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The Generation Z advocacy group is launching a TikTok campaign against the election of Jill Stein

The Generation Z advocacy group is launching a TikTok campaign against the election of Jill Stein

Jill Stein (Rebecca Cook/Reuters)

Jill Stein during a rally in Dearborn, Michigan, on October 6.

A young voter advocacy group supporting Vice President Kamala Harris is launching a campaign on TikTok aimed at young voters — but not necessarily those who support 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 support Harris and attempting to rebrand the third-party candidate as a “fraud.”

“She is literally worse than Elizabeth Holmes, the Fyre Fest boys and Anna Delvey combined,” said 21-year-old Katy Gates in one of the campaign videos. “Although she seems like a sweet old lady, she has been scamming the entire country for over eight years.”

Gates compares an imprisoned Silicon Valley CEO, a disgraced music festival founder and a fake German heiress to the Green Party presidential candidate who is running on what Stein calls a “pro-worker, anti-war, climate emergency agenda.” It's a similar agenda to the one she pursued 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 how close 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 poll's head-to-head results, but Trump had a one-point lead 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 need look no further than the 2016 results in the key battleground 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.

For millions of Generation Z members, this is the first presidential election in which they are eligible to vote, and Democrats are trying to make sure they know about Stein's influence on American politics.

“We don’t want to tell people what to do,” Santiago Mayer, executive director of Voters of Tomorrow, told NBC News. “We just want to make sure they have the information when they make their decision.”

In one-minute TikToks, Gates, who will vote 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 Stein's long-term campaign. “It’s about stopping Kamala Harris from defeating Donald Trump.”

Using a Gen Z voter to explain Stein to other members of their generation is part of what makes Voters of Tomorrow unique, Mayer said.

“We don't talk down, and we don't do it because we think young people are stupid or because we think they don't know the facts,” he said. “We want to make sure she’s not actually tricking young people.”

And it's not just young Democrats who are sounding the alarm about Stein. On Friday, the DNC released its first ad against a third-party candidate this cycle, which ran on television in the Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin media markets.

“A vote for Stein is really a vote for Trump,” the announcer says before playing a clip of Trump praising Stein. “I like her very much. Do you know why?” he said at a rally in the swing state of Pennsylvania in June. “It takes 100 percent away from them.”

This is a break from previous campaign strategy, in which 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’ve attracted enough attention. “Isn’t that worthy of public debate?” Call said NBC News. “A vote for our election campaign is not a vote for Donald Trump. It is a vote for our agenda that addresses what Americans want – to use our tax dollars on the urgent needs of the American people, not on endless war and genocide.”

There is an ongoing feud within the left on TikTok between some progressives and anti-Harris leftists.

“It annoys me that instead of using their voice to make a difference in every way possible, they raise their hands and say: Fuck the system.” “It's an excuse and completely against what we as 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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