Green Party’s Stein taps into progressives’ anger in SC

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein found Columbia’s angry progressives Tuesday and had a field day.

The presidential long-shot repeatedly railed against GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton, urging a crowd of roughly 100 at the Lourie Center in downtown Columbia to start a political revolution by voting third party.

“We are unstoppable, and the future is changing before our very eyes,” Stein said to the crowd, which applauded intermittently. “I can’t thank you enough for just being the amazing change agents that you are.”

Virtually everyone in the room raised their hands when asked if they originally had supported U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who also promised a political revolution, in his bid for the Democratic nomination. Fewer than half did so when asked if they were Green Party members.

Far fewer responded when asked if they watched the first presidential debate last week.

“Everybody needs therapy after listening to that political poison,” Stein said.

Stein told the crowd that America is at a “Hail Mary moment” in which voters can reject two-party politics and “create an America and a world that works for all of us.”

She advocated transitioning the country to rely only on renewable energy, making free public higher education, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and ending “wars for oil.”

The physician-turned-environmental-activist’s rhetoric hit home with some in the crowd.

“She’s good,” said Katy Jones, 44, a converted Sanders fan from Columbia. “No wonder they don’t want her to debate.”

But it is unclear whether Stein will have the backing of two S.C. congressional candidates who spoke Tuesday at her Columbia stop.

U.S. Senate candidate Thomas Dixon and 1st District candidate Dimitri Cherny both won the S.C. Democratic Party’s nomination for those seats. Both also accepted the nomination of the S.C. Green Party and the S.C. Working Families Party.

Asked whom they will vote for on Nov. 8, Dixon would not say. Cherny, who told the crowd he identifies “mostly as a Green,” said he did not yet know.

“For the real hardcore Democrats out there, it really pisses them off that I’m on the other two tickets,” Cherny said. “And for the real hardcore Greens out there ... it pisses them off that I’m on the Democratic ticket.”

2nd District Democratic candidate Arik Bjorn, another “fusion” candidate, said he accepted the Green Party’s nomination only after winning the Democratic primary. He said he plans to vote for Clinton in November.

This story was originally published October 4, 2016 at 7:12 PM with the headline "Green Party’s Stein taps into progressives’ anger in SC."