Jill Stein: How and Why I Will Stop Kamala Harris Winning the White House

Kamala Harris cannot win the presidential election because she has lost the crucial support of Muslim and Arab Americans in key battleground states, Jill Stein has said.

The Green Party leader has placed Israel's wars with Hamas and Hezbollah front and center of her campaign—with potentially devastating effect for the Democrats.

There's been a spike in support for her among the Muslim and Arab American communities that polling shows could deny Harris victory in several swing states—and present a path to the White House for Donald Trump. The Greens are seeing particularly strong support in Michigan and Wisconsin—two key swing states that look likely to go to the wire.

"The Democrats cannot win without the support of the Muslim American community. And that community has left the station and is not coming back unless the Democrats decide that it's more important to them to win the election than it is to conduct the genocide," Stein said in an interview with Newsweek.

"So they have to do a 180 on the genocide and they don't appear willing to do that. They could win those votes back, but it doesn't look like that's on the cards. So it looks like they are sacrificing several swing states." Israel denies it is conducting genocide.

She said the U.S. must "rein Israel in" before there is a possible ground invasion of Lebanon and all-out war in the Middle East. Stein's interview with Newsweek took place two days before an Israeli airstrike on Beirut killed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader.

Stein, 74, says her campaign is experiencing a "breakout moment" and that attacks and "gaslighting" from key Democrat figures have only served to open up new audiences to her stance on the "defining issue" of Israel's wars with Hamas and Hezbollah.

"(There's a) rumble taking place as our campaign is coming out of the woodwork," she said.

𝐏𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠: '𝐃𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐬 𝐂𝐚𝐧'𝐭 𝐖𝐢𝐧'

Recent polling has "put the fear of God into the Democrats," Stein said, because it showed that she leads Harris among Muslim and Arab Americans in some swing states.

In Michigan, a battleground state where the Greens are campaigning hard, and which has a large Arab American community, 40 percent of Muslim voters backed Stein versus just 12 percent for Harris and 18 percent for Trump, according to a late August poll by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Michigan has more than 200,000 Muslim voters and 300,000 with Middle Eastern or North African ancestry. Biden won there in 2020 by 154,000 votes, while Trump carried the state with a victory margin of just 10,700—or 0.23 percent—in 2016.

In Wisconsin, the CAIR poll showed Stein on 44 percent and Harris on 29 percent, while she also leads the Democrat candidate among Muslims voters in Arizona.

A poll by the New York Times and Siena College published on Saturday showed Harris on 48 percent in Michigan and Trump on 47 percent—comfortably within the poll's margin of error. In Wisconsin, Harris polled at 49 percent—a slender lead over Trump on 47 percent.

Harris performed stronger for among Muslim voters in Georgia and Pennsylvania, the CAIR poll found.

There are around 3.5 million Americans who reported as being of Middle Eastern descent in the 2020 census. In tight races in swing states, these votes could prove crucial. Biden won the Muslim vote in 2020, with between 64-84 percent of their support, exit polls showed.

"Third Way found that, based on polling averages in battleground states, the 2020 margin of victory for Democrats would be lost in four states—Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin—because of third party support," Stein said.

"So they can't win. There's a fair amount of data now that suggests the Democrats have lost. Unless they give up their genocide," she said.

"We're doing outreach all the time to a lot of different groups but it's really been the Muslim Americans and Arab Americans who have really taken this campaign on like it's theirs—like they have enormous ownership over this."

𝐌𝐮𝐬𝐥𝐢𝐦 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐀𝐫𝐚𝐛 𝐀𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐧𝐬 '𝐀𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐀𝐠𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐝𝐞'

Stein's policy of bringing about an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza via a full embargo on U.S. arms to Israel has been seized upon by Muslim and Arab American communities.

She held her first event with a Muslim American group in Illinois in February, but the strength of support has grown throughout the summer as Israel intensified and expanded its campaign.

"It was like we were on the same wavelength from the very beginning with the Muslim American community, with a very similar humanistic perspective and a sense of the centrality of the genocide in this election and its importance in our society and in our lives. The bottom line being that we cannot turn away," Stein said.

"The Muslim Americans and Arab Americans have really felt like allies here in our standing up to stop genocide. It's felt like a family affair from the start … we're very much in-synch. For a long time that community didn't know which way they were gonna go. It's only recently we've been getting these endorsements and pulling ahead in the polls in a very big way."

Stein recalls her childhood growing up in a Jewish community in Chicago in the aftermath of the Holocaust. She attended a Reform synagogue.

"Genocide was a very big deal for a community that was trying to figure out if there was life after genocide. How do you find faith in humanity again? For my community it was all about affirming that genocide would not be allowed to happen again and that bystanders are as responsible as perpetrators. That was what I was taught, it was just imbued into my bones: you don't let that happen," she said.

Newsweek contacted the Israeli government for comment on Stein's allegations.

In April, Stein was arrested at a pro-Palestinian protest on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri on a charge of what she said was assaulting a police officer. She was released without charge.

𝐁𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐞𝐧 '𝐒𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐁𝐞 𝐈𝐦𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐝'

Stein says that it would be easy for the Democrats to win back much of the support it is apparently losing among the Muslim and Arab American communities, but says the Biden-Harris administration "choose not to."

"(They could do what) Ronald Reagan did in 1982 when, like what's happening now, Israel went into Lebanon. He picked up the telephone to Menachem Begin (Israel's prime minister at the time) and said: 'This is over, end of missile strikes, your troops are going home because we are funding this and we are arming you'—just like now," she said.

"Instead of reining Israel in, they just keep sending more aircraft carriers and battlegroups and 5,000 more soldiers. This is the makings of a World War Three … This is like pre-World War One in its complexities and inter-alliances … This could be unbelievably disastrous. Netanyahu has been attempting to enlarge the war and drag the U.S. into it. Harris is competing with Trump for who can pledge the most allegiance to Bibi Netanyahu."

Stein went as far as saying that Antony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, should be impeached.

"There needs to be a weapons boycott now and Antony Blinken should be impeached. He should be impeached because he lied to Congress and said Israel was purposefully not disrupting humanitarian aid and he had two reports to the contrary. This was a lie on his part in order to continue this war, which is now very dangerously expanding," she said.

ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative journalism organization, reported last week that both the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration determined in late April that Israel had deliberately blocked food and medicine deliveries into Gaza. Blinken ignored these reports and told Congress the opposite days later, the report states.

Newsweek contacted the State Department for comment on Stein's allegations.

Harris has attempted to balance steadfast U.S. support for Israel while expressing sympathy for Palestinians—an issue that has caused splits to open up in the Democratic Party. More than 41,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel's operation began, officials have said. The campaign followed the October 7 attack by Hamas militants on Israel.

"We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent," Harris said in July of the situation in Gaza.

However, she was heckled at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August, when pro-Palestinian protesters interrupted her speech with chants of "Kamala, Kamala you can't hide! We won't vote for genocide."

Protesters blocked roads and the group Muslim Women for Harris-Walz disbanded after the Uncommitted National Movement said it was told a Palestinian American speaker couldn't address the convention.

𝐃𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐭 '𝐒𝐦𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐂𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐢𝐠𝐧 𝐌𝐨𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐳𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐒𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐆𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐧𝐬'

Stein says that, following the recent polling, and the surge in support for her among the Muslim and Arab American communities, the Democrats launched an "all-out assault" against her and the Green Party.

"(The polling) led to an all-out assault by the Democrats, who would much rather just eliminate their competition than deal with the issue. And that's been going on around the ballot access shenanigans for quite a while. But what's new is that they've started this all-out attack with smear campaigns and getting the luminaries of the Democratic Party to smear us," she said.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted on Instagram recently that Stein was "predatory" and "not serious" because she only "shows up once every four years."

Earlier this month, DNC spokesman Matt Corridoni told The Bulwark that Stein was "a useful idiot for Russia." Stein said the Russia attack line was "an old worn-out theme."

She said the Democrat attacks had "opened the floodgates of greater public attention."

"Their efforts to gaslight us is really resonating with everyday people. These efforts to smear us aren't working," she said, claiming that the Greens were hearing from lots of people who said they had not been intending to vote, but changed their minds and will now be voting Green.

"In their desperation the Democrats are striking out with their attack dogs in a way that's really mobilizing the public into our camp," she said.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐅𝐢𝐫𝐬𝐭 𝐒𝐩𝐨𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐖𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐓𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐒𝐥𝐚𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲

Stein refutes the suggestion that some commentators have made that Harris is better placed to secure a ceasefire in Gaza than Trump. She stated that if Harris was the candidate more likely to prevent "World War Three," more Muslim and Arab Americans would be lining up to vote for her.

"We have two genocidal war-mongers who are not worthy of our votes," she said. Newsweek contact the Trump campaign for comment on Stein's claims.

Stein also rejects the accusation that she is a "spoiler" and that a vote for her could boost Trump's victory hopes.

Stein won just over 1 percent of the popular vote in 2016, but was blamed by Hillary Clinton and many in the Democratic Party for taking crucial votes in battleground states and giving Trump a path to the White House.

In her 2017 book What Happened, Clinton wrote that Stein contributed to her defeat. "So in each state, there were more than enough Stein voters to swing the result, just like Ralph Nader did in Florida and New Hampshire in 2000," when Republican George W. Bush narrowly beat Vice President Al Gore in the presidential election, Clinton wrote. Clinton later accused Stein of being a "Russian asset."

"I'm not preparing myself to be considered a spoiler because I reject the notion. Democracy is about political choices," Stein said, adding that Democrats should support ranked choice voting.

"They rely on fear-mongering to extort your vote, because they know they can't earn your vote, because they're working for Wall St and the war machine—they're not working for you. Working people are thrown under the bus.

"This is what they do. Every election is the most important election of our lifetimes."

She said she has been accused of being a "spoiler" at every election she has run in since her first bid for office in the 2002 Massachusetts gubernatorial election.

"The concept of spoiler goes back to abolition parties at the time of slavery. Those who wanted to abolish slavery were told that they were spoilers. It's how power clings to power—by vilifying its opposition as a spoiler," she said.

Stein denied claims that the Greens were receiving any support from the Trump campaign or Republicans.

"We do not accept help from other parties, especially the parties of the duopoly. We do not accept Republican help. Where we have been made offers of help, we do not respond," she said.

𝐃𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐬 '𝐃𝐞𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐋𝐚𝐰𝐟𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐓𝐨 𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐰 𝐆𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐧𝐬 𝐎𝐟𝐟 𝐁𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐭𝐬'

Stein accuses the Democrats of "fraudulent tactics" to subdue her campaign—but says they are only serving to bolster it.

She claims Democrat agents have been impersonating Green Party workers—and even advertised for paid positions for "spies" to infiltrate third parties. She said these alleged tactics are worse than the allegations leveled against Russia for interfering in the U.S. election.

Secondly, she says the Democrats are employing "lawfare" to throw third-party candidates off the ballot and that they "bragged" about hiring an "army of lawyers" to do so. The tactic involves violating the spirit of the law by looking for technical details that "would allow them to just off their competition like all the authoritarian countries that we try to instruct how to be a democracy," Stein said.

"The Democrats pride themselves on defending democracy when they're talking about Donald Trump and his shenanigans after the election. They've got their own set of shenanigans before the election, which are equally violations of the basic foundations of our democracy through free and fair elections," she said.

Thirdly, she claims the Greens' public funding has been hijacked.

Stein said all the legal battles her campaign has faced has meant their campaign is only now starting in earnest—and, given the recent polling, that should worry Kamala Harris.