A noontime campaign event in Ohio went awry Friday for White House hopeful Jill Stein when the Green Party’s candidate for president mistakenly took a flight to Cincinnati instead of Columbus, organizers said.
Ms. Stein was expected to address a crowd at Capital University in Bexley near Columbus “to speak about her vision for America” at noon, according to her campaign’s official website. At 11:50 a.m., however, a reporter for The Columbus Dispatch announced on Twitter that he learned the candidate would be two hours late because “it seems she accidentally flew to Cincinnati.”
The group that organized the event, the Capital University Greens Student Organization, confirmed to the newspaper that it was being delayed on account of Ms. Stein accidentally arriving more than 100 miles away in Cincinnati near the Kentucky border.
“They just got on the road and will be two hours late. Things happen,” the group’s president, Aaron Suarez, told The Dispatch.
The reporter who broke the story, Randy Ludlow, tweeted a photograph a few minutes after the event was supposed to begin, showing a few dozen people assembled in front of an empty podium.
“This is what happens when people don’t have private travel agents and private jets at their disposal. These are the issues that every day people face when they travel. Our campaign is having to handle tremendous growth and momentum in a very short time, and what’s important is the wild enthusiasm on the ground that we are experiencing everywhere we go,” the Stein campaign said in a statement sent to The Washington Times later Friday.
Ms. Stein was expected to address a crowd later in the evening at an event in Cleveland before speaking Saturday in Detroit.
The candidate is scheduled to stop in Cincinnati on Sunday afternoon, a little more than 48 hours after she arrived there by mistake.
Ms. Stein is currently polling in the single digits below Libertarian Gary Johnson, according to several recent national surveys. Both must each poll at or above 15 percent in order to share a debate stage with Republican nominee Donald Trump and the Democratic Party’s choice, Hillary Clinton, according to the Commission on Presidential Debates’ official rules.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.