Green Party officially nominates Jill Stein as candidate for U.S. president
The Greens held their party convention over the weekend in Houston where they picked Jill Stein as the party’s nominee to run for president. She spoke with FSRN’s Seán Kinane about the November election.
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The Green Party approved its national platform Saturday with calls for expanding Medicare benefits for everyone, a ban on fracking, legalization of marijuana and stopping the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
The party also chose Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka for the party’s Presidential and Vice Presidential ticket to campaign for what Stein described in a Monday interview with WMNF as the “Green New Deal.”
“The centerpiece of our policy and our platform is a jobs emergency program that would create 20 million jobs, that would not only address our ongoing economic emergency but would also address our climate emergency,” said Stein. “Because both of those are critical problems, that we’ve been told we’re in a recovery and in fact we’re not for most Americans.”
Stein says the jobs program would be funded with the money saved by halting military campaigns overseas.
Stein’s name is already on the ballot in 23 states. Her campaign says there are nine other states that are in the process of being certified and 15 more where there is an active petition drive. They expect the Stein-Baraka ticket to appear on the ballot in at least 47 states.
“We are on our way and many of the ballot deadlines are still ahead of us in coming weeks. So we’re currently on the ballot now for 70 percent, 80 percent of voters. And we expect to be on the ballot for – if not 100 percent, then very close to it – 95 percent something like that,” Stein said. “There are one or two states that are so prohibitive that it’s virtually impossible for a grassroots campaign to be on the ballot, especially those that close their ballot drives early in the campaign before we had this surge in funding and in volunteers.”
Much of the surge Stein refers to are Bernie Sanders supporters who switched allegiance to the Green nominee after Sanders endorsed Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton. Stein says she’s receiving many $27 donations – which was the most common amount during Sanders’s drive to fund his campaign almost entirely through small contributions and refuse corporate money.
Stein says she plans on campaigning even in so-called swing states that are projected to be closely contested between Republican Donald Trump and Clinton.
Most polls have Stein hovering around 6 percent nationwide which could make her campaign a strong factor in a tight race between Clinton and Trump. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson is polling slightly higher. Like Stein, he appeals to voters who say they are unwilling to support either Trump or Clinton in November.
