How Jill Stein Can Get 5% Of The Vote

No, that is not a picture of one of Bernie Sanders' rallies. It's a Ralph Nader rally that took place in the summer of 2000.

The fact that Nader received a mere 2.74% of the vote gives people a false image of just how big a presence his campaign had at one point. During June of that year, the movement that he had generated among those who were disillusioned by the Democratic Party's descent into Clintonism had him polling at 6%.

But as the election approached, as always happens with third-party campaigns, more voters became focused on helping the major candidate that they preferred most, and his support fell. Though Nader didn't end up swinging the election, the Democratic spin that he had-along with the important goal of stopping Bush in 2004-effectively killed the Greens' hopes for overtaking the Democrats anytime soon.

Several election cycles later, Americans are finally learning the consequences of continuing to support the two-party system. This destructive paradigm has resulted in the two most detested figures in American political history being the nominees of both major parties, and even though 57% of the electorate wants a third choice, in all likelihood they aren't going to see one win this year.

Though factors such as record income inequality and an increasingly independent electorate make it so that a third-party upset in 2020 is dramatically more likely than it was in 2004, the current state of the race indicates that such an event will be somewhat difficult to realize. If Nader had received 5% or more of the vote in 2000, his party would have qualified for federal matching funds and automatic ballot access in the next election cycle, which would have significantly shaken things up. And though the Liberitarian Party's Gary Johnson is set to receive more of the vote share than that, Jill Stein of the Green Party-the only party with the ability to break the grip that banks and corporations have on society-is polling hopelessly far beneath that number.

Or at least, that's what we've been told.

A frequent complaint from insurgent candidates during this election (legitimate or not) has been that the process is rigged against them. This claim has had a lot of basis, particularly in the case of Bernie Sanders, who's campaign would have likely succeeded had it not been for the voter suppression, electoral fraud, and biased coverage from the corporate media that plagued the Democratic primaries. If you suspect that similar things are happening to Jill Stein, your intuition is correct.

First and foremost comes the way Stein has been treated by the mainstream media. As columnist Caitlin Johnstone writes about the attacks Stein has received from corporate news outlets:

Countless pages of editorial have been spent deriding Jill, Ajamu, and their entitled-white-privileged-but-also-basement-dwelling supporters. How exactly does that work, oh million-dollar media hacks? How can someone be overly entitled, but stuck living in their Mom’s basement, at the same time?
So there’s that. Just look up “Jill Stein anti-vax,” the creation of a neoliberal think-tank, and you will come up with pages and pages of superficial editorial and smear. On that one lie alone, there are thousands upon thousands of deceitful and maliciously manipulative words written on it designed to paint her as anti-vax without any actual evidence. That’s a tricky two-step. Takes a lot of creativity to make up such ornate lies.
They sure do spend a lot of time on us. Anyone who didn’t know better would think we were a threat.

The media's response to Stein has been more than simply about a concern that she'll swing the election. The fact that Gary Johnson-who's taking nearly as much of the potential support from Hillary Clinton as Stein is-hasn't endured such a smear campaign further confirms this. The reason for their hostility towards her, as Johnstone continues, seems to be about something deeper.

You certainly would not think that we were a footnote protest vote that will amount to less than a percent of the vote.
Of course, they use that line too. We are merely a percent or two in the polls. But their vitriol betrays them.
Their own polls betray them too. When you drill down in the data of a CNN poll, for example, you will find that they have exorcised all millennials, Gen-Xers, minorities, and anyone not living in a southern state, from their sample set.
That’s a whole lot of people they’re not asking anymore. Basically, if you’re not a fifty-plus white person from the south, you don’t get polled. Now, why is that, I wonder? Hmm. They could not be hiding something…could they?

The name of that piece is "Vote For Jill Because She Can Win." While I wouldn't go quite so far as to say that these things are proof Stein in fact has enough unreported support to do so, I do think it's clear that she has more support than it appears.

That CNN poll isn't the only one which has underestimated Stein's numbers. Many surveys, such as an August Ipsos-Reuters poll and the five polls that the Commission on Presidential Debates used to determine whether Stein and Johnson could debate, have been biased against likely Green voters, having included problems such as underrepresenting independents and young people. Other suspicious factors in how these polls are conducted, as Nathan Francis reports, have to do with how they tend to make unfair assumptions about the people that are participating in them.

One of the biggest factors in Jill Stein overperforming her polling could be in the models these polls use to predict likely voters. Guessing which poll respondents will actually show up on Election Day has always been something of an informed guess for pollsters, and they don’t sound terribly confident this year compared to the past.
“These methods, which have been around for so long, may be losing some of their accuracy because circumstances have changed,” Scott Keeter, a senior survey adviser at Pew Research, told the Atlantic. “Whether there has been a change in our politics in just the last two years that makes all of this less accurate is really impossible to answer at this point.”
And those likely voter models — the ones that are used to show Jill Stein’s low support — are generally weighted to expect fewer young and first-time voters. That happens to make up a large share of the Green Party’s base, so a model that fails to take these voters into account will have Jill Stein underperforming.

In short, the Real Clear Politics polling average, which currently puts Stein at 2%, is not accurate at all. Ignoring these "push polls" and unscientific surveys, she in fact has far more support than that.

Here's some amateur, but reliable enough, polling analysis of mine: 13% of former Bernie Sanders supporters now support Jill Stein. While it's difficult to say exactly how much of the electorate is made up of those in that crowd, seeing as about half of Democrats backed Sanders at one point and he won among independents, it's reasonable to assume that if you were to take all of the Sanders supporters and then calculate how much 13% of them is relative to the rest of the electorate, you will get a number close to or even above 5%.

A more certain demographic to look to to find how much support Stein actually has is young voters. Stein has 16% of the support with voters under 30 (to put that in perspective, if this group made up all of the electorate Stein would qualify for the debates), and since millennials make up 31% of the electorate, we can confidently say that counting young people alone, she has more than 4% of the support.

Stein supporters from those two groups, added to the other supporters that she has, gives her an uncertain, but crucial, amount of support above 5%.

So that's that. We've already succeeded in the first half of our mission to make Jill Stein succeed where Nader's supporters made him fail by getting her 5% or more of the vote. The support she needs to do so is already there, and those who run the corporate media, perhaps suspecting this, are doing everything they can to stop us.

And with thirty days until the election, all that we can do now is spread awareness of this fact so that those Sanders supporters and millennials who want to vote for Stein but feel like doing so would be a waste will vote for who they prefer on November 8. And if they feel like stopping Trump is the most important thing, tell them about how voting third party in most states will have no affect whatsoever on the race's outcome, and how Clinton can afford to lose their vote regardless because she's highly likely to win. Though the wind will be at our backs for a Green Party upset post-2016 even if we don't pull this off, we're going to need every advantage we can get.

Though the odds are stacked against us in this mission, as they were with Bernie Sanders' campaign, do not lose the belief that we can reach 5% until it's November 8 and you see that the election results show we've failed. Until then, it's a game of working and hoping. Because, as John Laurits said about the possibility that third-party voters can stage an upset this year in an article similar to this one, "Sure, it’s 'statistically unlikely' — but so is the fact that life even exists at all and yet here we are."

Why I Have Faith In Our Revolution

Today Bernie Sanders began his second presidential campaign. Except in this case, he isn't running so that he can try to change a fundamentally corrupt political institution and work within a similar Washington establishment, but to preside over the start of a national movement of citizens who want to change the system quite literally out of self-preservation. Except this time the members of his campaign know that change cannot be achieved through trying to reform the party system but by replacing it altogether, and despite Sanders' positive comments today about the Democratic platform and the many progressive Democrats running for office, I suspect that he knows this as well.

Of course this new campaign will involve electoral politics as the old one did, since the government needs to be reformed as much as anything else in order to make progress. But just as essential to its success as grassroots organizing, fundraising, and advertising will be a focus on something larger than running any political campaign: transforming society. The revolution will not win through playing the traditional game of politics, though that is nonetheless important, but through creating a general awareness that the world's geopolitical, environmental, social, and economic problems can only be solved by breaking the power of neoliberal institutions and rejecting their ideas.

This isn't going to be as easy as one would assume.

My first encounter with candidate Donald Trump was when I was listening to the radio in June of 2015. I heard a man with a somewhat nasal voice who was going on The Sean Hannity Show saying how he planned to deport all undocumented immigrants, build a wall along the Mexican border and (for the sake of the narrative, pretend like you don't already know what comes next) make Mexico pay for it. When I learned that this man, who was apparently named Donald Trump, intended to become president, like so many others I immediately wrote him off.

What followed was quite possibly the strangest turn of events in the history of American politics. In spite of having a message that appeared as if it would only appeal to the openly xenophobic and fundamentally ignorant part of the electorate-which, in the Republican Party as much as any other demographic, is a minority group-he started to gain serious ground. By September, he had gone from an absurd fantasy of a candidate to the likely nominee.

And after that, it didn't take long for things to get scary; this was a man who's candidacy was praised by a prominent white supremacist, who excused the behavior of his supporters when they assaulted a Black Lives Matter protester, who's comments towards Muslims were so offensive that the radical Islamist group Al Shabaab once used them to incite anger towards the west. And he was winning.

But even as Trump's popularity hit a new high after he so helpfully suggested that the US bar Muslims from entering the country, we comforted ourselves with the realpolitik that we'd known all our lives; there has to be some kind of limit to Trump's possible base of support. No one like him can win over the majority population of open-minded, tolerant and compassionate people. If that fact didn't stop him from winning the Republican nomination, it would most certainly stop him from winning the presidency. And we were probably right.

But that's only because in the case of Trump, we're likely to avoid a dangerous demagogue simply because he happened to be a terrible politician.

Ten years ago, the top 1% wealthiest individuals on the planet owned 40% of its wealth. Since then, that percentage has increased at a startling rate, with 62 billionaires owning 50% of the world's wealth according to a study from the beginning of this year. So naturally, starting perhaps as recently as a year ago, this fact has had an effect on politics. At least in the industrialized world, where people generally have the expectation of being able to enjoy modern life and many are gradually seeing that being taken away from them, there has been a sudden revolt against the political and economic establishment.

The uncomfortable problem with this movement, though, is that in almost all instances it's being directed in a way that will do nothing to solve the woes of the working class. From the Turkish authoritarian party Justice and Development's stunning victory in 2015 due to them having run a campaign promising security, to the Polish Law and Justice Party coming out on top that same year through similar means, to the best-known Brexit vote, right-wing politicians have been taking advantage of the growing public anger towards "elitists" and "the establishment" and diverting it from the neoliberal forces that actually caused the economy's problems towards Syrian refugees, immigrants Muslims, civil liberties, and in some cases women, gays, and racial minorities.

Last year, former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum declared that the right-wing elite's method of getting their lower-class base to accept trickle-down economic ideas by inciting anger on social issues "stopped working at least a decade ago." He also more or less concluded that because of what's happened to the political environment, Republicans won't survive much longer if they don't move to the left. Sadly, though, I believe that they and other conservative institutions around the world will continue to do well, because as I described above, they've regained their ability to manipulate the electorate's emotions using socially far-right rhetoric as the social pathology of fear towards "the other" has increased.

Yes, opposition to free trade has also played a role in the success of Trump and others, but for the most part, the massive populist will that's sprung up in response to economic inequality is moving in the direction of unproductive scapegoating rather than actual efforts to rein in the greed of big business, increase taxes on the wealthy, and ensure the health, education, and upward mobility of all people.

And if this trend continues, the problem will only get worse. By the current rate of advancing inequality, ten years from now the bottom 99.9% will only have 40% of the wealth, ten years from then they'll have 30%, and fifty years from now, well...you can do the math.

The reason I don't believe such a scenario will ever come to be can be summed up by what Elzbieta Janicka, a cultural anthropologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences, once said to the author Chris Hedges when he was visiting Poland to research an article on the country's reactionary populism: "There is no such thing as human nature. Human nature is culture. It is a product of education."

It's tempting as it is cynical to look at what's happened to politics in response to this crisis and say that it's all the result of an inherent tendency that humans have to resort to irrationality and hate when faced with an uncomfortable situation. And to some extent, that is the case, as the politics of fear far better serve the egomania and authoritarianism of figures like Trump than do the politics of genuine compassion and equality. By that logic, one can only conclude that Trumpism's popularity has come about simply because the majority of people involved in national politics tend to have low ethical standards, and are more likely to adopt such reactionary tactics. In other words, the leaders share a lot more of the blame than the followers.

But in order to replace them with better leaders, the followers will of course need to step up and vote them out. And as Janicka also said, this will be something of a challenge. "When you construct an educational system and a public discourse where there is an almost total lack of critical, analytical thinking," he laments about the direction that his country's culture has taken, "where you refuse to strengthen individual human beings capable of autonomous judgment, human beings aware of their experiences and feelings, responsible for their deeds and relationship to the other, you destroy what is fundamental to an open society. It becomes exclusively about collective image, meaning collective narcissism. Liberal pluralism from this perspective is viewed as moral relativism or nihilism. There is a clash in Poland between the formal and legal frame of liberal democracy and the majority dominant culture."

For Poland and many other countries, the future for sane, progressive politics indeed appears to be uncertain. But at least in the United States, the foundations of Trumpism are weakening.

Millennials-an age group roughly defined as having been born between 1980 and 2000-can be considered the most liberal generation in history. Their historical experiences have involved a series of disastrous wars, an environmental crisis, and historic income inequality. So their views on neoliberalism, and even capitalism, are overwhelmingly unfavorable. But what sets them apart from the older parts of the electorate, who are largely bound to choose Trumpism over Sandersism in the years that follow, is that they even more overwhelmingly reject all kinds of bigotry. Despite deep dissatisfaction with their main alternative to Donald Trump, only 9% of millennials support him, which appropriately reflects the facts that 68% of them support same-sex marriage, 55% of them want a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and 56% believe that abortion should be legal in almost or all cases.

Bernie Sanders nomination or not, the ideological battle between the Sandersist and Clintonist political approaches has been won by the former. It's Trumpism that will be the next major obstacle for positive change. But as this great political drama unfolds post-2016, in spite of all the primal human emotions that Trumpism satisfies, the side of social, economic and environmental justice will increasingly have the upper hand. Because in addition to an increasingly diverse electorate which will make elections increasingly hard to win for those who promote bigotry, four years from now, millennials will have largely begun to enter middle age, giving them 40% of the electorate up from their current number of 31%. With enough turnout on their part, combined with efforts from those who are older than millennials but still share their worldview, this will most certainly be a game-changer.

For now, that's all the hope I can present to you; the numbers, impossible for anyone to deny or change, that prove we can beat the forces of regression if we come together and believe that a better future is possible.

But whatever ultimately comes of this, remember these words from Chris Hedges when he was once discussing the hurdles that this movement will need to overcome:

If you read the writings of anthropologists, there are studies about how civilizations break down; and we are certainly following that pattern. Unfortunately, there’s nothing within human nature to argue that we won’t go down the ways other civilizations have gone down. The difference is now, of course, that when we go down, the whole planet is going to go with us.

Yet you rebel not only for what you can achieve, but for who you become. In the end, those who rebel require faith — not a formal or necessarily Christian, Jewish or Muslim orthodoxy, but a faith that the good draws to it the good. That we are called to carry out the good insofar as we can determine what the good is; and then we let it go. The Buddhists call it karma, but faith is the belief that it goes somewhere. By standing up, you keep alive another narrative. It’s one of the ironic points of life. That, for me, is what provides hope; and if you are not there, there is no hope at all.

 We are there, and we'll still be there when the world needs us most.