In a double boost for Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Friday afternoon threw his backing behind the former president in the 2024 presidential election while Jill Stein unequivocally stated she will not drop out of the race.
During an event in Arizona, Kennedy announced that he is suspending his campaign for the White House and will be supporting Trump.
Meanwhile, Stein told Newsweek that she’s staying in the race and added she would never back Kamala Harris, even if it means facing a repeat of accusations that her campaign took votes away from the Democrats and contributed to a Trump victory.
A recent poll from The Wall Street Journal found that when Kennedy and other third-party candidates are removed from the ballot, half of the voters backing those candidates would support Trump, while only one-quarter said they would instead vote for Harris. Meanwhile, an August poll from ABC News/The Washington Post/Ipsos found Stein polling at around 1 percent, through her supporters are often thought to lean progressive.
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein at a rally at Union Park during the Democratic National Convention on August 21, 2024, in Chicago. Stein told Newsweek she will not drop out of the presidential campaign.
AP Photo/Alex Brandon
“I’m focused on us doing as strongly as we can so we can push Harris or Trump on the genocidal war, on the militarization of the police,” Stein said. “The Democrats are not a lesser evil. We have two evil options. Both is a vote for genocide.”
The Green Party candidate was referring to Israel’s war on Gaza, of which she is a vocal opponent. The war began with a Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Newsweek contacted the Democratic Party and the Harris and Trump campaigns by email Friday morning for comment.
When asked if she feared a similar backlash as after Trump’s 2016 victory, when Hillary Clinton and many in the Democratic Party blamed her for taking crucial votes in several battleground states, Stein said those “smear or fear campaigns by the parties of Wall Street have never stopped.”
“The exit polls showed the vast majority of our votes in 2016 were non-voters,” she said, stating it is nonsense to claim her party took votes away from Clinton.
“That campaign has never stopped and doesn’t influence my thinking. My thinking is on the climate catastrophe, economic hardships and stopping endless wars,” she said.
In her 2017 book What Happened, Clinton wrote that Stein contributed to her defeat by Trump. “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 incumbent Vice President Al Gore in the presidential election, Clinton wrote. Stein got 1 percent of the vote in 2016, receiving just under 1.5 million votes.
Hillary Clinton onstage during the first day of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago on August 19, 2024. Clinton partially blamed Stein for her loss to Donald Trump in 2016.
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
She was in Chicago this week, taking part in protests outside the Democratic National Convention.
“There was a convention inside and a convention outside. Opposition to the genocide has been awakened by the DNC. People are mobilizing,” Stein said.
Stein argued that the Democrats were trying to “shut down political opposition with an army of lawyers trying to get us off the ballot.” She also claimed that the Democrats were trying to “infiltrate our campaign with spies.”
“They [Democrats] proclaim this is the most important election ever and that we should embrace the Democratic Party as the only alternative to Trump … The Greens are the actual solution to the surge of the Right—just look at what happened in France,” she said, referring to the July snap election where an alliance of Left-wing parties won the most seats.
