Carolyn Fath
Dr. Jill Stein is waiting patiently for the Democrats to “sabotage” the Bernie Sanders campaign.
“Bless his heart, he’s a team player, but he's on the wrong team,” says the Green Party candidate for president. “This is why [the Democrats] have superdelegates and Super Tuesday — it’s to create a firewall against progressive, grassroots, populist campaigns.”
During a visit to Madison last week for the state Green Party convention, Stein stopped by the Isthmus office for an interview. She says Sanders’ unanticipated success in the 2016 presidential race is evidence that voters are “feeling the Bern” for the Green Party, not the Democrats. Whether it’s putting millions to work reinventing the energy sector, curtailing the influence of Wall Street or providing a free college education to every American, Stein and Sanders are running on a strikingly similar message. Enough so, that Stein’s supporters often inquire about the duo joining forces.
“We reached out in many ways, [but] at this point he does not acknowledge third parties,” says Stein. She finds it ironic that Sanders has given the Greens the cold shoulder. “He’s kind of the socialist who doesn’t talk to other socialists.”
But Stein is predicting that the coalition built by Sanders will flock to her camp if Hillary Clinton clinches the Democratic nomination. “There’s no doubt that those voters are not going to want to just line up behind Hillary,” Stein says. “We’ve made it clear that we are here for some people as a Plan B after Bernie.”
Stein says the Democratic frontrunner isn’t even pretending to champion progressive positions and accuses the former secretary of state of embracing corporatism. “She talks about looking at things, not about doing things,” says Stein. “[The Democrats] are not going to change; we’re going to have to force them to change.”
Nationally, the Green Party has never recovered from the 2000 presidential election despite it being the party’s best showing. Ralph Nader received over 2.8 million votes in that election but was cast as a spoiler for luring enough voters away from Democrat Al Gore in Florida to hand the election over to Republican George W. Bush.
In Wisconsin, the Green Party garnered 94,000 votes in the 2000 presidential election. In 2012, when Stein also headed the Green ticket, she received just over 7,500 votes in the Badger State and fewer than a half a million nationally.
Bernie might be singing the Green Party’s tune, but far more people are listening. In the recent Wisconsin primary, Sanders received more than 500,000 votes, better than any other candidate from either party.
But Stein says at the end of the day, the Sanders campaign will be good for independent politics. “If you talk to people under 30, they don’t have a lot of allegiance to either party,” says Stein. “They are giving Bernie a try in the Democratic Party, and they are being taught a lesson.”
Stein sees the mainstream parties perpetuating a sense of hopelessness among the electorate that constrains what is politically possible. She scoffs at the “vote for the lesser of two evils” mindset and sees the rise of Republican Gov. Scott Walker as a prime of example of why Democrats are ultimately to blame for Wisconsin’s sharp turn to the right.
“The Democratic Party candidates wouldn’t stand up for the key issues [of the] Wisconsin uprising,” she says. “Case in point how lesser-evilism paves the way for the greater evil.”
Stein sees the current two-party dominance over the political system as a house of cards that may well collapse in 2016. “In the words of [author] Alice Walker, the biggest way people give up power is by not knowing we had it to start with. We got it, and we have to start using it.”
