With the Democratic and Republican primaries all but over, and the parties having picked their nominees, the American people are left to choose between the stale piece of white bread and the racist traffic cone to be the leader of the free world for the next four to eight years. A recent poll, though, shows that seven per cent of Americans are unsure if they prefer Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, or, and I’m not joking here, a meteor literally hitting the Earth. But the thing is, many people forget there are more than two people on the ballot this year, which is the subject of my new two-part series: “Voting Third Party.”
Introducing Dr. Jill Stein, the candidate for the Green Party, currently polling at four percent nationwide. She may well be the most progressive candidate on the ballot this election, and called out Bernie Sanders for wanting to start a political revolution in what she calls “a counter-revolutionary party.” In many aspects, though, she is the best candidate Team Revolution could ever hope for; being the only candidate thus far to defend Edward Snowden and advocate for both debt and tuition free public colleges. She markets herself as an alternative to having to pick the lesser of two evils and even offered Bernie Sanders a spot as her running mate.
Central to Stein’s campaign is what she calls the “Green New Deal,” which combines progressive economic and social policies with environmentally friendly ideas. She supports the idea that America should run completely on clean energy by the year 2030 and the creation of millions of new jobs in the environmental sector, and also believes in a 90 percent tax on bonuses of all the executives that were bailed out after the Great Recession of 2008. The Green New Deal also outlines a plan to enact same-day voter registration, an end to “winner take all” elections, single-payer healthcare, and asserts that “corporations are not persons and money is not speech.” If it didn’t make so much sense, I’d call it revolutionary!
It’s no surprise that she’s attracting so many Bernie voters; she constantly praises the self-identified Democratic socialist’s efforts to lead Team Revolution and calls herself a supporter of the movement. She’s true to her principles, and doesn’t hesitate to criticize her ideological opponents, calling Hillary Clinton a “corporatist warmonger” and Donald Trump a “racist billionaire,” saying “while Trump praises dictators, Hillary takes their money.” She even lamented Bernie’s endorsement of the presumptive Democratic nominee with the tweet “Many Berning hearts are breaking right now,” followed by a broken heart emoji. She constantly reminds voters that she will be on the ballot in most states, encouraging Democratic voters to support a candidate in line with their ideologies and that “It sounds like the only good thing Bernie can say about Hillary is that she's not Donald. That's what most of her supporters like about her.”
And she’s not entirely wrong, actually. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll that around half of those who plan to vote for Clinton are doing so because they don’t want Donald Trump to win (and vice-versa, to be fair), and barely half of Sanders’ voters say they will vote for the presumptive Democratic nominee, with one in four saying they will defer to the Republican nominee. Even after Bernie was coerced into endorsing Hillary with all the passion of the FreeCreditReport.com band, that didn’t change voters’ minds in the slightest. In fact, Stein saw donations to her campaign increase by 1000 percent after the endorsement and has now gained the trust of Team Revolution members who feel betrayed by Bernie Sanders.
So, that’s all you need to know about Jill Stein, the newest face of the progressive movement. Stay tuned for Part 2 where I’ll write about the candidate for the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and give my two cents about voting for a third party!
