DNC launches ad in Wisconsin attacking Green Party candidate Jill Stein

National Democrats are running an ad in Wisconsin and other swing states attacking Green Party candidate Jill Stein, calling her a spoiler candidate who will hand the election to former President Donald Trump.

The ad comes as recent polls show the race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is tied in the state.

The Democratic National Committee's commercial, titled “Crucial,” will air on television stations in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, three so-called “blue wall” states that are crucial to Democrats' chances of retaining the White House. It shows an image of Stein morphing into an image of Trump as a narrator says, “Stein was key to Trump's 2016 victories in battleground states.”

“She is not sorry that she helped Trump win,” the ad says. “That’s why a vote for Stein is really a vote for Trump.”

The ad ends with a video of Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, in which he says he likes Stein “because she likes them 100 percent,” referring to Democrats.

Ramsey Reid leads the Democratic National Committee's independent and outside campaign operations. In an interview with WPR, he said they are spending six figures in the three states.

“We know the election will be very close, and we saw how Jill Stein’s spoiler campaign impacted the election in 2016,” Reid said. “And because we think the margins in the battleground states are going to be so close, we want to make sure voters know that a vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Donald Trump, and we don't want that.” Take it all as of course.”

Stein last voted in Wisconsin in 2016, when she received 31,072 votes. That year, Trump won the state by 22,748 votes. In 2020, Stein did not vote in the election and Democratic President Joe Biden defeated Trump in a similarly close election, with Biden winning by 20,682 votes.

Stein campaign: “We completely reject the spoiler message”

Stein campaign manager Jason Call told WPR the DNC's ad was “false.”

“We don’t want Trump or Harris to win,” Call said. “We completely reject the spoiler message. This is democracy. People should vote their conscience.”

Regarding Harris, Call criticized her and Democrats' support for Israel amid what he described as the nation's “genocide” in Palestine. But he said both parties were part of a “duopoly” that supported a “corporate-funded war machine.”

Wisconsin Green Party Chairman Pete Karas echoed Call's concerns, saying the Libertarian Party's presidential candidate received more votes in Wisconsin this year, while the DNC accused Stein of being a spoilsport in 2016. Former Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson received 106,674 votes in the 2016 presidential race in Wisconsin.

Karas said Democrats used the spoiler argument in 2020 to keep the Green Party in state elections “so people don't have a choice.”

“We think it’s unfair and we’ll fight back,” Karas said.

The ad is the DNC's latest attack against Stein, which asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court in August to bar her from the ballot. The DNC claimed that Stein could not legally appear on the ballot in Wisconsin because the Green Party did not have statewide incumbents or legislative candidates needed to nominate in presidential races in the state. At the time, Call told WPR it was a frivolous lawsuit “intended to waste our time and resources.”

The Supreme Court declined to consider the DNC's petition a week later, and the Wisconsin Elections Commission voted on August 28 to add Stein to the states' presidential ballots. The commission also included independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy, who unsuccessfully sued to be removed from the ballot. On September 28, the Supreme Court rejected Kennedy's request, saying he had not shown that a lower court ruling should be overturned.

In a statement to WPR, Wisconsin Republican Party Chairman Brian Schimming accused the state's Democrats of “bashing democracy” while denigrating third-party candidates “in a desperate attempt to disempower inconvenient opposition.”

“'Democracy for me, but not for you' is a losing strategy,” said Schimming. “Voters have no interest in rewarding Democrats for their blatant hypocrisy or their abysmal record over the last four years.”

The DNC's advertising campaign comes at a time when recent polls show the race between Harris and Trump is particularly close in Wisconsin. A Marquette University Law School voter poll released Oct. 2 showed Harris with a 4 percent lead. Since then, four other polls of Wisconsin voters showed Trump either with a slight lead or tied with Harris.