Green Party presidential candidate offers ‘collaboration’ with Bernie Sanders

Facing a mathematically improbable path to victory, Democratic Party presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders needs all the support he can get, and the Green Party’s Jill Stein has an offer that would be unprecedented if accepted.

Stein is running for president just like Sanders is, but their “shared goals” could be enough for them to work together, the Green Party candidate tweeted on Wednesday.

“The Democratic Party is democratic in name only – superdelegates anyone?” Stein tweeted earlier in the day.

Therein lies the rub for many progressives enthusiastically supporting Sanders. The self-described democratic-socialist lost to Clinton in four out of five state primaries on Tuesday, and although Sanders expects to do better in upcoming contests, the delegate count – and more consequentially, the superdelegate count – is piling up in Clinton’s favor.

The delegate count will be finalized at the Democratic Party national convention in July, but at the moment, Clinton has 1,139 to Sanders’ 825. With superdelegates included, it’s 1,606 to 851, and according to the Boston Globe, Sanders must win 65 percent of the rest of the delegates up for grabs in the next 25 primaries or caucuses just to tie Clinton’s count.

Superdelegates are made up of prominent party members and elected officials who are not bound by any primary election results when they vote for the nominee in July. They represent about a third of the 2,383 delegates needed for the nomination.

This process is just part and parcel of a Democratic Party that Stein finds too conservative, telling Grist magazine the party has a “very clear track record of sabotaging rebels.”

“The party does this fake go-left thing by allowing genuine reformers to be seen and heard, but they never allow them to go all the way,” Stein told the magazine. “You can’t really have a revolutionary campaign inside a counter-revolutionary party.”

What Stein’s idea of a collaboration would include remains elusive, and with Sanders more or less ignoring the olive branch, it currently is serving more as a preemptive offer to collaborate with those who “feel the Bern” should they find themselves dissatisfied with a Clinton nomination.

Stein won a little more than one-third of 1 percent of the vote as the Green Party’s presidential candidate in 2012. The Green Party’s convention to secure its 2016 nominee is in August.