Racine, Wisconsin - Chester Todd is an 82-year-old running for Congress on a platform of "equality, reparations, liberation" – and those principles, he says, are why neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump have earned his vote.

Wearing a Palestinian flag-colored scarf at a coffee shop in his hometown Racine, Wisconsin, Todd told AFP he will instead vote for Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate who is on the ballot in nearly every state this presidential cycle.

Supporters say Stein's campaign is poised to deliver record votes to the Green Party this cycle – with Wisconsin one of the most closely watched states in the election.

Republicans won Wisconsin for the first time in nearly three decades in 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost by just under 23,000 votes to Donald Trump. That same year, Stein earned around 31,000 votes.

Joe Biden Biden faces growing pressure to commute federal death sentences

The Green Party's message – which centers on issues like climate action, universal healthcare, and, this year, ending arms transfers to Israel over its genocide in Gaza – continues to find traction in Wisconsin.

National Democrats recently ran a campaign ad attacking Stein that aired in Wisconsin as well as Michigan and Pennsylvania – states where polling data shows the Green Party nominee's support surging among Muslim voters outraged over the White House's continued support for Israel.

"She's not sorry she helped Trump win" in 2016, the ad states. "That's why a vote for Stein is really a vote for Trump."

Pete Karas, Wisconsin's Green Party elections chair, said that "spoiler argument" simply "doesn't hold water."

Donald Trump RFK Jr.'s nomination as Trump's health secretary draws opposition from dozens of Nobel laureates

"It is an excuse the Democratic Party uses when they run crappy candidates and crappy elections and they lose," he explained.

Democratic Party strategy has included legal action to remove Stein from ballots nationwide, efforts that have mostly failed.

Karas said that picking such legal fights has done little more than further motivate Green Party supporters like himself: "We will not be pushed out of the democratic process by the Democratic Party."

Charles Franklin, who directs the nationally recognized Marquette Law School Poll, told AFP while Stein likely does pull more from Democrats than Republicans, the idea that all Stein votes "would uniformly go to Harris" is "false."

"Any third party voter by definition has already passed the option of voting for one of the major party candidates," Franklin said. "They're voting for Stein because they're not satisfied."

Several Green Party-endorsed candidates have won local office over the past decade in Wisconsin, although organizers see room for growth this cycle.

Xavier Golden, a 23-year-old student at a public university near Milwaukee who has his own future political aspirations, says he voted for Bernie Sanders in 2020, an independent senator who caucuses with Democrats and has run for president twice.

Speaking to AFP at the Racine Public Library where he works, Golden said this time, he's for Stein.

"If the Democrats wanted to control the main spirit of the liberal front, they would do that," Golden said, pointing to what he calls their "conservative stance on Palestine" and a tendency "to be so ticky-tacky with racial issues."

Like Green Party House of Representatives candidate Todd, Golden is a Black man. And like Todd, he says the Democrats ask for support from Black voters every four years but rarely deliver on what he dubbed "empty promises."

Both men advocate ending US arms support to Israel and call for reparations for descendants of enslaved people. They also point to issues like universal health care and the shortage of social and economic resources in predominantly minority neighborhoods as key influences shaping their politics.

If Democrats "were to commit to actually being the social justice party that they're painted as," Golden said, "I think they would be able to sway more voters – and there wouldn't be no need for a Green Party."