IIn 2016, Green Party candidate Jill Stein received more than 132,000 votes in the crucial swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, giving Donald Trump victories in those battlegrounds – and thus the election – by a margin of roughly 77,000 votes.

Eight years later, Democrats have a plan to prevent them from helping Trump to victory again.

For the first time, the party has built a war room dedicated to hunting down and trying to discredit third-party candidates. The operation has more than 30 dedicated staffers, with an operating budget of just seven figures, according to an employee involved.

“We treat third-party candidates with the same rigor as campaigns treat major-party candidates,” said Lis Smith, a veteran Democratic operative who manages communications for the war room. “We have a full content team, a full press team, a full research team.”

This time, there are four third-party candidates who can make a difference together: Stein, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver and independent Cornel West. Many swing state polls examining multi-candidate fields show third-party candidates registering support in the low single digits — enough to potentially be marginally important in a race that looks like a dead end in the upper battlegrounds .

Through much of the 2024 campaign, Kennedy showed enough sustained strength in polls to make both campaigns nervous. But since dropping out of the race in August and endorsing Trump, third-party attention has focused on Stein, who is running again for the Green Party.

Read more: A look at the final weeks of RFK Jr.’s campaign.

Just like in 2016, Stein has no path to victory. Instead, her campaign has taken on a role as a protest candidate for young and Arab-American voters outraged by the Biden administration’s handling of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. “The goal is to punish the vice president,” said Hassan Abdel Salam, founder of the group Abandon Harris, at a Stein rally in Dearborn, Michigan.

A spokesperson for Stein’s campaign disputed that Stein has no path to victory and is merely running to “punish” Harris, saying that while the Stein campaign appreciates Abandon Harris’ support, “Hassan has no role in our campaign.’

Democrats have tried to discredit Stein, calling her a “useful idiot for Russia” and highlighting her coziness with the Kremlin. (The Stein campaign declined to comment.) The party has aired multiple ads against Stein; one shows her face turning into Trump’s. “A vote for Stein is actually a vote for Trump,” it says. They bought billboards in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania that read: “Jill Stein helped Trump once. Don’t let her do it again.”

“We are making sure voters understand that Jill Stein has no path to victory, that she is in this race to help Donald Trump win, and that we cannot repeat the mistakes of 2016,” Smith said. “By far the most powerful message to voters is that she helped Trump win in 2016, that she has no regrets, and that the Republican Party is doing everything it can to support her.” Trump allies, including lawyers who represented him during his impeachment trial and during his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, represented the Green Party in its efforts to secure access to ballots in key states.

A similar strategy helped neutralize Kennedy before her. When RFK Jr. entered the race for the first time, he leached votes from Biden, Smith says. But by defining Kennedy as a right-wing fringe candidate, Democrats were able to reduce his numbers among Democrats and boost his numbers among Republicans. By the time he dropped out, Smith says, “he had no appeal to Democratic voters, he was electorally irrelevant.”

Democrats do not see West as a serious threat, arguing that he is not running a real campaign that could eat into Harris’ margins. Attacking him, they say, would only strengthen him.

If Democrats succeed in thwarting third-party drift, the war room the party has created could become a mainstay in presidential politics. “It’s the first time anyone in American politics has experienced this in a presidential election,” Smith said. “It won’t be the last.”