Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant will not vote for Hillary Clinton. She has insisted on that for months and it hasn't changed this week, even after Bernie Sanders endorsed Clinton yesterday.

Sawant, a member of Socialist Alternative who has been campaigning for Sanders for months, has called the primary "rigged." She has said she is skeptical that the Democratic Party can be reformed and has called Clinton "the epitome of the establishment." She started an online petition urging Sanders to run as an independent if Clinton got the nomination.

That, of course, is not going to happen. So I asked Sawant about her plans. In an email, she backed away from Sanders and urged her supporters to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein instead. (She also made her case this morning here.)

"Our movement cannot follow Bernie into the corporate-controlled Democratic Party or support a presidential candidate backed to the hilt by the same billionaire class we need to fight," Sawant wrote in an email. "Socialist Alternative and I are calling on Sanders supporters to continue the political revolution by backing Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein and joining our efforts to build a new party for the 99%."

"There can be no doubt about Bernie’s diagnosis of the threat represented by Donald Trump’s right populism," she continued later, "but he is entirely wrong about how to cure the disease. We will not succeed in defeating the right by supporting establishment politicians like Hillary Clinton."

But if enough Sanders supporters line up behind Stein, they will hurt Clinton and help Trump. And won't Trump—a bigot who has promised to nominate far-right judges to the Supreme Court—be far more detrimental than Clinton to leftist movements, movements like the one Sawant considers herself a part of?

"What is holding movements back," Sawant replied when I asked that, "is a decades-long failed strategy of labor and the left making excuses for the corporate politics of the Democratic Party."

"What we need to worry about is not only Donald Trump," she added, "but that if we do not break from the Democratic establishment stranglehold and urgently build an independent left, it will allow the right to develop an ongoing base. The reason the Tea Party rose to prominence in 2010, and helped create a platform for the right, was because there was no force on the left that could tap into the legitimate anger against the corporate bailouts by the Obama administration."

While this hardline third-party-or-nothing stance may frustrate pragmatic Sanders-turned-Clinton supporters (like me), it is not surprising.

Sawant is not a Democrat. She has been unequivocal about her mistrust of the party. Members of Socialist Alternative did not caucus for Sanders because it would have required them to sign a form stating they were Democrats. Sawant doesn't worry that spoiling Clinton's chances could hurt the left because she does not believe Clinton—or the Democratic Party as a whole—is really "the left."

To support Clinton now would be completely off brand, out of step with both what she says and what she believes. It would also likely anger her supporters. So, don't expect it any time soon. For the rest of the election cycle, consider her "Stein or bust."