photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

Jill Stein, Green Party presidential candidate, is pictured at the Ecumenical Campus Ministries building at KU on April 30, 2024.

Jill Stein, the Green Party’s presidential candidate, features prominently in some Democratic nightmare scenarios.

A close race develops between former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden. Trump wins the election with Stein pulling in a small but significant number of votes in a key swing state.

That’s the nightmare scenario for Democrats, but it is not causing Stein to lose any sleep, she said in a brief interview with the Journal-World on Tuesday.

“I would say Democrats spoiled it for themselves,” Stein said while in Lawrence as part of her effort to gather signatures to be listed on the Kansas ballot in the November presidential election.

Democrats have been too reluctant to get dark money out of politics, she said. Too ineffective in implementing programs like lowering the cost of higher education and improving the American health care system, she said.

The one thing Democrats have done plenty of, Stein said, is smugly assume certain groups of people will always vote Democratic.

“If someone suggests that they own your vote or they don’t have to earn your vote but they are entitled to your vote, such a person or party has really disqualified themselves even for consideration of your vote,” Stein said.

Stein, a Massachusetts physician, is making her third run for president. She was the Green Party candidate in both 2012 and 2016. Like virtually all third-party candidates in the modern era, she has never come close to winning an electoral vote, winning about 0.4% of the popular vote in 2012 and about 1% in 2016. However, in three battleground states in 2016, she received vote totals that exceeded the difference between Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

On Tuesday, Stein said such spoiler scenarios are overblown because people fail to take into account the real possibility that some of the people who voted for her wouldn’t have voted otherwise. She said she thinks that is a big part of her support.

Describing her platform as a “pro-worker, anti-war, climate action agenda,” Stein is likely to appeal more to Democratic-leaning voters than Republican-leaning ones, many political pundits have opined. On Tuesday, Stein discussed several of those platform planks while participating in a forum at the Ecumenical Campus Ministries building on the University of Kansas campus.

Stein was in Lawrence as part of her effort to gather 5,000 signatures by Aug. 5 to be listed on the Kansas presidential ballot in November. She said the effort was just getting underway, but she was optimistic the campaign would ultimately gather 10,000 signatures in the state and easily gain ballot access.

Stein’s trip to Kansas followed a similar one to Missouri last weekend, which included her arrest on Saturday in St. Louis at a pro-Palestinian event on the Washington University campus. Stein, 73, said she was arrested for assaulting a police officer, although she said the paperwork she was given on her release from jail left unclear whether she had been charged with the offense.

Regardless, Stein denies assaulting any officer. Rather, she said her body came in contact with an officer when an officer who was moving forward through a perimeter line that Stein was a part of grabbed her leg in an effort to knock her over backwards.

Stein, who is Jewish, told the Journal-World that she does not support Hamas and its Oct. 7 attack, but she said Israel’s military response that has left large numbers of civilians and children dead can’t be justified. She has characterized the Israeli military actions as genocide.

“I condemn any targeting of civilians, period,” Stein said of her response to Hamas’ attacks. “But you can’t justify a genocide . . . by the war crimes committed by Hamas on one day.”

Stein said she also is concerned about how college students are being treated by authorities as campus demonstrations and protests grow. While she said she doesn’t support demonstrations that turn violent, she said universities currently are suffering from some of their past actions to stifle debate about Israel.

“At least half the problem is the effort to suppress democratic dialogue and discussion,” she said. “Students wouldn’t be forced to have encampments if there was actually a vigorous debate about this.”