Green Party’s Jill Stein on Why Bernie Sanders Should Go Third-Party
America’s two major political parties are poised this year to pit a couple of historically disliked presidential candidates against each other. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s unfavorable ratings are bad news for both the Democrats and the Republicans — but they could be good news for a candidate intent on dismantling the country’s two-party system.
That’s exactly what presumptive Green Party nominee Jill Stein is counting on. Rolling Stone recently spoke to Stein about her entreaty to Bernie Sanders to join the Green Party ticket, about her plans to do away with student debt, combat climate change and pay reparations to the descendants of slaves.
You sent a letter to Bernie Sanders after the New York primary asking him to join the Green Party ticket. Did he ever respond?
No, he has not. I’m not holding my breath, but I’m not ruling it out either. The Green Party has been reaching out to him since 2011 without a response. There are a lot of commonalities in our agendas, in our views. Technically he is a political independent — or used to be, up until his recent registration as a Democrat — so we’ve long been exploring the potential for collaboration.
He has definitely not been interested, although I would mention that his brother is a member of the Green Party in the UK. But he has not responded, and has been really quite consistent in expressing disinterest in independent third parties over the last many years. After the beating that he is getting — this real, purposeful, I think, sabotage by the DNC — we’ll see if he’ll have a change of heart. I don’t know.
Were you surprised when he switched his party affiliation from Independent to Democrat? He seemed to think he didn’t stand much of a chance of winning as a third-party candidate.
It wasn’t surprising at all. It seems like the logical and strategic thing for him to do from his perspective. I think he’s been both proven right and proven wrong. We are in a damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don’t situation right now, which should be fixed by a simple legislative reform — that could be passed right now, by the way, for anybody who is concerned about wanting to change this rigged political system: The state legislatures can simply pass ranked-choice voting, which gets rid of the fear factor. It is used in many cities around the country from San Francisco to Portland, Maine, and many in between, and in many countries around the world. It allows you to rank your choices instead of just picking one; you don’t have to make your vote a gamble.
Most people are [voting out of fear] right now. The last CNN poll that showed the majority of Clinton supporters are not really supporting her, they’re primarily voting against Donald Trump, and the majority of Donald Trump supporters are mainly voting against Hillary Clinton. What’s wrong with this picture? We live in a system that tells us to vote against what we are afraid of rather than for what we believe in.