PHILADELPHIA (AP) – Angry and disaffected Bernie Sanders’ backers have a new rallying cry: “Jill not Hill.”
That’s Green Party candidate Jill Stein, whose liberal agenda of tuition-free college, $15-per-hour minimum wage and a renewable energy economy by 2030 offers a home to Sanders’ supporters disillusioned by the two-party political system and unwilling to back Democrat Hillary Clinton.
“We are standing up together, we are supporting the Bernie delegates who liberated themselves tonight from the Democratic Party,” Stein belted through a megaphone to cheering supporters outside the Democratic convention Tuesday night.
Stein is a 66-year-old doctor and political activist from Massachusetts who, like Clinton, was born in Illinois and raised in a Chicago suburb. She is poised to become the Green Party’s 2016 presidential nominee early next month, a title she won in 2012.
Then, Stein failed to crack even half a million votes. This year, detractors warn she could become a Ralph Nader-like candidate, taking enough votes from Clinton to deliver Republican nominee Donald Trump a victory in November.