What Are Jill Stein’s ACTUAL Poll Numbers?

I wanted to take a moment to address some rumors that have been circulating involving the corporate media lying about Jill Stein’s poll numbers.

There is actually a way that you can check polling numbers against donations, that are declared by the candidate, in order to see how accurate the poll numbers are.

It is no wonder that so many distrust corporate media, after the way they manipulated information in favor of Hillary Clinton in her race against Bernie Sanders.

By and large corporate media are not to be trusted, but when it comes to polling, they are historically quite accurate and in the case of Jill Stein, because she doesn’t accept money from corporations, you can actually gauge her popularity by looking at her donations, much in the same way you could with Bernie Sanders.

First, we need to establish that the magic number is 5%.

5% of the vote is what is needed for the Green Party to receive federal funding in the 2020 Presidential election cycle.

This would mean that the Green Party would receive somewhere between $10-$20 million, in the next cycle, which would give them a huge advantage in their attempts to compete with the two corporate parties.

Now that we recognize how incredibly important it is to vote for Jill Stein in this election, let’s see where she actually stands currently.

In 2012 Jill Stein ran for President and received just shy of 1% of the vote and raised just shy of $1 million dollars.

We see in the above Open Secrets chart that Jill has raised nearly twice that in her current Presidential run.

As Jill’s donations tend to run fairly commiserate with her poll numbers we can extrapolate that for every million dollars that Stein’s campaign raises her poll numbers will go up one point.

So if Jill Stein raised $1,000,000 in 2012 and was at 1%, then Jill Stein would be at 2% currently, because she has raised approximately $2,000,000 in this cycle.

But don’t despair, a recent upsurge in Stein donations shows her to be at nearly $3,000,000 at present day (this article was written on October 9) so Jill Stein should be polling at around 3%.

Corporate media polling shows her at 4%.

So the formula holds up.

Let’s remember, the ALL IMPORTANT number is 5%.

Without that, she will not get federal funding in the next election.

Although I submit that corporate media is not to be trusted, in this case, it is the people who tell you that Stein is really polling competitively, who are actually causing the most damage to her campaign.

If people believe that Stein is polling at higher rankings then she actually is, then they will be less likely to phone-bank and canvass for her.

If people are expecting Stein to actually win the Presidential election and then on November 8 they see that she only pulls a small percentage of the vote, they are likely to think that the voting was rigged and that there is no point to continuing on with politics.

They will walk away with a bad taste in their mouth and that would be extremely unfortunate to lose Progressives to apathy.

It is much better to know where we actually stand and be able to take massive action.

Right now is a very important time for the Green Party going forward.

There is only one month left before election day and if all Stein supporters can get out and knock on some doors, then the Green Party will hit the 5% and qualify for federal funding during the next cycle.

The next time someone tells you that corporate media is lying about Jill’s polling numbers, simply go and look at the financial data that HER CAMPAIGN has supplied and you will have a pretty good gauge of where she is at.

If you are anything like me, your radical leftist politics have left you in a social media echo-chamber.

This happens to people who are outspoken about their political views.

Those who disagree often are afraid to speak up, so they stop following you or just remain silent.

Echo-chambers can be extremely dangerous impediments to rational, logical thinking.

For example, if you see hundreds, or even thousands of Stein supporters every day in your Facebook feed, you may get the idea that Jill Stein is actually winning the election.

Yet, if you walked out your front door, you could probably walk for hundreds of miles in any direction and never see a Jill Stein sign or bumper-sticker.

It’s hard to know what reality is, when we are so able to create any reality we want in our smartphones and laptops, simply by finding thousands of others who agree with us.

Six months ago Bernie Sanders dominated my Facebook feed and when I walked out my front door and drove to work, I would see Sanders signs and stickers everywhere I went.

It was clear to me that my reality extended past my echo-chamber.

In fact, Sanders raised $238 million dollars from individual, non-corporate donors and had an incredibly active team of volunteers.

It is safe to say that Sanders volunteers literally called every phone in America and knocked on every single door.

When you compare $238,000,000 to $3,000,000, you see the incredible uphill battle that the Green Party has ahead of it, so don’t be fooled by people telling you that the work is already done and that Jill is actually polling higher.

She is not.

Take a drive.

Look around.

Jill Stein is a virtual unknown outside of leftist political circles.

If you want to change that, you will need to get out and go share Jill’s awesome platform with others.

Simply yelling into your own echo-chamber will not help her.

Before we wrap this up, let’s talk about writing in Bernie Sanders and how this affects Jill Stein.

In full-disclosure, I am part of a movement to write-in Bernie Sanders in Vermont.

I am NOT part of any other write-in Sanders movements, but I do not actively oppose them either.

There were many reasons why we targeted Vermont with our movement, but chief among them, is that we wanted to be careful not to pull any Jill Stein supporters away from her, because it is important to all of us that Jill Stein achieve the 5% funding goal.

Vermont is a state of traditional Democrats and there is almost no Green Party movement there in their tiny state.

We felt that we could set a historical precedent and honor Bernie Sanders without hurting Jill’s campaign if we targeted Vermont exclusively.

In fact, I have continued to canvass for Stein here in Indiana, while organizing the Vermont Write-In project remotely and our canvassers in Vermont are nearly all Jill Stein volunteers.

You can imagine how shocked we were to hear the unsubstantiated rumor that our movement was actually working for Hillary Clinton in a covert capacity.

The rumor, which I am actually embarrassed to even be addressing, due to its ludicrous nature, stated that we were attempting to get Jill Stein supporters to write-in Bernie Sanders, in an attempt to “steal votes” from Jill Stein.

There are so many logical holes in this rumor, that it makes me sad that anyone would fall for it.

First and foremost, you cannot sway a Jill Stein supporter.

It’s impossible.

They are absolute diehards for their candidate, so the idea that you can trick them into voting for ANYONE but Jill Stein is absurd.

Secondly, the rumor really underestimates the intelligence of Stein supporters.

You actually think that there is some sort of strategy that would make her supporters “throw their vote away”?

I find it very insulting that the people who spread this rumor, think that Stein supporters are so intellectually bankrupt that some slick speech by an “undercover Clinton operative” could trick them into changing their vote.

While it is true that Clinton did use Correct the Record hired trolls to attempt to sway Sanders supporters during the primaries, she has no such motivation to do so against Jill Stein, for the simple fact that Stein is not a threat to her candidacy.

Use your logic.

Don’t turn into the leftist Tea Party.

Don’t fall victim to paranoid propaganda.

Think about it.

If you were Clinton, your ultimate outcome would be to get people to vote for you.

Your secondary goal would be to get people to NOT vote for Donald Trump, who actually stands a chance of defeating you.

Every vote for Jill Stein, Bernie Sanders or Gary Johnson is a push, meaning it neither helps nor hurts Clinton’s chances.

The one thing that Clinton was really afraid of was that a bunch of angry leftist were going to vote for Donald Trump, just to keep her out of the White House.

That didn’t happen and now she is going to win and whether you cast your vote for Stein, Sanders, Johnson or Mickey Mouse, it will have zero effect on that outcome.

So you are free to vote your conscience.

If you like Jill Stein, you should definitely vote for her.

She really needs your support to get federal funding.

But if you don’t like any of the candidates, feel free to “throw your vote away” and write-in Sanders.

Your Presidential vote will be hand counted and then thrown out (unless you are in Vermont, New Jersey, Alabama, New Hampshire, Oregon, Wyoming, Delaware or Iowa. In those states it will be counted.) and your down-ballot will be recorded and counted.

There is some misinformation going around that they would throw your entire ballot out if you wrote in a Presidential candidate.

That is simply not true.

They count everything except the write-in vote.

Be skeptical of all claims.

It is very easy to tell people what they want to hear and hope that they never figure out the truth.

It is very easy to play on people’s fears and mislead them.

I hope you will take everything with great skepticism and do your own research on ALL matters.

We have a unique opportunity to take America back from the establishment by sticking together and fighting for truth.

Don’t let anyone mislead you.

We are all on the same team here.

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Someone Stole My Bernie Sanders Yard Sign

Some asshole stole my Bernie Sanders yard sign last night. That’s number eight. I’ve got one more around somewhere. I used to have a trunk full of them. I would knock on your door, some crazy forty-year old guy, with shaggy hair. You’d tell me that you were planning to vote for Hillary Clinton, we’d talk for 15 or 20 minutes and at the end of our conversation, I’d get one of those signs out of my trunk and we’d plant it in your yard and you’d be excited about it.

I take no credit for this. It wasn’t like I was some great salesman. I just memorized the facts and had a conversation and my new friend just came to the logical conclusion that Bernie Sanders was a much better candidate than Hillary Clinton on every level. Once you had heard the gospel according to Bernie Sanders, you were kind of embarrassed that you had ever even considered voting for Sillary.

If I was at all effective in converting souls to Sanders, it was because of the religious-type fervor I felt for the absolute righteousness of Sanders unflappable ethics, which filled my body with energy that radiated from my eyes, like that of a newly baptized person born in the deep South.

And yet I was an atheist.

I gave so many of those signs away. And now I have but one left. Tucked away in a closet somewhere. I will find it and plant it in the yard as a monument to my stubbornness and my absolute refusal to give up. And when they steal this one, there will be no more.

We will have to go back to making them, like we did before the campaign centers opened and the website took weeks to ship them. Carrie would take old political campaign signs, turn them inside out, and spray-paint over a Bernie stencil she made. She would hand them out at debate parties.

Our house was full of amazing new people for a solid year. What an odd turn of events for me, the paranoid, who didn’t really like people, to fall in love with so many strangers. What a beautiful thing for people to open their homes to my children and I, to feed us, to provide us a place to rest, all because we had one incredible thing in common.

Perhaps the sign-thief was trying to help me move on. Perhaps it was a misguided gesture of compassion. Or maybe it was some ignorant Trump supporter who thinks that Democratic Socialism means that you can take whatever you want from whoever you want, so he thought he was being witty by teaching me a lesson, when I already knew that the world was full of overconfident morons with boundary issues, so no lesson was learned.

Or possibly, it was a Hillary Clinton supporter who was eaten up with guilt each day, as they drove past my sign and were reminded of how their choice to be WITH HER was condoning lying and cheating and murder and everything else that is bullshit in this awful/awesome world and my sign reminded them that supporting this cheater of Democracy meant they didn’t have the moral authority on any issue, ever again, for the rest of their FUCKING LIFE!!!

Or perhaps the wind blew it away…I don’t know.

But I’ve got another one.

Number nine!

And I’m going to put it out tomorrow morning. Because I’m completely in denial and I plan to stay that way for the rest of my life. I refuse to accept that the world is a shit-hole. I refuse to accept that evil wins. I’m going to be 80 years old and still have some form of Bernie Sanders sign in my yard and the kids in the neighborhood will call me Old Man Sanders and tell legends about me. And I will do things to encourage the legends, even though I’ll still be like a super-nice guy and all..

But I won’t want to disappoint the neighborhood children, so I’ll play screaming sounds out of speakers in my basement and let spider-webs grow all over my house…maybe even wear an eye-patch…I don’t know, but whatever kind of stuff creepy old guys that live in haunted houses in the year 2053 do, that’s the kind of stuff I’ll do.

The kids will dare each other to steal my Bernie Sanders yard sign and each time they do, I will make an even scarier looking Bernie sign and one of the kids will double-down on the dare and say that “if you sleep with the stolen sign under your mattress then Old Man Sanders will appear at the foot of your bed…”

Then another kid will say..

“You guys are stupid. The man who lives in that house isn’t named Bernie Sanders. He just likes Bernie Sanders. Don’t you guys ever read cyber-books on your ocular implant?! You know the way our world is today? With the flying cars and no war and everybody being fed and loved and living to be 500 years old and terraforming other planets and bending space/time and with statues of Neil Degrasse Tyson, Bill Nye and Carl Sagan everywhere? Bernie Sanders was the guy who started all that. Before Bernie Sanders human beings were tore up from the floor up.”

And yeah, in the future, kids are going to say “tore up from the floor up.”

I know that no one has said that in like ten years, but it’s going to come back in a YUGE way in like forty-years, so remember that I predicted that.

So anyway, I’m putting a new sign up.

Number nine!

To remind me and everyone else who sees it..

That this isn’t over.

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