A young voter advocacy group that supports Vice President Kamala Harris is launching a TikTok campaign aimed at reaching young voters — but not necessarily those who support former President Donald Trump.
Voters on Tuesday released a series of videos aimed at persuading young supporters of Green Party candidate Jill Stein to back Harris, working to rebrand the third-party candidate as a “coupster.”
“She is literally worse than Elizabeth Holmes, the Fire Fest kids and Anna Delvey,” said 21-year-old Katie Gates. In one of the video campaigns. “Despite her appearance as a sweet old lady, she has been deceiving the entire country for more than eight years.”
Gates is comparing a jailed Silicon Valley CEO, a disgraced music festival founder and a fake German heir to the Green Party presidential candidate, who calls Stein a “pro-worker, anti-war, climate emergency agenda ”. It's a similar agenda to the one he drove in 2016, when more than 1.4 million Americans voted for him, more than Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. (Stein did not run in 2020.)
The Voters for Tomorrow campaign highlights how close the race is between Harris and Trump. In an NBC News poll published on Sunday, 1% of registered voters in the 38 states where Stein is on the ballot said they would vote for him. Head-to-head polls tied Harris and Trump at 48%, but Trump had a 1-point lead when third-party candidates were included. Both results are within the margin of error – but even that small difference could be important in a close election.
Young Democrats need look no further than the 2016 results in the key state of Wisconsin to explain their concerns. Trump received 27,257 more votes than Clinton in the state – and Jill Stein received a total of 30,980 votes.
For millions of Gen Zers, this is the first presidential election they can vote in, and Democrats are trying to make sure they know Stein's influence on American politics.
“We don’t want to tell people what to do,” Voters Tomorrow Executive Director Santiago Mayer told NBC News. “We just want to make sure they have information when they make their decisions.”
In minute-long TikToks, Gates, who will vote for president for the first time in November, explained how he believes Stein's candidacy could lead to a second Trump presidency this cycle.
“It’s not about winning the White House,” Gates said of Stein’s long-shot campaign. “This is about stopping Kamala Harris from defeating Donald Trump.”
Using a Gen Z voter to explain Stein to peers in their generation is part of what makes tomorrow's voters unique, Mayer said.
“We’re not talking and we’re not doing this because we think young people are stupid or because we think they don’t know the facts,” he said. “We want to make sure he can’t actually mislead young people.”
And it's not just young Democrats who sound alarmed about Stein. On Friday, the DNC released its first ad against a third-party candidate this cycle on TV in the Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin media markets.
“A vote for Stein is really a vote for Trump,” the voiceover says, before playing a clip of Trump praising Stein. “I like him a lot. Do you know why?” He said this at a rally in the swing state of Pennsylvania in June. “He gets 100 percent out of them.”
This represents a break from previous campaign tactics, when major party candidates typically studiously ignored third party candidates.
In response to the TikTok campaign, Stein's campaign manager Jason Call called for a debate between Harris and Stein.
“Obviously we got a lot of attention. Isn’t it worthy of a public debate?” Call told NBC News. “A vote for our campaign is not a vote for Donald Trump. It’s a vote on our agenda that addresses what Americans want – to use our tax dollars for the urgent needs of the American people, not endless war and genocide.”
TikTok has an ongoing conflict between the left, some progressives and anti-Harris leftists.
“It irritates me that instead of using your vote to make a difference in some way, they throw up their hands and say screw the system. It’s a cop-out and completely against what we on the left should be standing for,” one TikToker told NBC News about those on the left who want to vote for what he calls a “100% morally pure alternative.”
