Green Party Candidate Jill Stein Gets Last Laugh As Democrats Suffer Crushing Defeat in Wisconsin

One big thing Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein had in common with (now-former) independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was being the subject of intense focus by the Democrat Party's legal teams and related allies at the state and national levels, with them fighting in the courtroom to keep her, Kennedy, and Cornel West off the November ballot in states across the country.

Just last Wednesday, as he was preparing to suspend his campaign and endorse GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, Kennedy went off on Democrats who talked big at the DNC about voting rights and democracy but who have gone to unprecedented levels to suppress third-party candidates.

After a New York court appearance on a ballot access case, Kennedy said "The DNC is in Chicago talking about their commitment to voting rights, while they're spending tens, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars to keep me off the ballot."

Stein, meanwhile, dropped some receipts on her Twitter/X page pointing to how Democrats had done far more than simply engage in lawfare to try and sabotage her candidacy.

In an update of sorts to Stein's battle, she got the last laugh on Monday thanks to the Wisconsin Supreme Court:

Jill Stein, the presidential candidate for the Green Party, will remain on the ballot in Wisconsin, the state’s Supreme Court said, after the court declared a Democratic technical challenge to her ballot access moot on Monday.
The three-page order, left unsigned by members of the court, represented a significant victory for Ms. Stein’s third-party presidential bid, as the Green Party had been disqualified from the ballot in Wisconsin in 2020. The presence of Ms. Stein — a minor left-wing candidate — on the ballot could also pose a risk to Vice President Kamala Harris’s prospects in Wisconsin, which has been won on razor-thin margins in recent presidential races.

"IT IS ORDERED that the petition for leave to commence an original action is denied," the order declared. "We determine that the petitioner is not entitled to the relief he seeks; and, IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that all other pending motions are denied as moot."

As also noted in the order, the petitioner in this case was David Strange, "individually and as Deputy Operations Director-Wisconsin for the Democratic National Committee." Strange had argued that the Green Party not having any statewide candidates or officeholders meant they had no way of legally nominating presidential electors.

RedState readers will recall that many Democrats including twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton blamed Stein in part for Clinton losing the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump:

Stein last appeared on the Wisconsin ballot 2016, when she won just over 31,000 votes — more than Trump’s winning margin of just under 23,000 votes. Some Democrats have blamed her for helping Trump win the state and the presidency that year.

Such claims have been heavily disputed even by left-wing outlets like Vox.com, which did a post-election analysis in 2016 and found the allegation to be sorely lacking:

This is very different from Florida in 2000, where only a small fraction of Florida voters for Nader — about half of a percent — would have needed to vote Gore to give Gore the election.
And that’s what exit polling that asked people how they would have voted in a two-party race — with the third option of not voting — finds. Under that scenario she would have won Michigan, still lost Florida, and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania would have been a 48 to 48 percent toss-up. Clinton would have needed to win both of those states to reach 270 electoral votes. So even in the artificial world of that exit poll that erased Stein and Johnson, Clinton seemed likely to lose.

The Wall Street Journal reported at the time that "the third-party vote doesn't appear to have been the key factor in Democrat Hillary Clinton's defeat"

They also shared that their "analysis" of third-party voting in key Republican-leaning states "shows that Mrs. Clinton would have needed to win a large percentage of a fickle, independent and often-misunderstood group of voters in order to flip enough states to affect the outcome of the election."

That said, though a resounding Trump victory would be awesome, a third-party candidate factoring into a Kamala Harris defeat in a battleground state or two would be a chef's kiss.

As always, stay tuned!