Scenes from Jill Stein’s very strange election night party

DEARBORN, Mich. - Jill Stein declared victory at around 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday, well before much of the country had finished counting ballots for Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

“It feels to me like we have won,” Stein, the Green Party’s nominee for president, told a room of supporters seated for dinner beneath crystal chandeliers at an intimate and thoroughly strange election night party in a state where, after much ado about spoilers, Stein’s share of the vote appeared to be inconsequential as of Wednesday morning.

It was a watch party, only people weren’t watching the election. This brightly lit banquet hall was a black box of information. There were no televisions broadcasting the returns. The speakers offered no news updates. And why would they?

“The numbers actually don’t matter,’’ Stein said in an interview after her speech, sipping a “Berry Blast” smoothie.

No? So - what was her victory, exactly?

“It feels to me like we have launched an amazing, essential, transformational process,” Stein said.

She had begun her campaign late last year in a long-shot bid to break up the two-party system and to try to end the war in Gaza - and she had accomplished neither. Nor did she appear bound for a strong enough showing to make any establishment heads spin (or even turn, slightly, in her direction).

The 100 or so people who showed up here to not watch election returns included members of her campaign, a handful of Green Party volunteers and a few dozen local Arab Americans who had become supporters of Stein due in large part to her declaration that she was the “anti-genocide” candidate.

“Our goal,” said Hudhayfah Ahmad, the national spokesman for the Abandon Harris campaign, an organization that endorsed Stein and co-hosted the party, “was to put a price on genocide, to ensure that a party could not commit a genocide and win a reelection.”

In that sense, the Harris campaign’s loss was something. But Stein’s victorious feeling hadn’t exactly trickled all the way down.

“It’s kind of ironic to be having an election party,” said Wissam Charafeddine, a Dearborn-based Green Party activist. “To tell you the truth, I’m not excited. I mean, as far as people who are pro-Green, we know that we have a long-term plan and we are not going to see anything that will make us happy tonight.”

Without much to root for, Charafeddine didn’t mind the lack of election-watching at the party. He would have just spent the whole night booing. “Harris winning means genocide winning,” he said. “At the same time, Trump winning means xenophobia and racism wins.”

“To reelect genocide has worse consequences for our future than whatever Trump might bring us,” Jason Call, Stein’s campaign manager, told the room, and many agreed that Harris needed to be punished for the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s brutal campaign in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. This could come with some possible benefits, too, according to the Abandon Harris camp, namely that perhaps the left would be more likely to protest Trump’s Israel policy. “Democrats get complacent when a Democrat is in the White House,” Ahmad said. “It’s not always the atrocities that upset people, but how they are packaged.”

There was also this: Trump had shown up. He’d come to Dearborn and shook hands at a local diner. He’d gotten the endorsement of a nearby Arab American mayor and campaigned with him onstage. He’d posted on social media about how Harris and her “warmonger Cabinet” would threaten World War III, while he wanted to create peace in the Middle East.

“A lot of our community is new in American politics and can be swayed by a little sign of respect,” Charafeddine said.

“She’s opportunistic,” Bilal Baydoun, a longtime Democratic voter who works in public policy who was not at the watch party, said of Stein. “But, like, the ground was fertile for recruiting Arab American voters. It was not a difficult thing to do. I mean, if Donald Trump, the architect of the Muslim ban, is making headwinds, small though that they may be, then that was available to anyone.”

Stein took advantage of the people here, in Baydoun’s opinion. The community has been so hurt, so traumatized by war, he said, that when Stein came on the scene promising to make things better, people were desperate to believe her.

“I do think that’s exploitative,” Baydoun said. “This is a community in pain.”

What does third-party victory look like, in American politics? Typically, it would mean getting credit - or blame - for another party’s defeat as a way to demonstrate that your voters matter. Like in 2000, when the Green Party’s Ralph Nader got enough votes in Florida that he and the party got blamed for the George W. Bush presidency.

“It’s ‘sting like a bee,’” says Bernard Tamas, a professor of political science at Valdosta State University and the author of “The Demise and Rebirth of American Third Parties.” The idea, he says, is if you aren’t going to win, then you cause as much pain to a major party as you can and hope that it then will adopt your policy positions - at which point your own party, like a spent bee, will die out.

But “victory” in 2000 ended up being costly to the Greens, who faced a backlash from Democrats that included concerted efforts to keep them off ballots, says Todd Chretien, an organizer who worked on the Nader campaign (also not at Stein’s watch party). The party lost support, he says, and its organizational capacity took a hit.

“It’s remarkable the party gets as much support as it does with so little infrastructure,” Chretien says, “and so much hostility from the leadership of the Democratic Party.”

“I think,” Stein said Tuesday, in a victorious mood, “if it turns out that Trump wins, I think this will be a further wake-up call for Democrats that their party is really over as an effective political strategy.”

Her party went deep into the night. Her guests sat at round tables, eating chicken shawarma and hummus off plastic plates, and watched hours of speeches from supporters (the leader of the antiwar group Code Pink, a former spokeswoman for Bernie Sanders, a Green Party leader who once gave Stein a tour of the southern border in Texas) - some in person and others projected onto a large screen in the front of the room - who offered praise for Stein and defended her against some of her most common criticisms. Stein missed the vast majority of these speeches, spending most of her evening talking to members of the press in a nearby hallway or conducting virtual interviews at her laptop.

As midnight approached, a reporter asked her whether she had been paying attention to anything outside of her conversations - if she were aware of how things were shaping up in the race. She said she hadn’t.

When given the update that Trump seemed to be on the precipice of victory, Stein expressed no emotion at all.