Mitt Romney wasn’t the only Massachusetts politician celebrating a win here on Super Tuesday.
While Romney’s 72 percent victory in the Massachusetts GOP primary got all the attention, Jill Stein of Lexington won handily on the Green-Rainbow Party’s ballot. Though at deadline state election officials had yet to release official Green-Rainbow numbers, Stein’s campaign, looking at returns in individual municipalities, estimates that she took 80 to 90 percent of Green-Rainbow votes.
Stein beat two other candidates running to be the party’s presidential nominee, Kent Mesplay and Harley Mikkelson. She’s now won in all seven of the states where a Green Party primary has been on the ballot.
Stein was the Green-Rainbow’s candidate in the 2010 and 2002 Massachusetts gubernatorial races. Her presidential platform centers on a “Green New Deal,” including an Economic Bill of Rights that guarantees a living wage job for all Americans who can and want to work. Stein supports universal healthcare through Medicare for All, strengthened labor laws, an economic plan based on environmentally sound and sustainable practices and industries, and financial polices that address economic inequality.
Her platform also contains a Voter Bill of Rights that would, among other reforms, replace the current money-driven campaign process with full public financing and free media access for candidates. “When corporations and big money dominate our elections, government of, for, and by the people cannot take root,” Stein said in her People’s State of the Union statement in January. “For this reason, we urgently need to amend our Constitution to make clear that corporations are not persons and money is not speech. Those rights belong to living, breathing human beings like you and me—not to business entities controlled by the wealthy.”
On the eve of Super Tuesday, Stein’s campaign announced that she’d been endorsed by Noam Chomsky, the celebrated MIT scholar and activist. Chomsky called on voters to “cast a vote for resurgent democracy … that thrives outside of the Democratic and Republican Parties that are sponsored by and subservient to corporate America.” He also urged financial support for Stein’s campaign “for people, peace and the planet.”
Stein has also won the Green nomination in Wisconsin, Arizona, Ohio, Minnesota, Maine and Illinois.
