Green Party’s Jill Stein: I’d have trouble sleeping if Trump or Clinton won

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein on Wednesday dismissed the criticism that her bid for the White House could help propel Donald Trump into the White House by sapping leftist support from Hillary Clinton.

An audience member at CNN’s Green Party town hall event asked Stein to directly confront the possibility of being a spoiler candidate. Andrew Fader, a software engineer from the Bronx, N.Y., held little back regarding how he felt about Trump or Stein’s candidacy.

“Given the way our political system works, effectively you could help Donald Trump like Ralph Nader helped George Bush in 2000. How could you sleep at night?” asked Fader.

Without missing a beat, Stein replied, “I will have trouble sleeping at night if Donald Trump is elected. I will also have trouble sleeping at night if Hillary Clinton is elected. And as despicable as Donald Trump’s words are, I find Hillary Clinton’s actions and track record is very troubling.”

A common criticism against third party candidates trying to break up the United States’ two-party system is that they ultimately draw votes away from the major party candidate whose ideological views are closer to the third party’s. If the election is close, the criticism goes, then the election could be thrown to the less preferable of the two major candidates.

The questioner invoked the 2000 U.S. presidential election to illustrate his point. Many argue that Democrat Al Gore would have beaten Republican George W. Bush in the battleground state of Florida had liberal activist Ralph Nader not run on the Green Party ticket.

But for Stein, who appeared at the Green Party town hall with her running mate Ajamu Baraka, another Clinton administration would not be a victory for liberalism.

“Donald Trump bashes immigrants and is a xenophobic and racist loudmouth, but Hillary Clinton has been promoting these wars that have killed a million black and brown people in Iraq, for example,” she said.

Stein, a retired physician, criticized Clinton for allegedly being untrustworthy and hawkish. She also took issue with Clinton’s use of a private email server out of her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., during her tenure as secretary of state. The FBI announced in July that it would not recommend charges against Clinton or her staffers related to the mishandling of classified information.

“Part of the problem with Hillary’s abuse of the rules, she was sort of too big to jail on the rules,” Stein said. “And she violated those rules with a sense of impunity, and she violated them for a purpose which she stated herself.”

She continued: “So I do have serious questions about Hillary’s judgment, her safeguarding of national security information and, above all, her trustworthiness in a job where she will have her finger on the button, given how she handled major decisions both around the War in Iraq but especially around the War in Libya, where she led the charge.”

Stein only received 0.36 percent of the national vote when she was the Green Party’s presidential nominee in 2012, but she hopes to capitalize on the liberal enthusiasm that surrounded Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ bid for the Democratic nod. Sanders, a self-identified democratic socialist, brought many issues that had traditionally been the purview of the Green Party — such as economic inequality, corporate influence in politics, climate change — to the forefront of the Democratic primary.

“To people who don’t like Donald Trump,” Stein said, “you know, you have more alternatives out there than just Hillary Clinton.”

Margaret Flowers and James Lane, the honorary co-chairs of the 2016 Green Party Presidential Nominating Convention, wrote an open letter to Sanders supporters earlier this month. They congratulated the grassroots activists who helped Sanders make it further in the nomination process than “any other insurgent candidate ever has in the party” and extended an olive branch to those unimpressed by Clinton.

“We invite you to consider the Green Party. The Green Party platform, which has been and continues to be shaped through a grassroots democratic process for twenty years, is in line with the values of the Sanders campaign. In some ways, it goes beyond Sanders’ platform,” Flowers and Lane wrote.

A recent CNN poll found that Stein only had 5 percent of support compared with Clinton’s 45 percent and Trump’s 35 percent. The Libertarian Party’s candidate, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, had 9 percent.

At the Green Party town hall, Stein warned against succumbing to what she dubbed the “politics of fear” that encourages people to vote against the people they most dislike rather than for the person they most prefer.

Once the Green Party’s message is heard, she argued, their campaign might actually “flip the vote” rather than split it.

“So that we who are the underdog,” Stein said, “deserve to be the top dog and actually could be the top dog if we stand up with the courage of our convictions.”