, because of our first-past-the-post voting system, these two forces inherently work against each other. When these parties fight over votes, they give the far-right space to dominate, just as they did in 2016 and now in 2024. The U.S. Green Party siphons votes from the Democrats to the benefit of the Republicans. It is no wonder that the Republicans directly funded and supported the Green Party and other third-party candidates in key battleground states in the 2024 election. Reflecting this dynamic, Trump said of Jill Stein at a 2024 rally: “I like her very much. You know why? She takes 100% [of the votes] from them.”

The Progressive Path Forward

The Green Party will struggle to enact progressive policies as long as it retains Jill Stein as leader, prioritizes presidential races over down-ballot contests, and the U.S. uses a first-past-the-post electoral system. In its endorsement of Kamala Harris, one of the largest reputable grassroots climate action networks, 350.org, wrote: “We know and believe that candidates are not marriages. We’re not choosing a life partner, we’re choosing someone who is part of a system and we’re working to push them.” Progressivism must come from inside the Democratic Party, as the Green Party has yet to wield influence or deliver results. It has consistently failed to build the down ballot infrastructure necessary to enact change, and its continued focus on symbolic presidential runs undermines its credibility as a serious political force. Instead, the Green Party’s actions often serve to weaken the very progressivism it claims to champion by splitting the vote and empowering conservative opposition.

If progressives in the United States hope to advance a progressive agenda on a federal level, they must focus on leveraging pressure and influence within the Democratic Party, while prioritizing ranked-choice voting reforms that could foster genuine multiparty competition for the presidency in the future. The Green Party should also comply with its internationally recognized strategy to focus on down-ballot races, where it can more effectively build political power and push for progressive policies at local and state levels within a first-past-the-post system. Until these reforms are enacted, the Green Party will remain a political dead end.

The image featured in this article is licensed for reuse under the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license. No changes were made to the original image, which was taken by Gage Skidmore and can be found here.