Hillary Clinton's loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 elections had many reasons, but if you ask Democratic Party activists, they'll point first and foremost to one woman: Jill Stein. The 74-year-old Jewish activist ran in 2016 as the Green Party's candidate, clearly targeting left-leaning voters.
When the votes were counted, it turned out that in the three states considered the "blue wall" supporting Democratic candidates – Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — Stein received several tens of thousands more votes than the total margin by which Donald Trump won those states at the time.
This trauma haunts the Democrats now as well, deep into the 2024 election. In a race that's expected to be even tighter than 2016, Jill Stein could once again hand Trump the victory. National polls give her around 1% of the vote, and that could be enough to tip the scale. “I like her very much,” Trump said of Stein at a rally in June. “You know why? She takes 100% from them.”
Independent candidates can't win elections in the U.S., but in a deeply polarized reality where every vote in a small number of states carries disproportionate importance, a third-party candidate can change the game. Democrats have felt this twice in the 21st century.
In 2000, independent candidate Ralph Nader, Stein's predecessor as Green Party leader, won 95,000 votes in Florida — and George Bush defeated Al Gore in Florida by a margin of 600 votes following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, winning the entire race.
This time, Democrats are running an aggressive campaign against Stein, including financial investments in television ads saying, "Jill Stein helped Trump once. Don't let her do it again."
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Donald Trump, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris
(Photo: Kevin Dietsch/AFP, REUTERS/Brian Snyder)
Stein, a physician, is considered far-left, but partly because of her isolationist agenda — including support for Russia and opposition to U.S. support for Israel — she attracts voters who embody the famous horseshoe theory: the far left and far right are very close to each other.
Things reached the point where Stein received an endorsement from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke last week and her campaign had to publicly distance itself from him.
Stein insists there's no chance she'll withdraw from the race, no matter who pressures her, including her own children. “For her political activities, she does not have the support of the family. When she told us she was going to run again back in October 2023, we asked her not to,” one of her sons told The New York Times.
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