RFK Jr Expected to Drop Out — Jill Stein Will Not Be Following Him

Jill Stein has unequivocally stated she will not drop out of the 2024 presidential election, even if it means facing a repeat of accusations that her campaign took votes away from the Democrats and contributed to a second Donald Trump victory.
Amid speculation that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is close to announcing the withdrawal of his independent presidential bid and endorsing Trump as early as Friday, Stein told Newsweek she would never back Kamala Harris.
“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,” she 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% of the vote in 2016, receiving just under 1.5m votes.
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.