June 13, 2024: US Presidential candidate Jill Stein today signed the NuclearBan.US “presidential candidates pledge.” The pledge is a promise that, if elected President, she will sign the Nuclear Ban Treaty, work with the other nuclear-armed nations to ensure the complete elimination of all nuclear weapons, and put all those wasted human and financial resources into addressing the climate crisis.
Jill Stein, who is running for President as a Green Party candidate, is the second presidential candidate to sign the pledge. Marianne Williamson, who was running against Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination, signed the pledge last year but has since dropped out of the race. The other Democratic candidates for President, Joe Biden and Dean Philipps (who also dropped out of the running) both declined. Other third party candidates were invited to sign the Pledge but have so far not done so.
Although many Democrats fear third party candidates like Jill Stein could “spoil” the election and result in a second term for Donald Trump, the reality is that in 43 out of 50 states, the outcome of this election is already a foregone conclusion and no amount of votes for a third party candidate will really make a difference to the result. In 25 “Red” states, Donald Trump has a consistent and commanding lead of 10% or more in the polls, and there is little to no chance of Joe Biden winning any of those states. And in 14 “Blue” states, Joe Biden has a consistent and commanding lead of 10% or more in the polls, and there is little to no chance of Donald Trump winning any of those states.
It is only in the remaining 11 “purple” or “marginal” states that voters really have a chance of affecting the outcome of the election (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Minnesota, Virginia, Maine and New Hampshire). Trump is currently ahead in the polls in all but four of these states, but the margins are in most cases too small to call. In 2016, for example, Trump won Pennsylvania by just 40,000 votes. In 2020, Biden won that state by 80,000 votes. In both elections, a total of nearly 7 million votes were cast in Pennsylvania, meaning that in both elections the margin of victory was only around 1% of total votes cast.
Vote to Survive is a campaign to encourage “vote swapping” with voters in those 11 states. This involves voters in Red and Blue states agreeing to vote for a candidate like Jill Stein in exchange for a voter in a Purple state voting for Joe Biden. This helps ensure that Donald Trump does not win in those Purple states while allowing candidates like Jill Stein to collect more votes overall than she might otherwise get. There are plenty of voters in Blue and Red states, as well as in Purple states, who don’t want to see Donald Trump back in the White House but are also deeply unhappy with Joe Biden as President. Vote swapping gives those voters an opportunity to send a clear message to Biden that he needs to do much more to end wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and much more to address the impending threats to us all of climate catastrophe and nuclear war!
The full text of the Presidential Candidates Pledge signed by Jill Stein is pasted below:
