Our electoral laws naturally result in a two-party system with (for the last century) the Democrats as the relative left and Republicans as the relative right. There are only two other parties that have any significance at all - the Green Party, which is ecologically focused party that backs renewable energy as their main feature, but is also very socially liberal; and the Libertarian Party, which is like the Republicans except they're in favor of legalizing recreational drugs and abolishing even more regulations than the Republicans.

Jill Stein has been the head of the Greens since 2012 or so. Under Stein's leadership, the Greens don't really run for any offices other than President. Despite their platform being very popular in Democrat dominated areas, sometimes more popular than the actual Democrat platform, they almost never make a real attempt to run for city or state positions. Instead, the Green Party almost exclusively runs in the presidential election, and exclusively fields Jill Stein as their candidate. Due to our archaic first-past-the-post system, having two candidates on the relative left makes it easier for a candidate on the relative right to win, even if a majority of voters would prefer a relative left candidate, due to the votes getting split. The Greens also make bigger pushes in what are expected to be closer elections, spending more money and maintaining a larger media presence, siphoning votes from the Democratic candidate despite never having done better in a presidential election than 2.7% of all votes. However, in areas that flip parties frequently, that percentage is higher and they often function as a spoiler candidate, handing what should be a close win for a Democrat to an easy win for a Republican.

Stein herself has also been seen at events with Putin, has repeated Russian propaganda about Ukraine and NATO, and has been investigated by the FBI for possible collusion with the Russian government to interfere in US elections.