Green Party’s Stein seeks ‘liberated’ Sanders supporters
PHILADELPHIA — Angry and disaffected Bernie Sanders’ backers have a new rallying cry: “Jill not Hill.”
That’s Green Party candidate Jill Stein, whose liberal agenda of tuition-free college, $15-per-hour minimum wage and a renewable energy economy by 2030 offers a home to Sanders’ supporters disillusioned by the two-party political system and unwilling to back Democrat Hillary Clinton.
“We are standing up together, we are supporting the Bernie delegates who liberated themselves tonight from the Democratic Party,” Stein belted through a megaphone outside the Democratic convention Tuesday night.
Stein is a 66-year-old doctor and political activist from Massachusetts who, like Clinton, was born in Illinois and raised in a Chicago suburb. She is poised to become the Green Party’s 2016 presidential nominee early next month, a title she won in 2012.
Then, Stein failed to crack half a million votes. This year, detractors warn she could become a Ralph Nader-like candidate, taking enough votes from Clinton to deliver Republican nominee Donald Trump a victory in November.
Nader, the Green Party’s nominee in 2000, captured nearly 3 million votes. Many Democrats argue it was Nader who kept Democrat Al Gore from winning the White House over Republican George W. Bush.
Jason Sherry, a Sanders’ delegate from Colorado, warned about helping Trump.
“If you’re in a battleground state,” he said, “you’ve got to suck it up and vote for Hillary.”
Clinton’s campaign is monitoring many of Sanders supporters who, for now, seem unwilling to get behind her as the nominee despite the senator’s pleas.
With voters expressing discontent at both major party nominees, pollsters are watching third-party candidates such as Stein and Gary Johnson, the Libertarian party’s nominee. But a July Associated PressGfK poll found both Stein and Johnson remain virtual unknowns among Americans, with 76 percent saying they don’t know enough about Johnson to have a favorable or unfavorable opinion and 82 percent saying the same about Stein.
Danny Keating, a steelworker from Lowell, Mass., says he’ll vote for Stein “because the two-party system is corrupt.”