A young-voter advocacy group backing Vice President Kamala Harris is launching a campaign on TikTok meant to target young voters — but not necessarily those backing former President Donald Trump.
Voters of Tomorrow released a series of videos Tuesday aimed at convincing young supporters of Green Party candidate Jill Stein to back Harris, working to rebrand the third party nominee as a “scammer.”
“She’s literally worse than Elizabeth Holmes, the Fyre Fest guys and Anna Delvey combined,” said 21-year-old Katy Gates in one of the campaign’s videos. “Despite the sweet old lady look, she’s been scamming the entire country for over eight years.”
Gates is comparing an imprisoned Silicon Valley CEO, a disgraced music festival founder and a fake German heiress to the Green Party nominee for president, who is running on what Stein calls a “pro-worker, anti-war, climate emergency agenda.” It’s a similar agenda to the one she ran on in 2016, when more than 1.4 million Americans voted for her, over Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. (Stein did not run in 2020.)
The Voters for Tomorrow campaign underscores just how tight the race is between Harris and Trump. In an NBC News poll released Sunday, 1% of registered voters in the 38 states where Stein is on the ballot said they would vote for her. Harris and Trump were tied at 48% in the head-to-head results of the poll, but Trump had a 1-point edge when third-party candidates were included. Both results are within the margin of error — but even that small difference could matter in a close election.
Young Democrats have to look no further than the 2016 results in the key battleground state of Wisconsin to explain their concern. Trump received 27,257 more votes than Clinton in the state — and Jill Stein received a total of 30,980.
For millions of Gen Z members, this is the first presidential election in which they’re eligible to vote, and Democrats are trying to ensure they know about Stein’s impact on American politics.
“We don’t want to tell people what to do,” Voters of Tomorrow Executive Director Santiago Mayer told NBC News. “We just want to make sure that they have the information when they do make their decision.”
In minute-long TikToks, Gates, who will be voting for president for the first time in November, explains how she believes Stein’s candidacy this cycle could lead to a second Trump presidency.
“It’s not about winning the White House,” Gates said of the long-shot Stein campaign. “It’s about blocking Kamala Harris from defeating Donald Trump.”
Using a Gen Z voter to explain Stein to fellow members of their generation is part of what makes Voters of Tomorrow unique, Mayer said.
“We’re not talking down, and we’re not doing this because we think young people are dumb or because we think they don’t know the facts,” he said. “We want to make sure that she doesn’t actually get to trick young people.”
And it’s not just young Democrats sounding the alarm over Stein. On Friday, the DNC released its first ad against a third-party candidate this cycle, going up on TV in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin media markets.
“A vote for Stein is really a vote for Trump,” says the voice-over, before playing a clip of Trump praising Stein. “I like her very much. You know why?” he said at a rally in swing state Pennsylvania in June. “She takes 100 percent from them.”
This is a break from past campaign strategy, when major-party candidates usually studiously ignore third-party candidates.
In response to the TikTok campaign, Stein campaign manager Jason Call called for a debate between Harris and Stein.
“Obviously we have garnered enough attention. Isn’t that worthy of a public debate?” Call told NBC News. “A vote for our campaign is not a vote for Donald Trump. It is a vote for our agenda addressing what Americans want — to use our tax dollars for the urgent needs of the American people, not for endless war and genocide.”
TikTok has been home to an ongoing feud within the left, between some progressives and anti-Harris leftists.
“It annoys me that rather than use their vote to make a difference in what ways they can, they throw their hands up and say screw the system. It’s a cop-out and completely against what we on the left should stand for,” one TikToker told NBC News about those on the left who want to vote for what he called a “100% morally pure option.”
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