Want to Elect Socialists? Run Them in Democratic Primaries

By Daniel Moraff. First published by In These Times.

There are currently 7,383 state legislators in the United States. Nine of them are affiliated with the Vermont Progressive Party. One of them is an independent from Alaska who caucuses with the Democrats.

This is the grand sum of the left presence in American state legislatures outside the Democratic Party. There has been a single instance of federal-level victory in my lifetime—Bernie Sanders’s election as an independent to the U.S. House, then Senate, in Vermont. No one else has even come close. And Sanders, after 30 years as an Independent, elected to seek the presidency through the Democratic primary.

Jill Stein’s $3 Million Post-Election Scampaign

Jill Stein blew $3.5 million failing to even come close to winning 5% of the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election — as predicted — but she has a new scampaign: election integrity. In a few days, she raised over $3 million for vote recounts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan fueled by baseless rumors that Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in these states had something to do with hacking.

Jill Stein Enabled Trump’s Electoral College Victory

In a repeat of the 2000 election, Jill Stein failed to win 5% of the popular vote but won enough votes in key states to tip the outcome of the Clinton-Trump electoral college contest in Trump’s favor by splitting the anti-Trump vote between herself and Hillary Clinton.

• In Wisconsin, Trump beat Clinton by 26,989 votes and Stein received 30,907 votes.
• In Michigan, Trump beat Clinton by 16,236 votes and Stein received 51,043 votes.

Taking these states’ combined 26 electoral votes away from Trump would have put him below the 270 threshold necessary to become president (as of this writing he stands at 276).

Voters in these states who cast their ballots for the ‘greater good’ and in doing so enabled the greater evil. Bernie Sanders was right to warn against casting a protest vote in 2016.

Jill Stein Syria Statements Show She’s Unfit to Be President

Last month, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was roundly condemned for surreptitiously substituting a neutral pro-peace Syria statement on her campaign’s website in place of her original pro-war criminal position without a word of explanation.

Now, the URL linking to her original statement no longer seamlessly re-directs to her new statement but has been restored — but without its original incriminating text. Instead, there is the following statement:

Bernie Sanders, the Most Popular Politician in America

Bernie Sanders — not Barack Obama, not Joe Biden, and certainly not Jill Stein—is now the most popular politician in America according to a new Economist/YouGov poll.

Jill Stein Supported Bombing Aleppo

On October 5, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein removed her previous statement on Syria (“Stein Opposes Obama’s Troops on the Ground in Syria”) and put in its place a very different statement (“Jill Stein on Syria”). Visitors to the previous statement‘s URL do not encounter an error notice but are seamlessly redirected to the new statement.

It is as if her first Syria statement never happened.

Unfortunately for Stein, the internet never forgets. Her now-disappeared statement will always be available here.

Jill Stein’s Impossible Quest for 5% of the Popular Vote

If Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein wins 5% of the popular vote in the 2016 election, the party will be eligible for millions of dollars in federal matching funds for a 2020 presidential campaign. The Green Party has strategically justified every fringe/spoiler presidential campaigns it has run since 1996 in part by talking up the possibility of winning 5% of the popular vote. What the Green Party has never done is develop a hard-headed assessment of whether it is even possible for their candidates to reach the 5% threshold despite failing to do so five presidential cycles in a row.

Year	% of the Electorate
1996	0.71
2000	2.74
2004	0.10
2008	0.12
2012	0.37