Every election, we are told collectively as a society that we have two main options on who to vote for; either the Democrat or the Republican candidate. However, there are three other contenders fighting, rather quietly, in the background for our votes.
These are Green Party candidate Jill Stein, independent candidate Cornel West and Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver.
Stein has spent most of her political career trying to get the most attention possible. Over the years, Stein has run in the 2002 Massachusetts gubernatorial election, 2006 secretary of the commonwealth election, 2012 presidential election and the 2016 presidential election — and lost all of them.
Stein also has a track record of sporadic yet not-infrequent arrests. For example, in April she was arrested at a pro-Palestine rally at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where she claimed to be mistakenly charged with assaulting a police officer. Despite her now being 74 years old, Stein is not slowing down in her pursuit of leftist ideals for our nation, which shows in her starkly collectivist policy positions.
The policies that would be pursued by a Green Party White House are outlined in Stein’s platform which is broken down into three sections: People, Planet and Peace. Universal basic income, building 15 million green-friendly public houses, creating a universal healthcare system, codifying Roe v. Wade and, most importantly, advancing the ecosocialist Green New Deal are just a few of the many positions championed by Stein as she campaigns across the nation. Hidden under the term “ecosocialist” are Stein’s wishes to socialize energy production, power distribution and the manufacturing sector in order to make them all based on clean energy.
If you think that this platform sounds somewhat radical, you would be correct. The amount of control that Stein and the Green Party would try to execute upon the American people is a true testament to their climate first, people last agenda. However, this strategy is not one of a candidate who believes that they can win any national election. The whole point of this type of political agenda is to attract as much attention away from the two main parties as possible in order to start a slow shift away from the mainstream narrative.
On the same side of the political coin, West is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at Union Theological Seminary and he has an impressive repertoire of being a professor at Harvard and the first African American to receive a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton. West’s platform, laid out so that every subsection has justice at the end of it, advocates for the battle against systemic racism, a standard for gender affirming care nationwide with an equal rights amendment for LGBTQ+ people, implementation of a national registry for gun ownership, nationalization of the fossil fuel industry alongside halting oil and gas projects and climate reparations, and, unsurprisingly, reparations for African American and Native American people.
These ambitious policies are even more radical than Stein’s, yet one cannot help but admire West as a dreamer. However, most of these could never be implemented in actuality because the president does not have that much power to yield. West’s policies would inevitably turn our nation towards national socialism, which is clearly not supported by our constitution or ideals. West, like Stein, knows that he can’t win, and therefore he is bold in order to attract the attention of his intended audience, voters on the far left.
Finally, we have Oliver, the Libertarian Party candidate. Oliver has a very interesting personal background. For one, he is an openly gay 39 year old who fully supports the LGBTQ+ community, believing that individuals, including transgender people, should have the freedom to choose for themselves how to live their lives without the government intervening. Ultimately, this stance fits well with the Libertarian ideal of limited government but outrages the wing of the party known as the Mises Caucus, that is a MAGA Republican-inspired subsection who are conservative on social issues. This has substantially impacted Oliver’s grip on the Libertarian Party, which has many members who are already voting for President Donald Trump in November.
Oliver supports a variety of astute policies, such as stemming the printing of money in order to cut inflation, drastically cutting government spending, overhauling the immigration system to allow more legal immigration, staying out of foreign conflicts and championing the right to bear arms. While these policies are noble and much needed in today’s political landscape, they are also purposefully vague in order to not anger the diverse Libertarian voter base.
Even outside of the Libertarian Party, many voters are beginning to question the two-party system’s hold on the presidency.
“One of the main reasons that I would consider voting for Oliver is because I believe he is the only true capitalist running. Trump and Harris are both big spenders and neither support free markets,” said Benjamin Chapman, a freshman majoring in accounting who identifies as an independent Libertarian. “I honestly don’t think that voting will be able to get us out of the hole we have dug ourselves into with record high taxes, a ballooning deficit and an ever-growing government who seeks to control every aspect of our lives.”
While Chapman believes that a third-party option is better, he also believes that nothing will change from his vote. This, in essence, is the crux of the third-party issue: When people believe that by voting for a third party candidate like Stein, Oliver, or West they are throwing away their votes, the two-party system will stand strong even against a rising tide of nonconformity.
If there can be any change in our system, it has to start with the people, which includes voting for something different, even if alternate options have shortcomings. Voting for a third party can make the mainstream politicians wake up and start fighting for our ideals, not just their donors’ ideals, and for the betterment of our lives, not just their own lives. Complacency is not always the only option, even in our two-party system.
