LETTERS FROM A SWING STATE
The Nightmare That Keeps Wisconsin Democrats Up at Night
The Green Party has a miniscule presence in Wisconsin. Democrats are nervous anyway.
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…
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