Most states have deadlines for candidates seeking to get a ballot line as an independent candidate that are earlier than the Democratic convention in July, so running as an independent would be impossible. And a write-in campaign would be even more hopeless. But there is another option: Running as the presidential nominee of the Green Party, which already has a ballot line on 25 states and which doesn't hold its nominating convention until August, after both the Democratic and the Republican conventions are over.
Could Sanders run as a Green? Some of his supporters are already talking about the idea. So, it turns out, are members of the Green Party. Apparently even Dr. Jill Stein, a past presidential candidate of the Green Party and its likely candidate this year, as well as Kshama Sawant, the hugely popular socialist city councilwoman in Seattle who led that city's activists' successful fight to pass a $15/hour wage law, are writing a letter to Sanders inviting him -- urging him -- to enter into discussions with the Green Party about running as its presidential candidate. Stein is apparently even willing to step aside and perhaps run as his vice presidential running mate if he were to do so. (Sawant has made an excellent argument for why Sanders and the Greens should do this. She also has a petition on line for people to join in the call. It already has over 17,000 signatures.)
Will Sanders seize this opportunity to continue the fight? If he is serious about inspiring a political revolution, he must. He has said he does not want to be a spoiler "like Ralph Nader" and help elect Donald Trump or some other Republican. But would that be the result of a three-way race with Sanders running as a Green? Not necessarily. In the first place, the claim that votes for Nader led to George W. Bush's 2000 victory over Al Gore is bogus. Gore lost because he embarrassingly failed to win his own state of Tennessee. As well, it is clear that it was a corrupt Republican Supreme Court that by a 5-4 vote halted the count in Florida that handed that state's electoral votes to Bush. It has been shown that continued counting and challenges to improperly rejected ballots would clearly have given Florida to Gore.
More importantly, 2016 is not 2000. The public this year is clearly sick of the two major parties, and disgusted by the undemocratic nature of the primaries. Incredibly, both Trump and Clinton, the likely winners of those primaries, represent the two most unpopular and disliked candidates in memory, with some 65 percent of Americans saying they dislike Trump and another 56 percent saying they dislike Clinton. Indeed, Clinton, not favored by almost half of Democrats, is so disliked outside the Democratic Party that there's a strong likelihood -- and a fear even among Democratic leaders -- that she could lose to Trump or another Republican nominee all by herself, with or without a Sanders endorsement. Meanwhile, the most liked candidate this year continues to be Sanders, whose negative rating is just 36 percent -- probably all of them Republicans -- and who continues to poll better against all possible Republican candidates than does Clinton. With numbers like that Sanders, if he continued to build his movement and continued to bring in new voters as he has demonstrably done in the primaries, could even contemplate winning such a general election race. He has also demonstrated his ability to attract tens of millions of dollars a month in online contributions. Running in a three-way race, he'd surely collect even more money, making him fully competitive with the two widely-loathed big-party candidates.
As the Green's presidential candidate, Sanders would have the opportunity, even if he were to lose, to catapult the Green Party, for decades stuck in limbo in the low single digits as simply a protest-vote option, into major-party status as the party of the 99% -- the poor, working and progressive people of all races. That's a standing that would not go away in subsequent elections, but that instead could be built upon -- especially with both major parties currently in danger of fragmenting. Given Sanders' already proven popularity, it would be impossible for the corporate media to deny him a lectern at any general election debates, as was always done to Green Party candidates and independents like Nader in the past.
Sanders and his ardent supporters, in other words, have a unique historic opportunity to shatter the asphyxiating two-party duopoly of two pro-corporate parties that has been the Bermuda Triangle of progressive politics for over a century.
Will he give up on the self-defeating, nonsensical notion of backing Hillary Clinton if she wins the Democratic Party's nomination for president? If he does, despite being clearly the most progressive candidate to make a serious run for the presidency since Eugene Debs in 1920 (when he garnered 3.4 percent of the vote running from a prison cell), Sanders will at best be consigned to a brief, dismissive footnote in future histories of the United States. If he runs in the general election as a Green, he has a chance to write a whole new chapter in those history books.
So here's an call to action:
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