Sanders to supporters: Don’t go Green

Bernie Sanders on Tuesday warned his supporters against flocking to the Green Party in protest of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has repeatedly called on Sanders supporters to join her movement in the hopes of framing herself, not Clinton, as the leader who will carry the Sanders “revolution” to the finish line. 

{mosads}“I don’t know the leadership of the Green Party, but I respect what they’re trying to do,” Sanders said at a Bloomberg event in Philadelphia, according to The Washington Post. 

“They’re focusing on very, very important issues. But I think right now — what is it, three, four months before an election — you’re gonna end up having a choice. Either Hillary Clinton is going to become president, or [GOP nominee] Donald Trump.”

He reasoned that unlike in a parliamentary system, the choice is binary, so supporters of the Vermont senator will only be hurting their cause if they flee the Democratic Party.  

“If we were in Europe right now, in Germany or elsewhere, the idea of coalition politics of different parties coming together — you’ve got a left party, you’ve got a center-left party, coming together against the center-right party. That’s not unusual,” he said. 

“We don’t have that. We have and have had [two parties] for a very long period of time — and I know a little bit about this, as the longest serving independent member of Congress.”

Despite the eagerness from Stein and Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson, the two-party system makes it all but impossible for an outside party to win a state, let alone a presidential election. 

The Green Party had its best showing with nominee Ralph Nader during the 2000 election, winning almost 3 million votes. But that didn’t translate to a single electoral vote.