How the Democrats want to thwart Jill Stein

IIn 2016, Green Party candidate Jill Stein received more than 132,000 votes in the crucial swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, helping Donald Trump win those battlegrounds – and thus the election – by a margin of around 1,000 77,000 votes.

Eight years later, Democrats have a plan to stop them from helping Trump win again.

For the first time, the party has established a war room dedicated to persecuting and attempting to discredit third-party candidates. According to an employee involved, the company has more than 30 dedicated employees and an operating budget in the low seven figures.

“We treat third-party candidates with the same rigor that campaign candidates treat major party candidates,” said Lis Smith, a veteran Democratic staffer who leads communications for the War Room. “We have a full content team, a full press team, a full research team.”

This time, there are four third-party candidates who could work together to make a difference: Stein, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver and independent Cornel West. Many swing state polls that examine multiple candidate fields show third-party candidates seeing support in the low single digits — enough to potentially play a role on the margins in a race that looks like a dead heat in the top spots.

For much of the 2024 campaign, Kennedy showed enough sustained strength in public opinion polls to make both campaigns nervous. But since he dropped out of the race in August and endorsed Trump, third-party Democratic attention has focused on Stein, who is running again as the Green Party candidate.

Read more: In the final weeks of RFK Jr.'s campaign.

As in 2016, Stein has no path to victory. Instead, she has embraced the role of a protest candidate on the campaign trail for young and Arab-American voters angry about the Biden administration's handling of Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza. “The goal is to punish the vice president,” Hassan Abdel Salam, one of the founders of the group Abandon Harris, said at a rock rally in Dearborn, Michigan.

A spokesman for Stein's campaign denied that Stein had no path to victory and was only running to “punish” Harris. He said that while the Stein campaign appreciated Abandon Harris' support, “Hassan has no role in our campaign.”

Democrats have tried to discredit Stein by calling her a “useful idiot for Russia” and highlighting her ties to the Kremlin. (The Stein campaign declined to comment.) The party has aired several ads against Stein; One shows her face morphing into Trump's. “A vote for Stein is actually a vote for Trump,” it says. They bought billboards in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania that read, “Jill Stein once helped Trump. Don’t let her do it again.”

“We are making sure voters understand that Jill Stein has no path to victory, that she is in this race to help Donald Trump win, and that we cannot repeat the mistakes of 2016,” Smith said. “By far the strongest message to voters is that she helped Trump win in 2016, that she has no regrets and that Republicans are doing everything they can to support her.” Trump allies, including lawyers who defended him during his impeachment trial and represented the Green Party in its efforts to secure ballot access in key states during his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

A similar strategy helped neutralize Kennedy before her. When RFK Jr. first entered the race, he took votes away from Biden, Smith says. But by defining Kennedy as a right-wing fringe candidate, the Democrats were able to lower his numbers among Democrats and increase him among Republicans. When he dropped out, Smith said, “he had no traction with Democratic voters, he was irrelevant to the election.”

Democrats don't see West as a serious threat and argue that he isn't running a real campaign that could hurt Harris's margins. Attacking him, they say, would only strengthen him.

If Democrats can prevent third-party defections, the party's war room could become a mainstay of presidential politics. “It's the first time anyone in American politics has experienced something like this in a presidential election,” Smith said. “It won’t be the last time.”