Five days after she dropped out of Arizona's high-profile U.S. Senate race, Angela Green voted for herself.

There was no way she could win. She had known for weeks. But by the time she quit, it was too late. Thousands of votes had already gone her way. Her name was already on millions of ballots.

“I didn’t realize how big it was,” Green said later. But her announcement pushed Arizona's toss-up Senate race further into uncertainty.

So before most voters knew Angela Green as a candidate, they knew her as a spoiler.

Those five days brought Green, 48, more attention than months of campaigning ever had. Her name became a pawn in partisan politics. The Arizona Republican Party mailed out flyers that called her "too extreme." Democrats accused her of stealing votes from Kyrsten Sinema and handing the election to Republican Martha McSally. Her adopted Green Party denied any affiliation.

Then came Election Day, and somehow, everything got worse.

First her best friend called, around 7:30 a.m., and choked out the news that her son had died. “I had to shut that off and go straight into dealing with the spoiler comments,” Green said.

She lay in bed for an hour, scrolling through Twitter and the emails that wouldn’t stop coming, before driving her sons to school. Back at home, her mind full of distractions, she started to make breakfast and spilled boiling water all over her hand. Worried that peeling skin would show on TV, she drove herself to the hospital, hoping to cover whatever damage she’d caused.

It was almost 3 p.m. by the time she made it to Bogle Junior High and stared down at her ballot. Three choices stared back. McSally. Sinema. Green.

When she dropped out of the race, ending a Green Party campaign that never stood a chance, Green encouraged her supporters to vote for Sinema, the Democratic nominee. But Green knew thousands of them would choose her, anyway.

She thought of her son’s friends, who said they wanted change, and of the high schoolers who picked her in classroom elections. Didn’t she owe them something? Hadn’t she promised them a better option, a way around big-money politics, a candidate who did what she thought was right, no matter the cost?

“To represent those who voted for me, yes I did,” she said. “I voted for myself.”

The rest of Election Day was a blur of selfies and watch parties and angry emails from strangers. She went with friends to Casino Arizona, and the election results followed. At each update, Green’s vote total was bigger than the gap between McSally and Sinema. Even her campaign manager thought the “spoiler” label might stick.

MORE: Arizona GOP mailers attack Green Party Senate candidate

Green relaxed only when she heard that Maricopa County, which was expected to lean toward Sinema, still had more than 470,000 ballots left to count. She called an Uber, slid into the back seat and rode toward her Chandler home.

“So,” she asked the driver, “did you vote?”

He said he voted for Sinema.

“What did you think about Angela Green?” she asked, not letting him know she was sitting in his back seat.

The driver said, “I really felt bad for her. I would’ve voted for her, but I didn’t know about her.”

“I know,” Green said. “I really felt bad for Angela Green, too.”

Be the candidate she would want

She had eyes on the White House.

Green set her target before she was old enough to know better, before she understood that a girl born in Bangkok could never become commander-in-chief. Her father, a blood-red Republican, handed 12-year-old Angie a copy of “Think and Grow Rich” and asked her two questions: What did you learn from this book? And what do you want to be when you grow up?

“What I learned was you have to have a burning desire for something, and keep it in your head. No matter what it is. Always keep it there,” Green said. “And then I told him I wanted to be president.”

But politics is about timing. When Green’s awakening arrived, at a Keeping Families Together rally earlier this summer, the next presidential election was two years away. A Senate seat was a good first step, and retiring Sen. Jeff Flake’s was about to open.

Green wanted it.

She saw a political system infected by money and the pursuit of power. Politicians who forgot the normal people they once were. Presidents who chose corporations over consistency. Teachers forced to go on strike. Children who couldn’t see themselves in their government.

“All I’m seeing was a debate between two puppets,” she said. “I thought, if I don’t like the candidates, then I better be the candidate that I would want to represent me.”

But she didn’t know where to start. Green had never run for elected office. She graduated from the University of Utah with an accounting degree and went to work in mortgages, with a side job in organic products and hemp clothing. Five children — from 26 to 9 years old — left little time to for political engagement.

She turned to Google. She typed, “Running for Jeff Flake’s seat in the U.S. Senate” and read everything that popped up, from the Constitution to Arizona’s election laws, reminding herself how it all worked. She wanted to make sure a campaign would be worth her time.

Merely running, she believed, wouldn’t be enough. She had to win.

Once she had decided to run, in July 2018, there was only one hurdle left: She was a registered Democrat, and the Democratic primary was full. Sinema had long been labeled the front-runner, and local attorney-turned-activist Deedra Abboud had already built grassroots support. They had momentum and money. Green had neither.

Her only path to the ballot was a third party. She switched her registration, became a member of the Green Party and announced a bid for the Senate.

The next day, her mortgage company laid her off.

Looking for the hidden support

This is how a campaign lives and dies:

Green started as a 48-year-old novice, with less than $1,000 to spend and a wordy slogan she wrote herself: “Let’s Make America Green Again, Because It’s Already Great!” She won the Green Party primary with fewer than 400 votes — she was the only candidate — and still the state party didn’t mention her on its website. Everywhere she turned, Arizona’s Senate election was described as a two-candidate race. Pollsters asked only about “McSinema,” as Green called her two opponents. Her own supporters hid somewhere in the margin of error.

But she swore they were there. Her oldest sons, who were 26 and 25, had friends who said they would vote for her. She kept winning high-school straw polls. Some Green Party members were just excited to have somebody on the ticket.

She convinced herself that she could win. Her name was on the ballot, and that was enough. America’s election system promised an equal shot, and now she had hers. As long as she could get into a debate.

That was the only way. She needed that hour of airtime on statewide TV, the image of herself standing among the big-time candidates, those few minutes to explain her muddled platform. From there, she could only gain momentum.

But no invitation came.

It’s a subtle moment, when a campaign crosses from hopeful to hopeless. Some candidates never see it coming. Others refuse to acknowledge it’s already passed. They keep fighting an impossible battle, flailing to be heard by people who aren’t listening.

It was mid-October when Green realized she couldn’t win. Weeks of calls and emails weren’t enough to get her a spot on the debate stage. Local media barely mentioned her. Even her own campaign team pointed her toward the polls: Green had a single percentage point here, a few more over there. She topped out at 6 percent. More and more she was just getting in the way.

MORE: Where Maricopa County split tickets for Kyrsten Sinema, Doug Ducey

Green knew she had to drop out. It was the only move that made sense. But it was hard enough admitting failure to herself. She couldn’t make herself tell the world.

She waited until she had no other choice. Then, on Nov. 1, she drove downtown, sat before a KPNX-TV, 12 News camera and told people not to vote for her.

"I want them to vote for a better Arizona," she said of her supporters. "And that would be for Kyrsten Sinema. The Democratic Party."

"But you struggled with that decision?" came a question from behind the camera.

"Very much," she said.

'I'm in it ... one way or another'

So she became a “spoiler,” a “useless and selfish” candidate who ran “arguably the worst campaign of all time.” Every day Arizona’s counties posted updated results, and angry strangers thought of new ways to insult the third-place candidate.

Hey there thanks for stealing the deciding votes, a man wrote on her Facebook page, one day after the election.

She’s probably a Republican, another man wrote two days after the election.

Thank you all for playing your part in everything that has gone wrong, wrote another, three days after the election.

Then it all stopped.

“What am I now?” Green asked. “The unspoiler'?”

In the end, 57,442 people voted for Angela Green. Their votes spoiled nothing. Sinema won by almost as many votes. Green started to fade back into obscurity, an asterisk on the brutal slog that was the 2018 election.

Still, she said, it was worth it. She believes her campaign "opened the curtains to everything," showing the state how politics really worked. She believes her voice was heard, backed up by 57,442 people.

And she still believes she can win.

“I’m in it,” she said. “I want to get in the Senate, one way or another.”

In the 2020 race, she said, she won’t be naïve. She’ll be smarter and wiser, with a cycle of experience and a bit of name recognition. Somehow she’ll have to raise more money. She’ll need a new party, because the Greens probably won’t want her back. Maybe she’ll rejoin the Democrats, or run as a Republican and take on Donald Trump.

ROBERTS:McSally campaign says it's not, not, NOT her fault she lost to Sinema

But that election is still two years away. In the meantime, Green plans to start at another mortgage company and write a book, tentatively titled “Look Who’s Voting Now.” She wants to take copies to every high school and college in the state, helping teenagers register to vote and telling stories of the system she believes pushed her aside.

“It’s a winner-take-all system,” she said. “Well, what about us, then? What about all of us that don’t want to vote for either of you?”

There’s a plan for that, too. Green wants to start a ballot initiative designed to overhaul Arizona’s elections. Her system would be free from big money and corporate politics. She’d install ranked-choice voting, to give third-party candidates a chance. Debates would have to include every candidate on the ballot.

And nobody would be allowed to drop out.

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