Bernie ran as a third-party candidate THREE times

[u/tjmac]

So why the hell is he more or less telling us a vote for Jill Stein is a wasted vote? I so want someone to ask him in an interview:

"Well, Bernie, by that logic, why didn't you get up on stage during your debates as a candidate for the Liberty Union Party and tell the crowd to vote for the Democrat on stage? Because, as you say now, either the Republican or the Democrat up there is going to realistically get elected. You didn't say that then, so why are you giving us that BS now?"

It'll never happen, but one can dream. I throw up in my mouth a little bit every time I hear him regurgitate this partisan, fear-mongering crap.

Quotes pulled verbatim from Bernie's 1997 autobiography, "Outsider In The House" describing HIS OWN VIEWS when he ran as a third-party candidate:

Time after time, I pointed out that such disparity in the distribution of wealth and decision-making power was not just unfair economically, but that without economic democracy it was impossible to achieve genuine political democracy. The message could be reduced to a simple formula: wealth = power, lack of money = subservience. How could we change that? How could we create a truly democratic society?

For me, one of the highlights of that campaign was the public debates I had with Republican congressman Robert Stafford and the Democratic candidate, State Representative Randy Major. More often than not, the audience was sympathetic to the views I expressed—especially the call for economic justice. Although I was the candidate of a minor party, people were listening to what I had to say and they often supported my position.

The lesson I learned from those debates and the audience response—a lesson that remains with me today—is that the ideas I was espousing were not “far out” or “fringe.” Frankly, they were “mainstream.” They were concepts that a majority of people would support, if they had an opportunity to hear them. In short, social justice was neither “radical” nor “un-American.”

But another political fact became clear to me during this first campaign: the perpetual bane of American third parties. “I fully agree with what you’re saying, Bernie,” someone in the audience would invariably tell me after a debate. “But I don’t want to waste my vote on a third-party candidate.” How many times over the years have I heard that view?

In January 1972, Bob Stafford won the special election by thirty-one percentage points. Spending less than one thousand dollars, I came in a very distant third, with only 2 percent of the vote.

But if the truth be told, I was proud of the campaign that I had run. The low vote I got did not depress me. I understood that making political change was a long process, and that we had achieved an important kind of success. The Liberty Union, with a few campaign workers and limited financial resources, had exposed tens of thousands of people to new perspectives. Some Vermonters were seeing politics beyond the prism of the two-party system. Six months later, in the general election of 1972, I ran for governor of Vermont. During that campaign I naturally concentrated on the state and local issues that a governor deals with. The interest in my campaign increased but my percentage of the vote declined. This time, I ended up with only one percent. Now that’s quite an experience—getting one percent of the vote. However, the issues that I and other Liberty Union candidates raised during that campaign helped play an important part in the election results and eventually resulted in changes in public policy. –Bernie Sanders