Could Kamala Harris have won Wisconsin if the votes cast for one of the independent candidates -- Jill Stein -- had gone to the Democrat? No, that's not true: That implication on social media was based on incomplete early totals. As more and more ballots were counted, Donald Trump's lead significantly outgrew the number of Stein's votes.
The claim appeared in a post on Threads on November 5, 2024. It said:
Jill Stein doing what she set out to do.
This is what the post looked like on Threads at the time of writing:
(Source: Threads screenshot taken on Wed Nov 6 15:06:05 2024 UTC)
The post implied that if Harris had gotten all the votes Stein (archived here) received in Wisconsin, that would have flipped the outcome of the race in that state to Democrats.
The screenshot in the post capturing Trump's lead of fewer than 2,700 votes, however, showed very early totals. That we not representative of the actual gap between the candidates from the two major parties.
On the day after the election, as 99 percent of the votes were counted, Trump's lead grew to roughly 30,000 (archived here). Though Stein's total also increased to more than 12,000, her votes alone couldn't have changed the outcome of the presidential race in Wisconsin, had all Stein's supporters voted for Harris. The Wisconsin breakdown by county is here.
(Source: NBC screenshot taken on Wed Nov 6 16:10:16 2024 UTC)
Other Lead Stories fact checks of the claims about the 2024 U.S. presidential election can be found here.
