While She Offers GOP-Friendly Policies, The Greens Rile Up Progressives
In 1854, 30 opponents of the pro-slavery Kansas-Nebraska Act— members of the Whig, Free Soil, and Democratic parties— met at the Little White Schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin to start a new political party. That party turned out to be the GOP and none of those 30 founders would have ever imagined they were starting a party that 170 years later would be an authoritarian garbage dump on the brink of fascism. Yesterday. Kamala campaigned in the tiny city (population 7,863) in red-leaning Fond du Lac County— which voted 62.5% to 36.0% for Trump in 2020. She had Liz Cheney, a Wisconsin native, in tow and the message was pretty clear: “I’m pretty conservative and conservative voters can vote for me without worrying about any kind of progressive stuff.” Since her nomination she has come out in favor of fracking, a harder line at the southern border, Wall Street-friendly policies and announced that she’s a committed capitalist. Basically the only reasons to vote for her are abortion, identity politics and, most important, the lesser evil. It isn’t enough for me— in California— but if I lived in Wisconsin or another swing state, I’d probably hold my nose and vote for her, aware that she’s going to be just another shitty American president, but not anything like Trump.
The Financial Times reported it was the “most explicit attempt to lure Republicans who have been disenchanted with Trump’s control of their party— and whose votes could decide the election.” Aggregate average polling shows her about 2 points ahead in Wisconsin, even with FiveThirtyEight including fake Republican polls from GOP firms like Trafalgar.
The most current Marquette Law School poll has Kamala up by 5 and when leaners are pressed to decide and are then factored in, up by 4. She’s also ahead when all 6 independent candidates are among the choices.
Meanwhile, before she showed up at Ripon, a couple dozen Wisconsin Republicans, mostly former office-holders, announced, in an open letter, that they’d be voting for her. “We, the undersigned, are Republicans from across Wisconsin who bring the same message: Donald Trump does not align with Wisconsin values. To ensure our democracy and our economy remain strong for another four years, we must elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to the White House… We have plenty of policy disagreements with Vice President Harris. But what we do agree upon is more important. We agree that we cannot afford another four years of the broken promises, election denialism, and chaos of Donald Trump’s leadership.”
Erik Gunn reported that “The single current office holder signing the letter is Tom Bilski, the district attorney for Buffalo County. Other signers include three Republican former members of the Wisconsin Legislature: Former Sen. Barbara Lorman, Fort Atkinson, and former Reps. Margaret Lewis of the Town of Middleton and Susan Vergeront of Sun Prairie. Also signing are former Brown County Republican Chair Mark Becker, former Iowa County Sheriff Steve Michek and Tracy Ann Mangold, former Republican Party secretary for the 8th Congressional District.”
Bilski, who is running for reelection this year, was originally appointed to the DA job by Gov. Scott Walker (R) when Thomas Clark, his predecessor, was elected to a judgeship. Buffalo County, in the far west of the state, is newly red and Trump beat Biden there 61.9% to 36.6%.
Although polling doesn’t point in this direction, Wisconsin Democrats are worried that the Green Party could upend the election and throw it to Trump. Putin’s very own “Jill Stein is once again on the ballot as the Green Party nominee, reviving bitter memories of the role she played eight years ago. Wisconsin Democrats haven’t forgotten the searing experience of 2016, when Hillary Clinton unexpectedly lost the state to Donald Trump by just under 23,000 votes— a defeat that many attribute to the roughly 31,000 votes Stein won that year as the Green Party nominee.”
Calder McHugh reported yesterday that “While they have little infrastructure in the county, within the last decade, Madison has nevertheless elected two Green candidates to local office, more than almost any other city of its size in the nation. The Green Party naturally finds the most traction in deep blue pockets like Madison, where voters are more progressive, more anti-war, more interested in pushing Democrats leftward— and more willing to abandon them when the party doesn’t go far enough. The area is both indispensable to Democrats and ripe for Green Party activism... In 2016… Stein won more votes than Trump’s margin of victory in each of the three closely-contested Rust Belt states that flipped to hand him the presidency— Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, leading many Democrats to point fingers at Stein in the bitter aftermath of that defeat.”
In general, the Greens chafe at the idea that they’re meant to stand down for Democrats. For years, they’ve rejected progressive Democrats’ calls for them to campaign only in non-swing states. In fact, they’ve pursued the opposite tack — they’ve directed efforts toward close battleground states where the party is sure to get more attention.
And the Greens remain positioned to swing the race given the dead heat between Kamala Harris and Trump. Whether it’s the narcissism of small differences or a deep-seated disagreement on how to build left-wing power in the country, the Green Party now functions as something of a vessel for embittered Democrats or leftists who never found a home in the party. The issue areas the party trumpets tend to shift based on the election cycle— this year, the war in Gaza serves as the line of demarcation between Democrats and Greens.
Stein has hammered Democrats over Biden’s response to the conflict. While Harris has quieted some fears on the issue, there are still plenty of former Democrats who refuse to vote for her because of their concerns about the Biden administration’s decision to continue providing aid and arms to Israel. And that’s fueling Democratic paranoia about Stein’s prospects in Dane County.
The University of Wisconsin at Madison has a pro-Palestinian student organization that regularly turns out hundreds of community members for protests at the Capitol. It recently successfully disrupted a Harris rally in Madison and a University of Wisconsin Board of Regents meeting. Pro-Palestinian slogans and messages are scrawled on mailboxes, sidewalks and in public bathrooms across the city.
…The Greens insist that left-wing Democrats are sellouts for supporting an administration that doesn’t always align with their policy priorities. Democrats fire back that the Greens are running what amounts to a grift, showing up every four years to try to pick up some cash and votes but not doing the work to build a viable political party.
The dispute has spilled into public over the last few weeks, with progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Stein scrapping on social media.
“Nobody needs talking points to know Jill Stein hasn’t won so much as a bingo game in the last decade and if you actually give a damn about people, you organize, build power and infrastructure, and win,” Ocasio-Cortez said on Twitter on Sept. 12.
Stein fired back, insisting, “you supporting genocide was NOT on my bingo card, but the Democrats have a way of changing people who say they’re going to ‘change the party from the inside.’”
…In Wisconsin, Green Party leaders are furious over Democratic efforts to sink Stein. Pete Karas, the elections committee chair for the Wisconsin Greens, says that in the wake of the lawsuit, they now plan to run more local campaigns in 2026, focusing on competitive districts.
Why run in swing districts when they likely have a better chance of getting more votes in deep blue ones— and risk electing Republican candidates who might be even more hostile to their ideas? Payback.
“We need to teach Democrats a lesson,” Karas said. “They’re trying to mess with us and mess with democracy, and they have a couple of choices. They can continue to do that and suffer the consequences, or they can pass ranked choice voting so that we actually do have fair elections.”
According to Stein, the attacks on her from progressives in Wisconsin only prove that they’re running scared. “The [Democrats] appear to be quite afraid of facing the music here… they want to wipe out their competition so they don’t have to face a challenge,” she told me.
On that point, both sides agree. Democrats are indeed deathly afraid that a few thousand votes in a razor thin election will deliver the state to Trump once again. Stein is once again polling around 1 percent across all the Blue Wall states this year, though based on sample sizes and margin of error, polling at or below 1 percent is mostly guesswork.
Even as state party operatives in Wisconsin insist that momentum has shifted in their direction since Harris ascended to the top of the ticket— and the polling is inching in Harris’ direction— some of them continue to have 2016 rattling around in the dark corners of their mind. Their nerves remain frayed.
“I am almost afraid to be optimistic,” says Bechen.