Jill Stein taps ‘Bernie Sanders movement’ in Green Party presidential bid

Short of adopting wire-frame glasses and a Brooklyn accent, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein did everything possible last weekend to blur any distinction between herself and Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont.

“It is such an honor to be also running in alliance with the Bernie Sanders movement,” Ms. Stein said to thunderous applause at the Green Party Presidential Nominating Convention in Houston. “We are Bernie Green!”

To nobody’s surprise, Ms. Stein, a Harvard-educated physician and prohibitive front-runner, won the nomination Saturday at the University of Houston. She will run on a ticket with human rights activist Ajamu Baraka.

That Mr. Sanders has endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton matters little to the Greens, a third party poised to make an enormous electoral leap in November if Ms. Stein can persuade Mr. Sanders’ ground troops to line up behind her instead of staying home or voting Democrat.

The Greens suffered a setback Friday when a federal court ruled that the Commission on Presidential Debates has the right to exclude third-party candidates such as Ms. Stein and Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson from televised forums if they don’t meet polling criteria.

The ruling all but guarantees that Ms. Stein will be excluded from the debates, given that the commission requires participants to reach at least 15 percent in the polls. A McClatchy-Maris survey released Friday shows Ms. Stein with 6 percent, and even that is a recent high-water polling mark.

Even so, the Greens have reason for optimism. For one, that 6 percent figure is far higher than the 0.36 percent that Ms. Stein earned as the party’s presidential candidate in 2012.

For another, Ms. Stein has new high-profile allies in former Ivy League professor Cornel West and WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange.

Mr. Assange, who released 20,000 hacked emails last month showing Democratic National Committee officials plotting against the Sanders campaign, urged left-of-center voters via live feed Saturday not to cast a lesser-of-two-evils vote for Mrs. Clinton.

“What the Clinton campaign is doing at the moment is trying to say, ’Well, OK, yes, maybe we’re committed to arms dealers and to Saudi Arabia, and yes, maybe we subverted the integrity of the Democratic primary, etc., etc., but you’ll just have to swallow that. You’ll just have to swallow that, or else you’ll get Donald Trump,’” he said.

“That’s a form of extortion,” Mr. Assange told the enthusiastic crowd from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has lived since being granted asylum amid sexual assault charges.

That message may be taking hold with voters like Angelica Duanes, a Sanders supporter from Los Angeles who attended the convention.

“I am still a Democrat but I guess you could say we’re a flight risk, so we’re really looking at our options now,” Ms. Duanes told Russia Today television. “We really can’t stand with Hillary Clinton as our nominee. We definitely can’t stand with Donald Trump. So at this point, we’re looking at what our options are.”

As for the argument that a vote against Mrs. Clinton is a vote for Mr. Trump, Ms. Duanes said that’s the Democratic Party’s fault, not hers.

“We feel that they had an opportunity to choose a stronger candidate that would definitely beat Donald Trump come November, and they did not,” said Ms. Duanes. “At this point, we’re not going to be influenced by fear tactics and the boogeyman narrative that they’re painting. We’re looking for someone to vote for rather than vote against.”

The Sanders loss, combined with the evidence of DNC favoritism, has given the Greens their best opportunity for a strong showing since well-known consumer advocate Ralph Nader headed the party ticket in 2000.

“We are at such an incredibly powerful, unprecedented moment in history,” Ms. Stein told delegates. “We have an incredible opportunity, we have an incredible responsibility to stand up and lead the way forward to the transformative change.”

This year’s presidential election “really is that moment that so many of us I think have dedicated our lives to creating and that we never thought we’d see actually happen in our lifetimes,” she said. “We are closer to that now than we’ve ever been.”

Ms. Stein called the election a “perfect storm, because the American people are tired of a rigged economy of the rigged political system that keeps us trapped in that rigged economy.”

But an effort by Ms. Stein and her Libertarian counterpart to break through one element of that “rigged political system” failed Friday when U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer turned away their challenge to the right of the Commission on Presidential Debates to exclude them.

Judge Collyer ruled that the commission is a private entity, not a “public forum,” and rejected arguments by Mr. Johnson and Ms. Green that the commission is essentially a government actor, performing an important role in U.S. democracy, and therefore should be subject to public oversight.

“This court could not require defendants to include plaintiffs in the debates because such an order would violate the First Amendment prohibition on forced speech and forced association,” Judge Collyer found.

Mr. Johnson’s campaign said it was disappointed with the ruling and spotted “several serious flaws” that could lead to an appeal.

The Green convention came as a reminder that the Green platform isn’t for everyone, even progressives. Ms. Stein has long taken a hard line on Israel, referring in her remarks Saturday to “war crimes” committed by Israeli troops in the “occupation” against Palestinians.

At the same time, she played up issues popular with Sanders voters, such as opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, banning hydraulic fracturing, erasing student loan debt, instating a single-payer health care system, releasing nonviolent prisoners convicted of drug offenses, and legalizing marijuana.

Ms. Stein also dropped Mr. Sanders’ name repeatedly in several speeches and interviews during the three-day convention, even though the senator was nowhere to be found.

Her supporters chanted, “Jill, not Hill,” although polling shows Mrs. Clinton is more likely to attract Sanders voters than is Ms. Stein.

A CNN/ORC survey released Aug. 1, two days after the Democratic National Convention, showed that 69 percent of Sanders supporters now favor Mrs. Clinton, versus 13 percent for Ms. Stein, 10 percent for Mr. Johnson and 3 percent for Mr. Trump.

The figures represent a 5 percent increase in support for Mrs. Clinton, within the poll’s margin of error, but also a 7 percent boost for Ms. Stein.

Oddly enough, Mr. Trump’s decline in the polls could wind up benefiting the Greens — and hurting the Clinton campaign — by reducing the perceived urgency among left-of-center voters to vote Democratic in order to defeat the Republican ticket.

“There’s a cost to violating principles, even if there’s also a cost to yourself, even if you don’t like the risk — which seems to be getting very small — the risk that Donald Trump becomes president,” Mr. Assange said.

For those still unconvinced, Ms. Stein argued that voting for one candidate in order to avoid the other has “brought us everything we were afraid of.”

Ms. Stein had urged Mr. Sanders to step in and run as the Green Party candidate. Although he didn’t accept her offer, the convention was evidence that he won’t be forgotten on the campaign trail. Far from it.

“We owe Bernie such a debt of gratitude for lifting up this revolution that has been smoldering for decades. You broke through the media blackout. You lifted us up and you refused to be shut down by the DNC,” Ms. Stein said in her acceptance speech. “Thank you to the Bernie campaign!”

• Stephen Dinan contributed to this report.