Troy

Voters should not have to choose the "lesser evil" of the two major parties' nominees, likely Green Party nominee Jill Stein said to about 70 people on Saturday.

She argued in an afternoon speech that the party has been "ahead of the curve" on racial equality, climate change and LGBT issues.

Stein, who also ran as a Green Party candidate in 2012, has dedicated her campaign to environmental issues, campaign-finance reform and creating green-energy jobs.

Stein was in town for the state Green Party convention, where the crowd voted her as their nominee at the Oakwood Community Center. She took 89 percent of the vote.

Stein has worked as a physician and founded the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities, a nonprofit. She received 469,501 votes last election.

The campaign, she said in an interview, revealed "hot spots" of the anti-establishment feeling that has characterized this election cycle.

In her speech in Troy, she characterized presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton as a corporate politician whose husband's policies led to the rise of Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee.

"Putting another Clinton in the White House will only fan the flames of the right wing revolt," she said.

She cited Bill Clinton's Wall Street policies and the North American Free Trade Agreement as specific critiques in an interview before the event.

The appearance closed Stein's three-day tour of upstate. She held fundraisers, posed for a photo at Albany's new vegan deli and held a rally with local Green Party candidates at the closed General Electric Co. plant in Fort Edward.

She expects some of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders' supporters to find a place in the Green Party as the campaign continues.

In a late-May Quinnipiac poll, Stein averaged 3 percent, behind Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, who polled 5 percent, Clinton, at 41 percent and Trump at 38 percent.

Sanders volunteers will likely sway supporters toward her candidacy, Stein said, adding that her campaign wants to be "respectful."

The "fire was extinguished" from Sanders's campaign after President Barack Obama met with the Vermont senator Thursday. "President Obama taking Bernie aside like it was a principal bringing a misbehaving student into the office – that's really what it reeked of," she said.

The Green Party, she said, is a natural fit for the fiery supporters of Sanders, a self-described Democratic socialist. "His supporters have nowhere else to go."

At the Capitol on Friday, she criticized New York's Limited Liability Corp. giving laws and Gov. Andrew Cuomo's recent executive order that called for a state spending ban on businesses or institutions connected to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement against Israel.

The Green Party will hold its four-day nomination convention starting Aug. 4 in Houston.

Stein is one of two presidential candidates who are recognized by the Green Party of the United States – the other is William Kreml, a former professor at the University of South Carolina – though others also seek the nomination. Kreml addressed the Troy audience via video conference before Stein spoke Saturday.

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