She’s No Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump — Behind the Scenes With Jill Stein (Multimedia)

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, center, with Truthdig team members Kasia Anderson, left, and Sarah Wesley right. (Eric Ortiz)

We at Truthdig want to clear up a misconception about the 2016 U.S. presidential race.

The popular notion is the country has only two options for president: a Democratic (Hillary Clinton) or a Republican (Donald Trump) choice.

That is not true.

This year, more than any other election year in American history, a path exists for a credible independent candidate to win the presidency.

It won’t be easy—political revolution never is—but 2016 could be the year of the insurgent for three simple reasons.

1. The American people have been open to the idea of a third party for a decade, and in a 2015 Gallup Poll 60 percent of Americans said they wanted a new major political party because the Democratic and Republican parties “do such a poor job” of representing the people.

2. No two candidates have ever been as disliked as Clinton and Trump.

3. Over 40 percent of American voters identify as independents, and according to a May poll from Data Targeting (which The Washington Post dismissed as “dumb,” perhaps because it counters a mainstream narrative), 55 percent of Americans favor an independent presidential ticket, including 91 percent of voters under age 29.

One person who could be on that ticket is Jill Stein, the presumptive Green Party nominee. In a recent CNN/ORC poll, Stein received 7 percent of the vote in a four-way race with Clinton (42 percent), Trump (38 percent) and Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson (9 percent). To put that number in context, in the first national election poll that included Stein in May, she was at 2 percent. When she ran for president as the Green candidate in 2012, Stein received 0.36 percent of the vote.

Stein is running again because she wants to give political power to the people, not the corporations, and loves being the outsider.

“If we as Americans allow our electoral system to be just bought and sold, and that’s it,” Stein said in a 2015 Yahoo profile, “then there’s really not very much hope going forward.”

Of course, the odds are stacked against Stein, but after appearing on only 36 state ballots in the 2012 general election, she is expected to appear on at least 47 on Nov. 8—including key battleground states Florida, Colorado and Ohio—and might even hit all 50.

The Green Party has begun courting Bernie Sanders supporters and has even invited them to attend the Green Party Presidential Nominating Convention in Houston, which begins Aug. 4.

On June 7, Stein visited Truthdig headquarters in Los Angeles for a “Live at Truthdig” show. We captured some behind-the-scenes moments with Evrybit.