Hoping to avoid a repeat of narrow swing-state losses that helped Donald Trump win the White House in 2016, Democrats are taking no chances this time and taking aim at Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein.
Jaime Harrison, the Democratic National Committee chairman, said Friday the group was releasing its first-ever ad focused on third-party candidates instead of Republicans.
“Trump ‘likes’ that Jill Stein is in this race—because Jill Stein can’t win, but she can help Trump win,” Harrison said in a social media post.
In a statement provided by a spokesman to HuffPost, the Stein campaign said, “Bring it on! The Dems smear campaign is the best publicity we could ask for.”
“Kamala Harris could win back her base if she would end the genocide with a weapons embargo to Israel now. But apparently she prefers killing Palestinian children to winning the election. No amount of lying campaign ads is going to distract from the simple truth that Americans revile this bipartisan genocide.”
Stein and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were the two most prominent names on presidential ballots aside from the Democratic and Republican nominees this year. But Kennedy has since gone on to endorse Trump and tried to get his name off of ballots in some states.
Stein has been a perennial candidate who also ran on the Green Party ticket in 2016 and 2012. Her campaign has focused on opposition to U.S. support for Israel in its brutal war in Gaza, calling it a “genocide” and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “war criminal.”
In September, Stein came under fire for refusing to also call Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal” in an interview, despite his being indicted by the International Criminal Court at the Hague and the invasion of Ukraine meeting many of the conditions that define “genocide” in international law.
In the 30-second ad, Stein is pictured onscreen as the voiceover says she is the Green Party presidential candidate.
“So why are Trump’s close allies helping her? Stein was key to Trump’s 2016 wins in battleground states. She’s not sorry she helped Trump win,” the announcer says.
“That’s why a vote for Stein is really a vote for Trump,” the announcer continues, as Stein’s face morphs into Trump’s. The ad ends with a clip of Trump saying he likes Stein “very much” because she takes votes away only from the Democratic side, not from Republicans.
Nationally, Stein polled at only 1% in an early October Economist/YouGov poll. But with Harris and Trump tied or within the margin of polling error in several swing states, her margins in those could be crucial.
The DNC said the ad would air on television in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as well as on cable in the rest of the country. It did not disclose how much it would spend on the ad.
The 2024 campaign is not the first time a Green Party presidential candidate has been accused of playing spoiler. In 2016, Stein was blamed for taking crucial votes away from Democrat Hillary Clinton and enabling Trump to win. In 2000, then-presidential candidate Ralph Nader received 97,488 votes in the disputed Florida vote for president. Al Gore, the Democratic presidential candidate that year, lost the state by 537 votes, and with it lost the election to Republican George W. Bush.