Trump Allies Worked To Keep Jill Stein, Cornel West on Swing State Ballots

Either Stein, the nominee of the Green Party, or West, an independent, will appear on ballots in no fewer than six of the battleground states. Candidates like this usually attract such a tiny share of the vote that they amount to a rounding error on election night, but in a close race, where margins are expected to be razor thin, they can be determinative.

Enter the Fair Election Fund, the Republican-aligned dark money group now taking a victory lap.

Founded by former Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, the organization provided a counterweight to a Democratic coalition led by the likes of a super PAC called Clear Choice, the opposition research group American Bridge, and the moderate Democratic group Third Way. That dark money machine had been working since early this year to cull, first, the candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and later, Stein and West.

“The Democrats openly ran around this spring thumping their chests about how they were going to war against third party candidates and trying to limit the choices of the American people at the ballot box,” Collins told RealClearPolitics. His group, he said, was “fighting back against their vote suppression scheme, leveling the playing field, and ensuring this November’s election will be free and fair.”

While Democrats vehemently disagree with that characterization, they say that Fair Election Fund has at least clarified things.

“Republicans are admitting here to buying nearly a million dollars of paid media to prop up Jill Stein and Cornel West’s spoiler candidacies,” Adrienne Watson, an adviser to the Democratic National Convention, told RCP. “Jill Stein delivered Trump the presidency in 2016 and she’s working alongside his closest allies to do it again in 2024. Thanks to Fair Election Fund for making it clear that a vote for Stein is a vote for Trump.”

The fund focused its efforts on boosting West because, according to an after-action report reviewed by RCP, they concluded that Stein had “a more sophisticated operation.” And again, Democrats can attest to that fact.

They are still haunted by the specter of Stein. The Green candidate never came close to overtaking either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in 2016. All the same, Stein won more votes than Clinton lost by in Wisconsin and Michigan. Trump won that state by 23,000 votes. Stein carried 31,000. It was enough to earn Stein the enduring ire of Democrats and the perennial description of a “spoiler.”

Fast forward eight years. Harris leads Trump nationally by 2 points in the RealClearPolitics Average, a polling lead smaller than the one that led Clinton to a popular vote victory but a lost White House. “This election could easily come down to less than a point in some of the swing states,” said Matt Bennett, executive vice president for Third Way, “and that could be the difference.”

Hence the reason why a Democratic machine went into overdrive to kick Stein and West off the ballots in states like North Carolina and Michigan with legal challenges to their candidacy.

When Clear Choice Action, a super PAC run by Biden alums, filed a complaint against the West campaign with the state election board, the Fair Election Fund mobilized. They ran television ads, bought billboards, and even projected images on the North Carolina State Election Board’s building. Visible at night, the projection included pictures of Democratic members of that election board along with the caption: “Working to block your voting rights by blocking Biden’s competition from the ballot.”

The decision was eventually overturned in court, and West returned to the ballot, but not after setting a precedent. “We blasted the efforts to keep West off the ballot as the racist, anti-democratic, voter suppression moves that they were,” a memo by the Fair Election Fund reads. “In essence, we ran the Democrats’ own playbook against them, and they had no answer for how to stop us.”

They ran a similar strategy in other battleground states like Michigan, where both Stein and West remain on the ballot. And when Democratic lawyer Marc Elias threatened to sue the state of Virginia after election officials restored West to the ballot, the group launched an advertising blitz.

The Fair Election Fund ran ads thanking Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin for keeping West on the ballot, a move meant to frame the debate as one where the Republican executive was “on the right side of history.” According to the memo, “This cut off Elias’ ability to file a credible lawsuit against West in Virginia.”

The fact that Collins served four terms in Congress as a Republican and remains a close Trump ally isn’t lost on Democrats. Said Bennett, “It is the height of cynicism for Collins to be doing this.” He put the chances of Stein or West meaningfully competing at “literally 0.00%” and described the Green Party nominee as “an attractive nuisance,” who isn’t serious about environmental issues so much as she represents a serious political threat to Harris.

“No third party or independent candidate can win the 2024 Presidential election, yet they’ve played a decisive role as spoilers in recent presidential elections – often helping the candidate who wins fewer votes secure victory in the electoral college,” a mission statement on the Clear Choice PAC website reads. “We exist to show Americans the clear choice between President Biden’s strong vision for the future, and the danger of unelectable spoiler candidates tipping the election to Donald Trump.”

They have since focused their efforts on backing Harris. Republicans, meanwhile, have their own examples of bad behavior. They point to efforts by Democrats to remove Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from the ballot in North Carolina before reversing course to try and keep the independent there, even after he suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump.

While Bennett’s organization was not involved in the RFK fight in North Carolina, he said the distinction is clear: “The overwhelming effort here has been on the Trump side to help third parties and almost everything the Democrats and their allies, including us, have done is try to keep the third parties off the ballot.”

But Collins countered that there is more than just politics at play and that there is an underlying principle. “This effort was about ensuring the fairness of our elections by stopping Democrats from blocking Harris’ competition from the ballot and disenfranchising the tens of thousands of voters who support Cornel West,” he said. All the same, there was also a very real practical effect: “Exposing the Democrats’ overall hypocrisy on voting rights.”

Biden was in the habit of framing the election as a referendum on the fate of democracy itself, and after him, Harris often refers to “the sacred right to vote.” Republicans like Collins say those words ought to taste bitter when she delivers them, given that her allies worked to limit the choices of the electorate.

“Thanks to our comprehensive efforts shining a spotlight on how Democrats were engaging in voter suppression,” he said, “they will never again have credibility when they claim to be the party standing up for democracy.”

The race for the White House remains close, and both campaigns are making regular overtures to independents. And as Collins prepares for Election Day, he is declaring an early victory. “Democrats not only lost the ballot access battle,” he said of the marginal war over Stein and West, “but they also angered a key segment of their base in the process in a way that those voters will never forget.”