Green Party presidential candidate, Dr. Jill Stein, is seeing a surge in both reach and engagement by refusing to allow the political movement that has rallied to the presidential campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to be co-opted by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
While Bernie Sanders appears to be signaling that he’s getting ready to support Hillary Clinton, the political movement behind the Senator seems determined to reject the woman who epitomizes the greed, manipulation, and evil Sanders’ political revolution attempted to overthrow. Green presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein is now courting Sanders supporters who aren’t ready to back the queen of institutional influence peddling and public service profiteering. This tweet blasting Hillary Clinton was retweeted more than 6,000 times:
Stein has been blasting Hillary Clinton since she proclaimed herself the winner over Sanders in the Democrat primary. Twitter handle @DrJillStein has picked up around 17,000 Twitter followers, a more than 15 percent increase, in less than a week since Hillary’s media-assisted coronation to the Democrat nomination on June 6, 2016. Stein has also seen her Facebook likes on her public page near 250,000 during this same period. Her most popular posts all aim to court disenfranchised Sanders supporters and expose establishment Democrats.
Clinton struggled badly against Senator Sanders with voters under thirty during the Democrat primary and Stein is building a social media platform that can bypass expensive traditional media campaigns. Stein’s most natural constituency is likely with those under thirty voters she can reach on Twitter and Facebook. Younger voters also don’t have painful memories of Ralph Nader, hanging chads, and ‘Dubya’ from nearly sixteen years ago. The perception that Nader enabled eight years of President George W. Bush left many Democrats holding a grudge against the Greens and cast them to the political wilderness.
Stein has even crafted a platform that makes the socialist Sanders look like the grinch who stole Christmas. Stein’s platform promises free healthcare, free tuition, free basic income, guaranteed government work, a federally subsidized green energy revolution, and a moratorium on all foreclosures and evictions. There’s something for everyone looking for a handout! Here are just a few of the highlights:
- Enact an emergency Green New Deal to turn the tide on climate change, revive the economy and make wars for oil obsolete. Initiate a WWII-scale national mobilization to halt climate change, the greatest threat to humanity in our history. Create 20 million jobs by transitioning to 100% clean renewable energy by 2030, and investing in public transit, sustainable agriculture, conservation and restoration of critical infrastructure, including ecosystems.
- Implement a Just Transition that empowers those communities and workers most impacted by climate change and the transition to a green economy. Ensure that any worker displaced by the shift away from fossil fuels will receive full income and benefits as they transition to alternative work.
- Create living-wage jobs for every American who needs work, replacing unemployment offices with employment offices. Government would be the employer of last resort, and the unemployed would have an enforceable right to make government provide work. Create direct public employment, as the Works Progress Administration did, in public services and public works for those who can’t find private employment.
- Guarantee economic human rights, including access to food, water, housing, and utilities, with effective anti-poverty programs to ensure every American a life of dignity.
- Establish a guaranteed minimum income.
- Reform public assistance to be a true safety net that empowers participants and provides a decent standard of living.
- Free universal child care.
- Establish an improved “Medicare for All” single-payer public health program to provide everyone with quality health care, at huge savings by eliminating the $400 billion annually spent on the paperwork and bureaucracy of health insurance. No co-pays, premiums or deductibles. Access to all health care services, including mental health, dental, and vision. Include everyone, period. No restrictions based on pre-existing illness, employment, immigration status, age, or any other category.
- Guarantee tuition-free, world-class public education from pre-school through university.
- Abolish student debt to free a generation of Americans from debt servitude.
- Guarantee a living wage job for all.
- Set a $15/hour federal minimum wage, with indexing.
- Impose an immediate moratorium on foreclosures and evictions.
And that’s just a small example of her platform – with something to appeal to nearly every single-issue and left-leaning voter.
Stein received less than half a million votes nationwide as the Green candidate in 2012, in a race where the incumbent President Obama was popular with the left-wingers Stein hopes to win. In that election, Stein spent less than a million dollars but did manage to win at least one percent of the vote in three states — Maine, Oregon, and Alaska. As of the last available report Stein had raised just $500,000. It’ll be worth noting if she’s able to pick up some of the donors who made more than eight-million individual contributions to Senator Sanders at an average of just $27 a donation.
Dustin Stockton is a political reporter for Breitbart News, a community liaison for Gun Owners of America, and a political strategist. Follow him on Twitter @DustinStockton or Facebook.