‘It Smells Like a Rat’: The Nasty Feud That Could Flip Wisconsin

MADISON, Wisconsin — On an oppressively hot August day in downtown Madison, the signs of this famously liberal city’s progressive activism are everywhere. Buildings are draped in pride flags and Black Lives Matter signs are prominently displayed on storefronts. A musty bookstore advertises revolutionary titles and newspaper clippings of rallies against Donald Trump. A fancy restaurant features a graphic of a raised Black fist in its window, with chalk outside on the sidewalk reading “solidarity forever.”

Yet the Green Party, which bills itself as an independent political party that has the best interests of self-described leftists at heart, is nowhere to be found. It has no storefronts, no candidates running for local office, no relationship with the politically active UW-Madison campus, which has almost 50,000 students.

Where it does have purchase is in the nightmares of local Democrats, who are deeply afraid of the effect the third party might have here in November. As one of the seven presidential battleground states, Wisconsin is a critical brick in the so-called Blue Wall, the term for the run of Rust Belt states that are essential to Kamala Harris’ chances of winning the presidency. It’s a deeply divided state that’s become notorious for its razor-thin margins of victory — a place where statewide elections are so close that even tenths of a percentage point matter. Against that backdrop, the Green Party looms very large this year.

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.

In the eight years since 2016, the state’s political equation has been somewhat altered. Thanks to its rapid growth, Dane County — which includes Madison — has turned from a reliably Democratic stronghold into a raging turnout machine that has overwhelmed the GOP’s traditional strength elsewhere in Wisconsin. The Democratic margins in the county keep getting larger, and more people keep coming out to vote. The clearest example came in 2023, during the state’s historically sleepy spring election, when Dane County powered Democrats to victory in a closely contested state Supreme Court race, producing even more Democratic votes than in the much larger Milwaukee County, the state’s traditional population hub.

Yet the seat of that newfound Democratic power is uniquely susceptible to Green Party influence. 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.

“Of course I have concerns,” says Carlene Bechen, a Democratic activist and village board trustee in the town of Oregon, a suburb of Madison, referring to the prospect of Green Party votes tilting the election toward Trump again in Wisconsin. “I’d be a fool if I didn’t have concerns.”

Across the country, the Green Party barely has a footprint. It has little money or political organization, no members of Congress or statewide officeholders and just a few local ones. Every four years, though, the Greens run a candidate for president — and it’s led to the party’s notoriety as a third-party spoiler.

In 2000, Ralph Nader, running under the Green banner, proved to be Democrat Al Gore’s nemesis by repeatedly undermining Gore’s efforts to make environmental protections his signature issue. Nader ended up winning almost 100,000 votes in Florida, dooming Gore’s chances in what was then the campaign’s pivotal battleground — the state was ultimately decided by 537 votes that year.

In 2016, that scenario was revisited. 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. Hillary Clinton was among them .

In relative terms, the Green Party represents an exceptionally small percentage of the electorate. But its outsized impact in modern presidential races has made it a boogeyman among Democrats.

This cycle, the Democratic Party is determined not to get caught sleeping by underestimating the Greens’ support like they did in 2016. The national party has built an operation across the country that takes a proactive and ruthless approach toward stopping third-party threats, including employing communications professionals whose entire jobs consist of attacking third-party candidates. In May, the Democratic National Committee posted and then quickly deleted a job posting for an “Independent & Third Party Project Manager” whose job description included attending third party events, reporting back on activity and recruiting volunteers to do the same. Democrats have also utilized a legal strategy aimed at removing third parties from the ballot that could hurt their electoral chances — like the Green Party — in whatever battleground state possible.

Despite those efforts, this year the Green presidential ticket is on the ballot in 38 states, including every battleground state except for Nevada. The legal fights have made an already fraught relationship even uglier.

In a phone interview with POLITICO Magazine, Stein bitterly criticized Democratic attempts to knock the Green Party line off ballots, calling them political dirty tricks. Though she’s accustomed to battling the major parties, her anger this year appears directed not at the “uniparty” (what the Greens like to call Democrats and Republicans together) but at Democrats in particular.

“[The DNC wanted] people to infiltrate and spy on our campaign,” Stein told me. “It smells like a rat.” The DNC declined to comment on the job posting.

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 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.

Alexia Sabor, the chair of the Dane County Democrats, noted that since Harris ascended to the top of the ticket, enthusiasm for voting blue among left-wing, pro-Palestinian Democrats has increased. But she also said that some people — including a friend of hers in Madison with Palestinian ancestry, who outright refused to vote for Biden — remain a little more guarded and are looking for more action to end the violence.

“[Harris] did call for a cease-fire in Gaza,” Sabor says. “That hasn't happened yet, right? But people feel like qualitatively, she’s potentially very different on that issue than Joe Biden.”

She insists that the Green Party is barely on her radar as a concern — she’s more worried about losing voters to the couch. And in Wisconsin, where the Greens have almost no political power to speak of. Among the state’s 72 counties, there’s currently only one Green serving on a county board of supervisors. On the ballot this year, there’s only one candidate running for Congress among Wisconsin’s eight congressional districts — an 82-year-old named Chester Todd, who’s focused on environmental protection and Palestinian rights. Stein herself hasn’t been to the state since March.

But the prevalence of pro-Palestinian protests across Wisconsin, and the Green Party’s focus on the Gaza issue, makes it hard to dismiss the possibility that a number of those voters — many of whom bused down to Chicago in August to participate in sit-ins and protests at the Democratic National Convention — will look for alternatives to voting Democratic on Election Day.

“I’ve been talking to people who don’t want to vote, or want to vote Green Party,” said Evelyn Comer, an at-large delegate from Wisconsin at the convention. “Most of those [conversations] are about the war in Gaza.”

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-N.Y.) 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 X 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.’”

Both critiques reveal something fundamental about how the two parties think about the pursuit, expression and purpose of political power.

“If you want power in a third party, start teaching the Green Party or whoever to run for school board and village board, and stop running for president and governor,” says Sabor.

Four years ago, Democratic attempts to suffocate the Green Party were widely successful across the country, and in particular in Wisconsin. The DNC successfully sued to keep Green nominee Howie Hawkins off the presidential ballot in Wisconsin by taking advantage of a minor clerical error — a change in Hawkins’ running mate’s residence made their paperwork inaccurate. That small oversight had potentially huge consequences since Biden ultimately won the state by a razor-thin 21,000 votes.

This time around, Democrats have followed the same playbook, pouring cash into a legal offensive aimed at throwing third-party challengers off the ballot in key swing states. In August, the DNC sued to remove Stein from the Wisconsin ballot, citing a problem with the nomination of her electors based on state law. They argued that, given that the Green Party had no candidates running for state office, there was no one who could serve as an elector for Stein in the state.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court ultimately threw out the suit, ensuring Stein’s place on the November ballot.

(In Nevada, the state Democratic Party had more success — it managed to knock Stein off the ballot due to an incorrect form that the secretary of state had provided to the Green Party in the first place.)

The lawsuits have further poisoned the already toxic relationship between the two parties.

“Jill Stein has no path to win the presidency, but just like she did in 2016, she can help Trump win and we can’t afford to repeat history,” DNC spokesperson Matt Corridoni said. “We plan to hold all candidates accountable and make sure they’re playing by the rules.” He also recently called her a “useful idiot for Russia,” a reference to a 2015 gala that Stein attended in Russia and her former appearances on Russia Today, a state-run television network.

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.