September 17, 2024 - 8:30pm

Old grudges die hard, and Democrats still blame the Green Party for two elections in which Democrats won the popular vote but lost the presidency: 2000 and 2016. In both cases, the vote total for the Green Party was more than the Republican margin in the states that determined the presidential election in the Electoral College. Ralph Nader got almost 100,000 votes in Florida during the 2000 election — far more than George W. Bush’s 537-vote lead in the Sunshine State. In 2016, Jill Stein also got more votes than Donald Trump’s victory margin in the trifecta of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that ended up delivering him the presidency.

Whether Stein really played a spoiler in all those states is up for dispute. Consider Pennsylvania. Hillary Clinton lost the state by roughly 44,000 votes, but Stein only racked up around 50,000 votes. There’s a strong likelihood that some of Stein’s voters wouldn’t have voted at all if Stein weren’t on the ballot — and some of them could have even voted for Trump (perhaps because of trade policy or his outsider appeal). In that case, Stein’s presence on the ballot in 2016 might not have tipped the scales in Pennsylvania after all.

Nevertheless, Democrats remain worried that Stein’s 2024 presidential run could cost them, and their allies have mounted a legal campaign to keep her off the ballot in many states. In the 2020 presidential election, the Green nominee was confined to write-in status in many swing states, including Wisconsin, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. But this year, Stein’s campaign says that it has qualified for the ballot in almost all battleground states. One exception is Nevada, where the state Supreme Court recently removed Stein from the ballot, but the Green Party is petitioning the Supreme Court to intervene.

In part because of the closeness of recent swing-state battles, the Green Party’s star has fallen. Stein got about 1% of the vote in the 2016 election in Michigan. Four years later, the Green nominee got only about 0.25% there. Democrats might have had more to fear from defections to the Greens when Joe Biden was still at the top of the ticket. Since Harris has replaced Biden as the nominee, enthusiasm among progressive voters has soared, as the latest Monmouth Poll demonstrates.

That is not to suggest that the Democrats aren’t worrying about the Jill Stein threat. Indeed, losing even a few votes could matter. This dynamic reveals another rationale for Harris’s strategic ambiguity about her policy positions: she wants to appeal to moderates while avoiding alienating the Left, making vague gesticulations about a “new way forward” instead. By keeping her campaign floating in the stratosphere of generalities, Harris aims to deny Jill Stein and other third-party candidates any points of attack.

The tightness of recent electoral contests has made American political conflict even more fraught. Fewer than 80,000 votes across Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania sent Donald Trump to the White House in 2016. Despite Biden’s bigger popular vote margin, a shift of 50,000 votes in key battleground states could have changed the results of the 2020 election. Republicans’ narrow 2022 House majority relied on razor-thin margins in swing districts.

Like trench warfare, contemporary American presidential elections have become battles of inches — and Democrats dread losing even a sliver to Jill Stein.


Fred Bauer is a writer from New England.

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