Bill Scher is the senior writer at the Campaign for America’s Future, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ” along with the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis.

As the Green Party convenes in Houston this weekend to formally nominate Dr. Jill Stein for president, the party’s stars appear more aligned than ever. The Greens have a catchy unofficial slogan: “Jill, Not Hill.” There’s a new generation of politically rootless democratic socialists to woo. The Green Party is predicting it will be on the most state ballots in its history. And Stein is getting more media coverage than any Green since 2000 nominee Ralph Nader, having just secured a prime-time CNN town hall for August 17.

The town hall is a critical opportunity, since Stein is the least known of the four top candidates, including Libertarian Party nominee and former Governor Gary Johnson. And while she has certainly been to political candidate school—male pundits won’t have to remind her to smile—she doesn’t have the inspiring cadence of an Obama or the gruff everyman shtick of a Sanders. Her even keel and consistently left-wing outlook goes down easily with the Democracy Now! audience, but she’ll need to raise her game if she’s to connect on CNN.


Still, the past week has yielded ominous signs that a moment is already being missed by the Greens. Stein hoped for a vice-presidential game-changer, reaching out to prominent Bernie Sanders surrogate and former Ohio state Senator Nina Turner, only to be publicly rebuffed, prompting her to settle for obscure left-wing activist Ajamu Baraka.

Stein also failed to earn a bounce out of the Democratic convention, despite considerable effort to grab a share of the spotlight. Hoping to amplify Democratic divisions, she made regular appearances at downtown rallies, whipping up those “Jill, not Hill” chants with the help of celebrity Sanders supporter Cornel West. Some Sanders delegates even held up Stein signs on the convention floor.

But polls taken before and after the convention show little movement. Stein’s support ticked down from 6 to 5 percent in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, bumped up from 3 to 5 in the CNN poll and edged up from 5 to 6 in the McClatchy/Marist poll. Meanwhile, it’s Clinton who has made gains with Sanders voters: CNN found Clinton’s share of the Bernie vote jumping from 57 to 69 percent, and McClatchy/Marist similarly tracked a rise from 57 to 65. Stein’s piece of the Bernie vote is at 13 percent in both polls, not budging from where it was before Philadelphia. And it’s not just Clinton that's getting in Stein’s way; Johnson, who has outpaced Stein for third-party media attention, is taking about 1 of every 10 Sanders voters.

That lack of momentum prompted David Weigel of the Washington Post to describe the Greens as “struggling” to capture progressive voters. Weigel surmised that too many leftists over 30 are still traumatized by how Nader’s Green candidacy helped tip the 2000 election to George W. Bush, and are deeply reluctant to repeat the scenario by embracing Stein.

But let’s not write off the Greens too soon. Remember: The Green Party’s objective is not to spoil for the sake of spoiling; it’s to win at least 5 percent of the popular vote. That threshold would qualify the Green Party for public campaign funds to use in the 2020 presidential campaign that party officials estimate would amount to more than $10 million. With a more reliable funding stream, the Green Party would be more able to retain the far left slice of the electorate, and become a perennial thorn in the Democratic side.

And strangely enough—though perhaps nothing is too strange this political season—the Greens could get their biggest lift from disaffected Republicans. Even if the prospect of President Donald Trump is too frightening for many of the left to take the risk of the Green vote, that dynamic could be offset by Republicans going Green.

Why? Conservative author Matt Lewis shared with me on our online weekly DMZ Show that he talked to an unnamed “Republican strategist” who, unwilling to vote for Trump, is planning to vote for Stein in a Machiavellian move to aid the Green Party’s quest for major party status, which could divide the left.

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If the election were today, Stein would have a good chance of hitting her 5 percent mark. But for November 8, it’s still an open question on how many state ballots will the Greens appear. Stein’s ballot access coordinator predicted 46 in a recent KPFA radio interview, which would be a Green record. Ballot Access News Publisher Richard Winger was a bit more pessimistic in an email to POLITICO Magazine, noting that Stein failed to meet the requirements in Indiana, North Carolina, Oklahoma and South Dakota, and her prospects are not certain in Georgia and Nevada. By next month we should know exactly how many ballots she has secured.

The other looming uncertainty is whether these summer poll numbers will sustain or grow through the fall. The historical pattern says they won’t. Third-party candidacies tend to peak early, if at all. Then the novelty wears off, voters get squeamish about “wasting” their vote, campaign coffers dry up and they limp across the finish line. In the summer of 2000, Nader was polling only slightly better than where Stein is today—8 percent in the ABC/Washington Post poll, 6 percent in Gallup—then drifted down to 3 or 4 points for most of the fall, landing at 2.74 percent in the actual vote tally. Stein could easily walk a similar path.

To buck the trend, Stein will need to do a better job of making her way into the media spotlight. But without Nader’s political celebrity or much cash so far, having raised about $2 million—(though half of that was last month, evidence that she has accelerated her fundraising pace) it’s not clear how Stein will do that. She has already raised more than her entire 2012 presidential campaign, and it’s enough to have purchased $575,000 in broadcast and cable TV ad time—more than what the Trump campaign has put into TV ads. Still, it’s a pittance compared with the more than a quarter-billion Clinton has raised, not even counting super PACs. Nor is Stein ever likely to match Trump in the sheer outrageousness that has earned him so much free media.

However, the advent of social media gives a savvy, underfunded insurgent more tools to wage asymmetrical political warfare, as both Sanders and Trump proved in the primary. Stein’s team has not quite mastered the art, though a recent online ad—which begins, “I would feel terrible if Donald Trump gets elected … and terrible if Hillary Clinton gets elected”—scored a strong 675,000 in Facebook views. And her Twitter following has cracked 200,000.

Stein’s rigid message discipline is evident on her social media accounts—follow her and it won’t be long until you read, “forget the lesser evil, fight for the greater good.” But can she incorporate the kind of Trumpian bombast that compels the media to pay attention?

She flirted with it once on Mothers’ Day, tweeting, “I agree w/ Hillary, it’s time to elect a woman for President. But I want that President to reflect the values of being a mother.” When that sparked a feminist backlash, Stein deleted the tweet and apologetically clarified, “I wasn’t criticizing Hillary as a mother, I was criticizing her record as a war monger.” She may need to offend more and apologize less if she doesn’t want to become an autumn afterthought. (She may be aided by her vice-presidential choice. Baraka’s blogging, as reported by Fusion, is unrestrained. In June, for example, he criticized the family of Muhammad Ali for inviting “Bill Clinton, the rapist and petty opportunist politician” to deliver the boxer’s eulogy.)

Beyond Stein’s own tactical moves, what may be the biggest factor determining her final result is the state of the race between Clinton and Trump, which could influence the willingness of disgruntled-yet-pragmatic voters to vote strategically in favor of the Greens. An analysis of past elections conducted by The Atlantic earlier this month found that “folks who lived in a state where elections tend to go strongly for one party appeared somewhat more likely to vote for a third-party candidate.” In other words, voters are more likely to vote third-party when they don’t think it will lead to the “greater evil” winning the election. (The Atlantic interviewed a political scientist who recounted a 1992 conversation with his mother, who asked, “Can you guarantee that Ross Perot will lose? Because if you can, I’m going to vote for him.”)

In 2000, Bush was ahead for much of the year but Democrat Al Gore staged a huge fall comeback, leaving the final outcome in doubt before (and after) Election Day and creating a disincentive for third-party protest votes. Today, several polls show substantial leads for Clinton. If those numbers prove to be more than just an ephemeral post-convention bounce, by November, soft Clinton supporters on the left may feel liberated to vote Stein, especially in deep red and blue states.

Then there are the GOP defectors. The prospect of Republicans voting for Stein en masse may seem half-baked. But note that in both the CNN and McClatchy/Marist polls, the percent of Republicans voting for Stein, while small, is 1 point more than that of the Democrats. If by November, more and more Republicans feel like they can’t stomach either Trump’s instability, Johnson’s social liberalism or Clinton’s likely Supreme Court nominees, they may conclude that elevating Stein provides Republicans with the most tangible political benefit.

Stein’s broadsides against the “lesser evil” show that the Greens’ long-term hope is to supplant the Democratic Party as the voice of the American left. But it’s the possible collapse of the Republican Party that may lead to a Green breakthrough this year.