How did Jill Stein get from member of Lexington’s Town Meeting to presidential candidate?

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has often been spotted walking her dog on Lexington’s wooded paths. A quiet neighbor, grandmother, environmental activist and former physician, Stein has held only one elected office, as a member of Lexington’s Town Meeting, the legislative body for the town of 34,000. 

But in this year’s high-stakes presidential election, Stein could play a critical role. Her  pro-Gaza stance has won her support among Muslim and Arab voters, particularly in Michigan, a key swing state where recent polls show Kamala Harris in a dead heat with Donald Trump.

Stein’s candidacy has drawn the ire of the Democratic Party, and has alienated neighbors, former allies, and even family members, many of whom disagreed with her decision to enter the race, according to several people LexObserver spoke to.

“I worry less about social approval than about children burned alive and crushed in rubble; than about climate collapse (with emissions under Biden and Obama even worse than under Trump and Bush); or about expanding war, with both parties leading the charge towards nuclear Armageddon,” Stein told LexObserver when asked about their opposition to her candidacy. “It’s time to forget the lesser evil and fight for the greater good like our lives depend on it.”

In a video announcing her candidacy, Stein pledged to fight “crushing inequality, endless war, [and] climate collapse,” along with the housing and health care crises, student debt, and “diseases of despair,” but her campaign has focused almost exclusively on Gaza. She joined in campus protests at Columbia and Washington University in St. Louis, where she was arrested with 99 other demonstrators, and has spoken at rallies from Washington D.C. to Dearborn, MI, calling for an immediate ceasefire and an end to US military support for Israel. She selected Butch Ware, a professor of Black and Islamic studies at UC Santa-Barbara who has also been outspoken about Gaza, as her running mate. “That is one of the essential reasons why our campaign is in the race,” she told LexObserver.   

Although Stein is currently polling at only about 1% nationally, Democrats are taking notice. Last week, the DNC released its first-ever ad targeting a third party candidate, which includes a graphic depicting Stein’s face morphing into Trump’s. 

“The Democratic Party of Desperation is smearing us big time right now,” Stein said. “This is a huge badge of honor.” 

This rancor is nothing new for Stein. Her disillusionment with the Democratic Party goes back to at least 1998, when she was involved in the push for a Clean Elections bill in Massachusetts. The bill passed, but was repealed a few years later by an overwhelmingly Democratic state legislature. “They repealed a law that we, the people, had passed by a 2 to 1 margin in order to address the fundamental corruption of our political system,” she said. “That’s what made me a political animal.”

Born in Chicago and raised in Highland Park, IL, a leafy Chicago suburb that’s in many ways similar to Lexington, Stein attended Harvard College and Harvard Medical School and settled in Lexington, where she raised her two children. Her work as a doctor led her to activism; seeing the impact of environmental toxins on her patients’ health, she fought coal-fired power plants across the state and a toxic incinerator where Lexington’s trash was burned.  

Stein entered her first political race in 2002, as the Green Rainbow Party’s candidate for governor of Massachusetts. She was excluded from the first debate, but, after taking legal action, was included in the second. Audiences said she fared reasonably well against Republican Mitt Romney and two other candidates, but in the end she received only 3% of the vote. The experience seems to have cemented her frustration with the two-party system — and her desire to fight against it. “It’s a very deeply tilted playing field,” she said, recalling that first campaign. “It’s hard to get coverage by the press, your issues are suppressed.” That frustration seems to have spurred her to run again and again. 

“I entered that race out of desperation because nothing else was working, but I came out of it with incredible inspiration,” she said. 

The next year, Stein ran for Lexington’s Town Meeting and won a seat representing her local precinct, with 539 votes. But there’s little evidence that she distinguished herself in the body of more than 200 representatives. A search for her name in the Town Meeting minutes for the five years she was a member yields only two results, one related to affordable housing, which she favored, and another on the state’s “fast track auction law,” which allowed Massachusetts to auction off land rather than give local communities the right of first refusal. Her work helped defeat the law, she said.  

“She was helpful in spurring us to do climate-related things,” said Jeanne Krieger, a member of the town’s Select Board at the time. But neither Krieger nor other members we spoke to had specific recollections of Stein’s time in Town Meeting. In 2010, Stein left before her second term was over to run for governor again.

Stein first ran for president in 2012, campaigning on the idea of a Green New Deal, a version of which was later introduced in Congress by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey, and helped pave the way for the Biden administration to pass the most significant federal climate legislation to date. Stein received 469,501 votes  (0.36%) — more than any woman had ever received at that time, but less than her Green Party predecessor, Ralph Nader, who at his peak in 2000 received 2.74% of the popular vote. Here in Lexington, the incumbent Barack Obama received 12,750 votes to Republican Mitt Romney’s 5,293. Stein got 160. 

Stein ran again in 2016, but this time, the race between the leading candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, was much closer, and the stakes were much higher. Stein ran on the same basic platform, courting supporters of the popular progressive primary candidate Bernie Sanders. Stein received a total of 1,457,216 votes — just 1.07% of the popular vote. But she garnered more votes than Trump’s margin of victory in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Had most of those voters cast their ballots for Clinton instead of Stein, Clinton would have won the election. 

After the election, reports prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee found that more than 1,000 of the posts created by fake social media accounts as part of a Russian disinformation effort to help Trump win mentioned Jill Stein. 

“Grow a spine and vote Jill Stein,” one hashtag read. Some posts specifically targeted Black voters, promoting Stein as an alternative to Clinton. 

There is no evidence that Stein was aware of the Russian campaign. But in the midst of the investigations into Russian interference in the election, video emerged showing that Stein had attended a 2015 dinner in Moscow hosted by the Russian TV network RT and was briefly seated at a table with Vladimir Putin. Clinton called Stein a “Russian asset.” Stein says she attended the dinner to talk about her pro-peace, anti-nuclear agenda, that she paid her own way, and that she didn’t speak to Putin. She cooperated with a Senate investigation into her potential “collusion with the Russians,” which found no wrongdoing. 

Stein was out of the public eye for several years after that. She did not run in the 2020 election. She did some work behind the scenes for Green Party candidates for down-ballot offices and on local environmental issues, according to her former campaign manager and Lexington resident John Andrews. 

Last month, progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized Stein on Instagram for showing up during elections, but not doing anything in between to build support for her ideas or her party. 

“If you run for years and years and years and years in a row, and your party has not grown and you don’t add city council seats and you don’t add down ballot candidates and you don’t add state electeds, that’s bad leadership,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “If all you do is show up once every four years to speak to people who are justifiably pissed off, but you’re just showing up once every four years to do that, you’re not serious. To me, it does not read as authentic. It reads as predatory.”

Stein fired back, blaming “the anti-democratic tactics and strategies that the Democratic Party uses to crush and silence political opposition” for the Green Party’s failure to win elected offices. She pointed to a New York Times article that says Democrats have assembled “an army of lawyers” to challenge the ballot access efforts of third-party candidates.

But Stein didn’t point to any specific political organizing or advocacy work she’s done since she last ran for president. 

Stein announced her plans to run in this election back in November 2023 despite protests from friends and family members, who worried about both the personal toll and, perhaps more importantly, the potential to help get Trump re-elected. 

“I have made my peace with whatever happens with the election on November 5,” Stein’s husband, Rick Rohrer, said. “What I’m worried about is what will happen with my family on November 6.”

Stein’s focus on Gaza amid continued US support for Israel’s assault has paid off. A poll conducted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations at the end of August found Stein basically tied with Harris among Muslim voters nationally. In Michigan, 40% of Muslim voters backed Stein, with 18% for Trump and 12% for Harris. She was recently endorsed by the “Abandon Harris” campaign, a group started by Muslims in Dearborn demanding a ceasefire in Gaza that now seeks to “ensure the defeat of Kamala Harris at the ballot box.” (The larger “Uncommitted” movement, also started by Muslims from Dearborn, stopped short of endorsing Harris but urged supporters to vote against Trump or third-party candidates that could “help inadvertently deliver a Trump presidency.”)

“A vote for Stein is really a vote for Trump,” the narrator says in the ad the DNC released in swing states last week. The ad then quotes Trump himself: “Jill Stein? I like her very much,” he says. “You know why? She takes 100% from them.” 

In Stein’s Lexington neighborhood, blue Harris-Walz signs adorn nearly every yard. But there’s one lonely green Stein sign at the top of a hill. The house belongs to Katie Flynn, whose husband is Palestinian. “My kids are Palestinian, and I couldn’t look them in the eye and vote for Kamala Harris,” Flynn said. “Thankfully in Massachusetts I have the privilege to vote without overthinking strategy, and only with my gut.”