In 2016, Green Party candidate Jill Stein got more than 132,000 votes across the pivotal swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, helping Donald Trump eke out victories in those battlegrounds—and with them the election—by a margin of roughly 77,000 votes.
Eight years later, the Democrats have a plan to prevent her from helping lift Trump to victory again.
For the first time, the party has built a war room devoted to tracking and attempting to discredit third-party candidates. The operation has more than 30 dedicated staffers, with an operating budget in the low seven figures, according to a staffer involved.
“We treat third-party candidates with the same rigor that campaigns treat major party candidates,” says Lis Smith, a veteran Democratic operative who runs communications for the war room. “We have a full content team, a full press team, a full research team.”
This time around, there are four third-party candidates who could combine to make a difference: Stein, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver and independent Cornel West. Many swing state polls surveying multi-candidate fields show third-party candidates registering support in the low single-digits—enough to potentially matter at the margins in a race that looks like a dead heat across the top battlegrounds.
For much of the 2024 campaign, Kennedy showed enough sustained strength in public opinion surveys to make both campaigns nervous. But since dropping out of the race in August and endorsing Trump, Democrats’ third-party attention has focused on Stein, who is once again running as a Green Party candidate.
Read More: Inside the Last Weeks of RFK Jr.’s Campaign.
As in 2016, Stein has no path to victory. Instead, her campaign has embraced a role as a protest candidate for young and Arab-American voters furious over the Biden Administration’s handling of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. “The goal is to punish the Vice President,” said Hassan Abdel Salam, a founder of the group Abandon Harris, said at a Stein rally in Dearborn, Mich.
A spokesman for Stein’s campaign disputed that Stein has no path to victory and is only running to “punish” Harris, saying that that while the Stein campaign appreciates Abandon Harris’s endorsement, “Hassan does not have a role with our campaign.”
The Democrats have sought to discredit Stein by calling her a “useful idiot for Russia” and highlighting her coziness with the Kremlin. (The Stein campaign declined to comment.) The party has aired multiple ads against Stein; one shows her face morphing into Trump’s. “A vote for Stein is really a vote for Trump,” it says. They’ve bought billboards in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania blazed with “Jill Stein Helped Trump Once. Don’t Let Her Do It Again.”
“We’re making sure voters understand Jill Stein has no path to victory, that she’s in this race to help Donald Trump win, and that we can’t repeat the mistakes of 2016,” says Smith. “By far the most powerful message to voters is that she helped Trump win in 2016, that she has no regrets about it, and that the GOP is going all out to prop her up.” Trump allies, including lawyers who represented him during his impeachment trial and during his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, have been representing the Green Party in its efforts to secure ballot access in key states.
A similar strategy helped neutralize Kennedy before her. When RFK Jr. first entered the race, he was leaching votes from Biden, Smith says. But by defining Kennedy as a right-wing fringe candidate, the Democrats were able to drive down his numbers with Democrats and drive up his numbers with Republicans. By the time he dropped out, Smith says, “he had no appeal to Democratic voters, he was electorally irrelevant.”
Democrats do not see West as a serious threat, arguing that he is not running a real campaign that could eat into Harris’s margins. To attack him, they say, would only amplify him.
If the Democrats manage to thwart third-party drift, the war room the party established could become a mainstay in presidential politics. “It’s the first time anyone in American politics has had this in a presidential election,” says Smith. “It wont be the last.”
