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Support for Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein and Vice Presidential candidate Butch Ware is the highest since the party’s candidate Ralph Nader ran for president of the United States in 2000.

The extent of Stein and Ware’s support is reflected in the fact that the Democratic Party is trying to remove the Green Party from the ballot in several “swing” states. Stein and Ware are on the ballot in more than 40 states across the country.

The Democrats have sponsored attacks on Stein by “progressive” Congress representatives, such as Alexandra Ocasio Cortez (AOC), who has moved to the right since being elected to become part of the Party establishment.

Palestine

The Stein-Ware ticket is winning support largely due to opposition to Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinians — and now Lebanon — and are calling on the US government to stop sending arms to the Zionist state.

Meanwhile, Republican candidate Donald Trump and Democratic Party candidate Kamala Harris continue their support for Israel's war.

Stein and Ware have won support from many Arab Americans, Muslims and pro-Palestine youth. Stein was arrested in April at a pro-Palestine rally at Columbia University in New York.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) last month published a survey showing Stein is leading Harris among Muslim voters in the battleground states of Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin. The Muslim Public Affairs Council also recently endorsed Stein.

The survey found that 40% of Michigan’s Muslim-American voters plan to back Stein, while 18% support Trump, 12% support Harris and 4% support independent candidate Cornel West.

Stein has visited Dearborn, Michigan many times during her campaign. Dearborn has a large Arab-American population and Mayor Abdullah Hammond is central to the campaign of opposition to Israel’s war.

Dearborn sits in the district that elected Palestinian and Muslim-American Rashida Tlaib to Congress. The district also takes in a population of South Asian Muslims in a largely Black section of Detroit.

Defund the war machine to fund social programs

Stein is a Harvard-educated doctor in Massachusetts and a Jewish anti-Zionist. Ware is a professor of history at the University of California-Santa Barabara and an African American Muslim.

Stein and Ware recently spoke to DemocracyNow! about their campaign and the issues they see as the most critical in the election.

Stein told DN!: “Some 8 million Americans are not able to afford their medications. Eighteen million were driven into poverty by the costs of healthcare in the last year for which data was available. Half of all Americans are struggling to keep a roof over their heads, severely economically stressed trying to just pay their rent.

“And we are spending half of our congressional dollars on the endless war machine — of which this genocidal war against Gaza is one example — that the American people vehemently object to.”

Stein told DN! the US is “a reckless and dangerous empire” and she calls for ending funding of armaments to Ukraine and Israel.

“We’re currently engaged in two hot wars on the verge of going nuclear and another cold war on the verge of becoming hot.”

In terms of voting for a third party, Stein said: “The American people are calling for other options. Who is anyone to say they should be denied and that the two zombie political parties, that have so poorly served the American public, are the only options.

Stein accused the Democrats of “pulling all the stops, including fraudulent impersonations of the Green Party, hiring infiltrators and spies, which they have publicly advertised for, and hiring an army of lawyers” to throw their candidates off the ballot.

Stein puts these tactics down to the Democrats being “terrified of actually meeting us in the court of public opinion and hav[ing] a real debate about the crisis that the American people face”.

Stein said the Green Party is the only one putting “Medicare for All, to free public higher education to rent controls” on the table.

The Green Party is also pledging to build 15 million units of social housing, “which would meet our housing crisis” and cut the military budget, said Stein. “[A]bove all, [the party pledges to] ending the genocidal war on Gaza right now … the American people overwhelmingly — a near supermajority — actually supports a weapons embargo right now.”

Stein said that Israel’s expansion of its war into the West Bank and now Lebanon “is extremely dangerous”, however if the US wanted to end the war it could “simply make a phone call and instruct Israel that this genocidal assault is over”, such as President Ronald Reagan did when Israel tried to expand its illegal settlements in the 1980s.

Immigration

On immigration, Stein said Harris and the Democrats were marching to the right, “basically adopting the policies of Donald Trump”.

“In our view the most important thing we can do is to stop causing it in the first place,” which she put down to “economic neocolonialism and domination, the climate crisis and the war on drugs”.

“[O]n day one of our administration we would legalise marijuana, and undercut the power of the drug cartels to cause violence and wreak havoc on so many nations, especially south of the border.”

Stein also said the Greens would not continue the practice of overthrowing “democratically elected administrations like, for example, the Aristide presidency of Haiti, which we overturned twice”.

She also noted the country’s “failure to actually take real, concrete steps on the climate crisis that in turn is prompting so many millions of farmers to have to flee, because of rampant drought and other climate instability.

“There is so much we can do not only to mitigate our own production of fossil fuels, which has skyrocketed under Democratic administrations, far more than under Republican administrations.”

“[I]nstead of spending billions of dollars on a [border] wall … we can be investing in prompt screening and background checks and providing work papers for people promptly at the border…

With migrants able to work and contribute trillions to the economy, “Our communities would be competing for migrants [rather] than shutting them out. They not only pay their way, they actually contribute to economic development and to the tax base of any community.”

Reparations

Ware told DN! it was an easy decision to accept Stein’s proposal to be her VP nominee. Ware said he spoke with Stein about reparations for the affects of slavery, “after having recently posted a video of Kamala Harris where she hemmed and hawed and shucked and jived for two full minutes and then said the exact words: ‘I will never do anything that only helps Black people.’”

When Ware asked Stein about reparations, she told him that the sum had been “calculated many times” and is “between US$10-13 trillion” — and that she is “in favour of cash payments”.

On the issue of Palestine, Ware said he had seen Stein’s arrest at the Columbia University rally. “I asked her about her overall foreign policy, her response was to say that the approach of the Green Party is to dismantle the American empire.

“Pulling back those 700 military bases out of the 800 that we have around the world that actually serve no purpose except to antagonise local populations … that allows you to reinvest the $1.3 trillion (if you take all the auxiliary costs that are being spent on the endless war machine) … [in] social housing, in healthcare, in fixing the roads and doing all the things that the American government could do…

“When I was invited into the struggle against imperialism, into the struggle against white supremacy, into the struggle against capitalist exploitation in my time, writing about this position, engaging this tradition at an activist level and as a community organiser, it was an easy decision.”

Ware also called out Harris and Biden for their silence and failure to intervene prior to the execution of Imam Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams the previous day, saying “We have a vast void of moral leadership in this country.” Williams was executed on September 24 by lethal injection in the state of Missouri. The victim’s family had asked that Williams be spared death. The Supreme Court refused to stop the execution.

Ware posted on X: “This election is about Gaza — but it is about so much more than Gaza. Muslims have shown that we can build big suburban mosques. What has it gotten us? They still kill us with impunity. It is time to consolidate power in coalition with all other anti-imperialists and anti fascists.”

Stein and Ware have ballot status in enough states to win the 270 Electoral College votes required to become president. Yet they are excluded from debates or interviews by the mainstream media.

But as the CAIR survey shows, they are getting broad support among Arabs, Palestinians and Muslims.