Green party

Vice President Kamala Harris is spending millions on new ads against Green Party candidate Jill Stein in swing state Wisconsin, warning potential supporters that a vote for Stein is a vote for Trump. The advertisement also attempts to smear Stein by asserting that she has links to KKK leader David Duke and Russian president Vladimir Putin. “You can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep,” a voiceover says. “Stein isn’t sorry about swinging the 2016 election to Trump.” The ad was paid for by the Democratic National Committee but approved by the Harris campaign.Why would Harris be using air-time to attack Stein just two weeks out from the election? There are a couple of theories.

In the closing months of the 2022 midterms North Carolina residents began receiving text messages and phone calls from unfamiliar numbers, a ritual all too familiar to a swing-state voter. The benevolent voice on the line had seen the recipient’s name on a petition to allow the Green Party on the ballot and wanted to ensure the signature was on the up and up. With validity confirmed the anonymous caller would reveal himself to be a Green Party representative. “If the Green Party is on the ballot, it’ll take votes away from Democrats, giving Republicans a huge advantage. It will help them win North Carolina in 2022 and 2024. There’s far too much at stake to let this happen. Are you interested in asking to have your name removed from this petition or leave it as is?

Within the last year, election officials and judges in a few key swing states reduced the Green party’s erstwhile ballot access to write-in only. They likely intended to reduce the Greens’ vote share to the benefit of Joe Biden and the Democratic party.Voters in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin might have noticed the unusual absence of the Green party’s presidential ticket from their 2020 ballots. Democrat-controlled courts and Democratic election officials denied Green presidential candidate Howie Hawkins and his VP pick Angela Walker a place on those states’ ballots.

The Green party’s 2016 presidential ticket, headed by Jill Stein, captured just about 1 percent of the national popular vote, a far cry from the 2.74 percent infamously won by Green nominee Ralph Nader in 2000. Now with its presidential primaries underway, party leaders are betting that voters will look to the left of the Democratic party. ‘The Green party’s just taking all the people who are too crazy for the Democratic Socialists of America,’ an insider in the Democratic party’s left wing told me. But the Greens have reasons to be optimistic about their future in American politics.

A Republican comes within a hair’s breadth of winning a Senate seat — only to lose when the Libertarian Party candidate draws more votes than difference between the majority-party candidates’ numbers. Elsewhere, a Democrat is narrowly defeated when a Green Party candidate takes a few percentage points in a tight race where the Republican has less than a single point’s lead. These scenarios have played out a several times in recent elections, including on Tuesday. Only in the past 24 hours has Kyrsten Sinema, the Democrats’ candidate for Senate in Arizona, pulled ahead of her Republican rival by half a percent, as votes continue to be counted. The Green Party candidate in that race won 2.3 percent.