The Case for Neither Harris nor Trump, Or, You Really Do Have a Choice
The Case for Neither Harris nor Trump, Or, You Really Do Have a Choice
Both of these candidates have offered nothing to meaningfully address our most urgent needs, and over half of Americans want a third-party option.
I started writing this piece a couple of months ago, so some time has passed since the events I mentioned, and the media queries I mentioned will be outdated by about a month. But I think the main points overall are still useful, and I decided to publish this post because we need more voices in support of third-party candidates and in rejection of the strategy of leftists continuing to work within the Democratic Party.
Do you know how many people are running for president this year? The Federal Election Commission lists 131 candidates as having registered to run for the office in 2023-2024. But now that we’ve had two presidential debates in which third-party candidates have been excluded due to polling requirements, many people operate on the assumption that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are the only two candidates to choose from in November. This is false. There are definitely other candidates to choose from. Ballotpedia has identified two additional “noteworthy” candidates: Jill Stein of the Green Party and Chase Oliver of the Libertarian Party. Other important candidates include Cornel West (Independent), Claudia De la Cruz (Party for Socialism and Liberation), and Joseph Kishore (Socialist Equality Party).
Given the many crises we face—from climate to the genocide in Gaza to healthcare to the rising cost of living—it’s worthwhile for every voter to consider who is actually proposing good policy and solutions in proportion to the scale of the problems we face. As Nathan J. Robinson wrote in an analysis after Trump and Harris recently debated, both candidates accepted right-wing framing of issues while offering precious little to address the crises we face, instead promising to continue fossil fuel extraction, uttering xenophobic nonsense about immigrants and China, and promising right-wing crackdowns on the border. Essentially, we have two Republican choices: one who has been endorsed by over a hundred Republicans and offers descriptive representation with a vibes-y veneer over her “top cop” agenda and another Republican offering authoritarian nightmares. Neither Harris nor Trump has indicated that they will reverse course on U.S. military aid to Israel, either.
U.S. aid, crucially, is allowing Israel to continue its war on Gaza, which is considered by many experts to be a genocide. As Israeli historian Amos Goldberg put it in a Jacobin interview in July, there has been “explicit intent, a systematic pattern, and a genocidal outcome—so, I came to the conclusion that this is exactly what genocide looks like.” Although Israel has been engaged in a decades-long war on Palestine, the situation has worsened significantly since the October 7 attack by Hamas. There is ongoing mass starvation, outbreaks of diseases like polio and “lice, scabies, and rashes,” numerous reports of children and infants suffering gunshot wounds to the head (in other words, these victims were intentionally targeted), and the systematic sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners by Israelis. There is immense preventable human suffering. (Not to mention the environmental impact and the starving, displaced, or abandoned zoo animals.) Our government could change course, but our leaders have decided to continue helping Israel carry out this barbarism. Journalist Chris Hedges has explained what has to happen for the genocide to end:
The only way for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians to be halted is for the U.S. to end all weapons shipments to Israel. And the only way this will take place is if enough Americans make clear they have no intention of supporting any presidential ticket or any political party that fuels this genocide.
Harris and Trump are totally out of step with the general public on Gaza. The American public is increasingly against the U.S. arming Israel to commit its genocide, and disapproval of Israel’s actions has increased since October 7. Significant portions of Muslim American voters have turned against the two parties and are leading the way (in some cases) in pushing for specific political alternatives. Nationwide, Muslim American voters are now split in their support for Harris or Stein, with each being chosen at 29 percent in a poll by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. In three swing states—Michigan, Arizona, and Wisconsin—Stein even leads Harris among Muslim voters. Other movements have formed to oppose the Democrats’ position on Gaza. The Uncommitted Movement, initially formed to vote “uncommitted” to send a message to Joe Biden (about his policy toward Gaza) in the (fake) Democratic primary, recently protested outside the DNC, which shamefully would not allow a Palestinian American person to speak at the event, showing just how tightly the party is keeping a lid on any dissent on this issue. Uncommitted has now decided not to endorse Harris—although their stance that voters should vote “against Trump” but “avoid” third parties is bizarre and seems like a quiet way of telling people to vote for Harris while avoiding the dirty work of endorsing her. The Abandon Harris movement, previously Abandon Biden, has decided to campaign against Harris to ensure her defeat. Abandon Harris has also organized with leftist presidential candidates to encourage people to abandon both pro-genocide parties and has just recently endorsed Jill Stein.
The Abandon Harris movement has presented a solid case for why it opposes Kamala Harris and Donald Trump—and incidentally, this case is completely in line with leftist and progressive values. When asked about Harris’s acceptance speech at the DNC and about the possibility that Trump would be “worse” for Palestinians, Abandon Harris Director Dr. Hassan Abdel Salam said:
“She would continue to send Israel the bombs raining down on innocent people, killing tens of thousands of them. It’s estimated that more than 200,000 have been killed, displaced or injured. We in Abandon Biden and now Abandon Harris believe that civil rights don't just belong to the American people. Civil rights belong to every single human being. We follow and are guided by the light of Dr. Martin Luther King, the one who wrote the letter in a Birmingham Jail, and the people who protested with him, where dogs ripped into their flesh.
We are also guided by the Martin Luther King who spoke out against the Vietnam War. America should never be part of a genocide. The fact that I even have to utter these words is despicable. [...] [U]ltimately the act of murder must be punished. [...] We know we'll have to sacrifice. I myself shut down my laptop during the Republican National Convention because I couldn't listen to the words of the former president, a despicable candidate.
Imagine though if we were to come out in droves again, as we did in 2020, for Joe Biden and vote for Kamala Harris after we protested again and again and again only to be met with silence. We would be rewarding the very murderers who killed our families and sending a signal that they could do anything without consequence. They could put us in concentration camps. They could go and shed blood in any part of the world. They could come into our homes and steal our property and take our children away, and still tell us that we have to elect them because they are the lesser of two evils.
There might someday be a moment where we do have to choose the lesser of two evils, but now we’ve reached a point where the evil is so pronounced that we must denounce it at every moment, regardless of the cost, to send an undeniable signal that a reckoning will come upon this party, and it will have to ask why it lost.”
Salam’s words are compelling. He is right to invoke the radical Martin Luther King Jr. King not only spoke out against war, but he also connected our foreign policy to our domestic policy. As Michelle Alexander noted, King “decried the moral bankruptcy of a nation that does not hesitate to invest in bombs and warfare around the world but can never seem to find the dollars to eradicate poverty at home. He called for a radical revolution of values.” As a democratic socialist, King understood that the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism” were operating in our capitalist society to maintain the status quo. When we understand, then, that these forces have come to define our society and our government policy, we can see that the genocide in Gaza is not a “single issue.” It’s “intrinsically linked,” in the words of climate activist Greta Thunberg, to issues that impact our lives, from to climate to police violence to mass incarceration, from racial wealth gaps from healthcare. King’s notion of materialism, or “profit motives and property rights,” shows up in the logic of “profit over people,” which forms the guiding principle of the arms companies currently selling weapons to carry out the genocide in Gaza and the health insurance companies bringing in large profits by denying us care while people die for lack of unaffordable medication. We see profit over people, too, in the fossil fuel companies whose continued resource extraction is harming our chance for a livable future on this planet. All of these issues are existential—Gaza, healthcare, climate, the police state. Why wouldn’t we wish to vote for a candidate who plans to address all these issues rather than make them worse, as Trump and Harris promise to do?
As a socialist, I believe that leftist third-party candidates have a much better analysis of the problems our country and world face and therefore a much better politics from which to make policy than Harris and Trump or other candidates in the field. A socialist analysis is superior to that of, say, libertarianism. As Current Affairs Chief Film Critic Ciara Moloney once put it, principled libertarians are right about half the time—and just plain wrong the other half. While I can appreciate (and even agree with) the libertarian stances against war, police violence, and other civil liberties infringements, I find other aspects less appealing. As Current Affairs House Economist Rob Larson recently pointed out, libertarians whose work he has reviewed tend to be just fine with corporate consolidation of power and gross material inequality, which we on the left tend to find unacceptable. Additionally, I am very skeptical of “market-driven” solutions to healthcare and climate, such as those mentioned in Chase Oliver’s platform, because the “market” is incapable of guaranteeing basic goods and services to all people—never mind addressing the climate crisis.
I don’t intend to flatten the distinctions between candidates—De la Cruz and Kishore, for instance, stand out as socialists and in calling bluntly for an end to a capitalist, profit-centered economy and the creation of a workers’ state. They are organizing to rouse the working class, not explicitly to “win.” But for the purposes of my point here, the broadly “left” candidates I have mentioned are the only candidates offering policies we urgently need: a ceasefire in Gaza and arms embargo to Israel, significantly reduced military spending and militaristic foreign policy, a Green New Deal to rapidly decrease fossil fuel emissions and address the climate crisis, Medicare for All (truly universal healthcare is one important component of responding to the ongoing COVID crisis), a $25 or $27 minimum wage, reparations for African Americans, and some form of free college, among others. De la Cruz and Kishore also call for the nationalization of major corporations (an excellent idea), and the Kishore program is particularly strong on a socialist plan for public health and COVID. All these candidates call for full political and social equality for LGBTQ people as well as guaranteed abortion rights. All of them have either spoken out against the death penalty or said they would abolish it. These candidates’ policies are addressing the needs of poor and working-class Americans of all racial backgrounds and origins, which neither of the major candidates seem to care much about.
But third-party candidates face major challenges. In the first place, the Green Party, for instance, notes that it faces the following paradox: “the dual burden of having both to contest for power within an arguably moribund political system and at the same time to restore the American voters’ belief in political parties as necessary and desirable vehicles for change and transformation.” Beyond that, because we don’t have public financing of elections, candidates have to raise absurd amounts of money to be competitive. Leftist candidates, who don’t take corporate PAC money, are at a huge disadvantage. Lack of media exposure (or biased coverage) also keeps Americans in the dark about third parties. And then there are the direct challenges (created by Republicans and Democrats) to ballot access in the form of legal battles, which cost third parties precious funds, and stringent legal requirements for signature-gathering and filing.
The Media and the Problem of Exposure
Media exposure is critical for third-party candidates, and the mainstream networks and newspapers know this. So, it’s not surprising that, when they cover third-party candidates at all, major media outlets (and even independent ones!) tend to remind us over and over that a candidate “won’t win.” The irony here is that the media themselves are playing a huge role in denying them critical (and fair) coverage that they need in order for voters to know about them! The case of billionaire businessman Ross Perot, who ran as an independent for president in 1992, is illustrative of the exposure problem. While Perot spent $26 million of his own money mostly on ads, he also got to participate in a presidential debate alongside George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, after which he received a surge of support. He ended up getting 19 percent of the vote. His impressive performance showed what is possible when candidates can mount an ad campaign and aren’t excluded from the debate stage. The Commission on Presidential Debates, which makes the debate rules, changed their criteria for inclusion in 2000 to require a 15 percent polling threshold. No third-party candidates have so far been able to meet these criteria.
A look at a few major media outlets reveals abysmal coverage of third-party candidates. I recently ran search queries for each of the candidates at The New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post, CNN, and Fox News. I found each outlet to have a strikingly similar pattern of coverage. For Stein and Oliver, the outlets ran a piece about their 2024 run, maybe a piece or two about Democratic Party challenges to third parties on ballots, a piece about Stein getting arrested at a protest or a rare interview with Oliver, and then nothing. For West, typically it’s one or two pieces about the fact that he is running or selecting a running mate. Impressively, The Washington Post actually sat down for an interview with West this past spring, but it was short, not very in-depth, and the headline made him sound like more of a divisive figure than anything else. They didn’t fail to point out that he “faces very long odds.” The Washington Post’s coverage is similar in number and content to the Times, with one piece painting Stein as a spoiler in the opening paragraph by suggesting she cost Hillary Clinton the election in 2016. (This is nonsense. You can only make such an argument if you assume that all of Stein’s votes—or votes in certain swing states—would have gone for Hillary, which is not a valid assumption. Does anybody ever argue that a mainstream candidate who lost could have won if voters for the opposition had just voted the other way? Given the frequency with which people switch from D to R and vice versa, we could make this argument, but no one ever does, which is indeed curious.)
NPR has offered essentially no meaningful coverage of Stein’s or Oliver’s candidacy. If either candidate has been mentioned, it’s usually in a way that portrays them as political curiosities or spoilers rather than legitimate candidates that people should consider voting for because they might offer an alternative to the mainstream candidates.
CNN has a list of the presidential candidates, but the third-party candidates are grayed out at the bottom and listed as people who “could be on the presidential ballot.” (Interestingly, RFK Jr., by far the wackiest candidate, is featured most prominently even though he has decided to suspend his campaign and endorse Trump.) Why not show an interactive map with every candidate’s ballot access and the total number of electoral college votes possible? (The New York Times does have a ballot map which had been last updated on August 19 for a long time. Just today I checked it again, and it said it had been updated Oct. 16.) It would become apparent that Stein and Oliver are on enough ballots to obtain 270 electoral college votes, the amount needed to win the election. Kishore’s election map is here. De la Cruz’s is here.
Meanwhile, left-wing or progressive media outlets tend to operate with their own kind of blackout against third parties, which is ultimately a form of Vote Blue No Matter Who. The idea is that because you’re supposed to Vote Blue™, there is no point even mentioning the other candidates. Or there is simply a bias toward leftists running as Democrats. This shows up in headlines like these: “Cornel West Should Not be Running for President,” from the Nation. Or another from Jacobin, which said that “Instead of running a third-party campaign most voters won’t notice, [Cornel West] should grab the spotlight by challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination.” Jacobin also recently retweeted an article from 2020 entitled, “Like it Or Not, If We Run Third-Party We Will Lose.” (One point in particular from that article that has not aged well is the claim that the major parties are “dynamic parties whose priorities and appeals change in effort to defeat their opponents.” These “priorities” are not in service of the left! If anything, Kamala Harris has signaled zero “change” leftward on major issues like Gaza, which is costing her support in swing states. What she has done is courted Republican support, even saying she’d have a Republican in her cabinet!) Last month, Jill Stein said that progressive media outlet DemocracyNow! had refused to cover her campaign. To their credit, they recently had Stein and her running mate, Butch Ware, on for an interview. If you search for the third-party candidates in other progressive news outlets, you’ll find precious little recent coverage as well. It’s a vicious cycle: third parties get no coverage or bad coverage, so people don’t know about them and so don’t support them, and it just repeats endlessly.
Additionally, when we on the Left critique Democrats and say that they should do X or Y instead of what they are doing—without also mentioning other third parties in the field who may already have the correct policy stance—this, too, is an implicit plug for Vote Blue No Matter Who. These critiques, of course, presume that there really is a choice for, say, Harris to make: embrace her past “progressivism” or appeal to the right wing. But principled progressives and leftists do not “fake” being right-wing to win elections and then pull out their true progressivism after they’ve won. There is, however, a history of the opposite: candidates running on progressive rhetoric and ideas in order to get elected, and then turning out to be not so progressive. As Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson put it, “They run like Frederick Douglass, and then they govern like Jefferson Davis.” Think Gavin Newsom. Lori Lightfoot. Barack Obama. John Fetterman. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Think of how, for example, Biden ran on supporting a $15 minimum wage but then allowed the Senate parliamentarian to kill it. I’m not suggesting that each of these politicians is exactly the same. But each of them did in fact move rightward after a period of professed progressivism. The case of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—who unconditionally endorsed Joe Biden in 2023, posed with him for photos as he aided a genocide, doubled down that he should be the candidate after his abysmal debate performance, and lied about Kamala Harris working “tirelessly” for a ceasefire (something she and Biden could get with one phone call, if they truly wanted to)—serves as evidence that most “leftists” cannot enter the Democratic Party and expect to maintain their values or the adversarial stance against the party that maintaining those values requires. As former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner put it, “If you can make it in the room but your morals and beliefs cannot, you have not gained power, power has gained you.”
But there seems to be no limit to some people’s support for the strategy that the left just has to align with (and presumably vote for!) Democrats. There’s a kind of idea on the left that essentially says, Yes, Third Parties Can be Good, in Theory. But You’re Not Doing it The Right Way. See one example here: “Political Realignment, the Honest Way. And here. (I respect this author’s work tremendously, but the timing of these pieces seems designed specifically to turn people away from third parties as opposed to Just Thinking Through Leftist Strategies.) I get frustrated by talk of patiently doing things the right way. What is the right way when we’ve got less than a decade on climate and two climate deniers (Harris being the soft kind, Trump being the hard kind) leading the major party tickets? The author has even called support for third parties an “affliction.” Well, it seems like 63 percent of the American public is suffering from some kind of affliction—that’s the percentage that says they want a third-party option.
So this is where we’ve gotta get into the weeds a bit. Why should various constituencies vote third party? I have discussed why some of the Vote Blue No Matter Who arguments fall short in a previous article. As I wrote, the comparison of who is “worse” on an issue may not entirely land the way we think. Take one aspect of climate, fossil fuels:
But what happens when the Democrat in power actually performs worse than the GOP on this issue? Biden, for instance, drilled more fossil fuel than Trump in his first year of office. More drilling means more fossil fuel use, which means more warming, which means a worsening threat to human existence. So can we still say that the GOP is the most dangerous organization, and therefore we must Vote Blue No Matter Who?
Or take immigration, such as when AOC said we had to vote for Biden in 2020 to protect vulnerable people like immigrants:
But again, what about when the Democrats in power are worse than the right on the issue? In 2019, reports noted that Obama, the “Deporter in Chief,” had actually deported more immigrants than Trump. And Joe Biden has continued Trump’s cruel family separation policy at the border. Where is the protection of all the vulnerable people under Biden? [...] The Democrats are so terrible and right-leaning themselves. The Vote Blue No Matter Who argument has merits, but it is hardly fool proof. And it is often used by Democrats to trick voters into thinking that real change is coming around the corner.
But beyond a comparison/tally of each issue between the two mainstream candidates, what about the “consequentialist” argument underpinning Vote Blue No Matter Who? This is probably articulated best in the 2020 Bad Faith podcast between Briahna Joy Gray and Noam Chomsky where Chomsky explained it like this: given the choice of only two candidates, one who will be worse than the other, the responsible choice is to take a few minutes and to vote against the worse one in order to help create a desired outcome in which the worse candidate loses. If we do not do this, we are helping to create an outcome in which the worst candidate wins, and this is unacceptable (for reasons of climate, and so forth). This argument makes logical sense to me, and I understand why people agree with it. Heck, I agreed with it in 2016, when I held my nose and voted for Hillary Clinton. But, at the same time, as Gray pointed out in the discussion, there are major issues that the VBNMW simply has no answer to, such as:
The fact that VBNMW seems to yield candidates (both parties) who move further rightward each cycle
The fact that people have immediate material concerns that they have good reason to believe will not be met by the “lesser evil” candidate (genocide! border crackdowns! Healthcare is unaffordable! police repression!)
How do we vote for a candidate first and then “push them left” once they are in office when they don’t respond to demands now even with voters’ stated intentions to withhold their votes ahead of an election?
Why should we accept two evils when the public wants more progressive policies?
And an additional point I’d add
If we are going to be consequentialists, don’t we also have to consider the consequences of supporting a third-party candidate separate and apart from the “spoiler” logic?
Chomsky’s response to Gray’s questions was that they simply have nothing to do with the options presented on election day, which are between two candidates, one worse, which we have to stop from getting into power. While I understand how this is strictly true, the implication here is that one must ignore third parties or actively decide to accept the two-party system and reject an attempt to break away from it. But breaking away from the two-party system is the whole point! I think the serious questions posed by Gray present an opening for further consideration: what are the harms of thinking of the election in purely two-party, consequentialist, lesser-evil terms, and how do those harms further empower the Right (again, isn’t the Right the main problem here?)?
For instance, on point 1: isn’t it a problem that resistance to a particular policy happens to be pronounced when a Republican does it but not when a Democrat does it? In other words, is trying to ensure a Democratic win really a benefit? Consider border policies. Trump’s family separation and immigration policies in general caused an uproar from the media and elected officials (and a pre-elected AOC). But when Biden continued Trump’s border policies, there was not as much of an uproar. We can make guesses as to why this is (media bias, people reacting more to personalities than to policies, and Trump being unlikeable and Biden’s so-called empathy having an effect), but more important is the effect that it has: acceptance of Democratic bad behavior desensitizes people to the issues that matter and arguably allows these conditions to continue. Immigrants continue to be harmed! This is most certainly a bad “consequence” of VBNMW since, after all, we’re often told that we need to VBNMW to protect the most vulnerable among us.
On points 4 and 5: What about the third parties, in particular the left candidates who are gaining support in a political moment in which voters are abandoning one or both major party candidates due to the genocide in Gaza? Given the desire of Americans for a third-party option and the moral atrocity of genocide, is there really no moral imperative for someone to vote for a third party? What about the effects of a strong third-party showing in the election? What kind of galvanizing effect might this have on people of any previous political persuasion who are tired of politics as usual and the two major parties? Just as Bernie’s failed runs (times 2!) helped radicalize people and helped to energize the Left, so a strong Left third-party showing could energize major segments of the populace including the anti-war movement, progressives, leftists, and others who agree with the third-party’s campaign but maybe didn’t identify that way previously. Is all of this of no importance?
Aren’t there other important consequences we should consider, such as adding support to a third-party candidate as part of a long-term movement to grow that party and independent politics more generally? This is where I’m always frustrated because, as Briahna Joy Gray has pointed out, there seems to be endless patience for the long, slow work of, say, the things we are always told to do on the Left: building the labor movement or “organizing” or incorporating leftists into a hostile Democratic Party. Case in point: one of the most egregious and disgusting examples of how antidemocratic (and anti-Left) the Democratic Party can be was seen in the election for Buffalo’s mayor in 2022. India Walton, a democratic socialist and organizer, won the primary in a stunning upset against the incumbent, Byron Brown. Brown then decided to run against Walton in the general election (talk about not accepting election results…) as a write-in candidate, taking money from Republicans and furnishing voters with stamps of his signature. He won. Isn’t that just sickening? Why do we need to keep running leftists in this party?
At the same time, despite this hostility of the Democratic Party to leftist candidates, there seems to be not much patience for trying to build up a left third party. Yes, third parties are a good idea, in theory, but Not Now!
But If Not Now, When?
In terms of the “consequences” of not voting against Trump: Does the individual voter who does not VBNMW—particularly in a swing state—really have to shoulder the moral weight of their vote marginally increasing the likelihood of the outcome of the election (say, a Trump victory) in which forces way more powerful than any individual voter are acting to sway the outcome—those forces being the media and the courts and legislatures? By courts I mean the legal challenges to third parties being on the ballot as well as the Supreme Court, which has been known to decide an election result in favor of the Right. And legislatures in the South in particular have made it harder for people, particularly African Americans, to vote.
To be completely honest, I’m not going to say to swing state voters that they must VBNMW. If that’s what you feel you need to do, you should do it… but only as a part of a strategy that is a necessary short-term measure for trying to avoid what you think is the worst possible conceivable outcome. But again, the Harris campaign itself is making no substantive push to win back voters they have lost over Gaza, and I think it’s hard to tell a swing state voter that they should feel morally responsible about the outcome of an election (again, Trump possibly winning) when the “lesser evil” candidate themselves isn’t even trying to win those key voters. (Yes, Harris has been trying to court various slices of the electorate with her last-minute agendas. But given her reversal on progressive policies, it’s hard to believe that she’s doing anything other than simply saying the politically expedient thing while having no real intention of following through on anything substantive. For instance, her supposed support of the $15 minimum wage comes as too little, too late. Her own administration failed to secure this legislation because of the PARLIAMENTARIAN. Why should we believe she cares about this issue? And as Anthony Zenkus pointed out, $15 is outdated. We need $25 an hour.)
Another major negative consequence of continuing to VBNMW is that it reinforces the conditions that create fascism. For anybody concerned with the rise of fascism, material conditions must be at the forefront of the solution. Alex Skopic, writing about the problem of fascist art, has pointed out that the solution to fascism is necessarily a socialist one:
To defeat the far right, what you need is a politics that roots it out at the source. As we’ve seen, the roots of fascism lie in class hierarchy and in the political malfeasance of the extremely rich. Far-right politics succeed when people’s legitimate grievances and angers are misdirected—whether it’s [Kanye West] blaming the “Jewish media” for exploitation in the record industry, or millions of ordinary people listening to Donald Trump tell them that immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” are behind all their problems. To thwart them, we have to give people real material solutions to those problems. So far, liberal politics have comprehensively failed to do that—but socialism can. It can guarantee that everyone’s basic needs are met regardless of their wealth, eliminating much of the grievance and injustice that powers the far right. And it can eliminate vast inequalities of wealth and power, so there is no ruling class willing to scapegoat vulnerable groups to protect itself. When class hierarchy ends, so will its poisonous fruits.
In the first place, the whole reason we have Donald Trump and his MAGA movement is because Democrats—Obama, the Clintons, and the rest—failed to give people a politics that actually helped them, which created millions of dissatisfied, angry people just waiting for a demagogue to sell them lies. The same is true now. We’re not going to stop fascism by voting for the parties that created the conditions for its rise.
We might feel that we need to vote simply to live another day or to create better organizing conditions. But I would submit that organizing and resistance to global capitalism will always be necessary and will always happen. People resist all kinds of oppression, whether or not the conditions are “good” for it. Take concentration camp uprisings or uprisings against slavery. I’m not saying we should wish to create worse conditions or downplay the seriousness of the fascist tendencies in the country but simply to point out that resistance must happen regardless of the conditions. As the Abandon Harris movement has pointed out, a Trump victory will be bad. No leftist can deny this. But if some of the people who are most vulnerable to a Trump presidency, such as Muslim Americans and Arab Americans, have the courage to take a stand here and abandon both major parties, I don’t see why others of us can’t do the same, frankly—not just as symbolic measure but as real solidarity, as a commitment to anti-war and anti-genocide politics and to supporting people who we know will be targeted by any future administration. (Another option is to take a Vote Pact. As explained by Sam Husseini, this is where a would-be Harris voter and a would-be Trump voter agree to both vote third party.)
I don’t think voting for a third party requires outlining a situation in which we prove that the candidate “will win” or “can win.” First, this logic is never applied to anyone else. No leftist or progressive candidate who has run as, say, a Democrat, has ever accepted the notion that they “can’t win” as a reason they shouldn’t run. If they did, no one would run! It’s simply not a useful point to make since people may require multiple runs to win an election (Cori Bush, for instance, ran two unsuccessful campaigns prior to her 2020 win), and candidates are the same people the day before they won and the day after—not having won is no measure of a candidate’s quality. But if the progressive and leftist community wished to put all their force behind a third-party candidate to increase their chances of, say, earning 5 percent of the national vote, now would be the time to do it. Now would be the time to ramp up independent progressive media coverage to really inform people of their choices and…maybe give people a real choice. “I agree with your candidate’s platform, but you are doing it wrong” is not useful anymore. It’s just another form of VBNMW.
Even though West’s candidacy in particular seems to have petered out, probably in no small part due to his frequent change of parties and lack of media coverage, I think the underlying arguments in the piece I wrote about West really apply to any third-party leftist candidate who has a good platform. A good platform—one that offers reduced militarism, serious climate action, and universal programs that address people’s need for healthcare and good wages—will serve every voter. (Presidential elections also help leftists to organize and popularize their policies, so “winning” is definitely not the only worthy goal here.) Progressive policies are popular generally: over two dozen states have raised the minimum wage, for instance, and countless ballot initiatives are put forth every year to advance progress policies such as the legalization of marijuana and election reform, among others. Republicans even like progressive policies. And for people tempted to vote Republican who don’t actually like Trump, or those who plan not to vote, leftist third parties are offering a lot of things that Trump simply won’t—such as concrete plans to make people’s lives better. Trump’s “concept of a plan” on healthcare, for instance, is pathetic, yet so is Harris’s idea to “strengthen the ACA,” which is little more than a scam and a subsidy for private insurance. The ACA has utterly failed to make healthcare “affordable.” Even if you feel your own healthcare is relatively affordable or you “like your private insurance,” as the argument often goes, you should know that you are getting a raw deal, anyway. A recent report by the Commonwealth Fund ranked the U.S. dead last in healthcare among nine peer nations. We also spend far more money on healthcare than other nations and get little in return. The only cost-saving and just policy option on healthcare is Medicare For All, which neither Harris nor Trump support.
We need to vote for leaders who will meaningfully address the material conditions of the vast majority of people in this country. This is good for people and good for the fight against fascism.
The tide may be shifting in terms of media coverage and visibility, as outlets such as Status Coup News, “Breaking Points,” “The Breakfast Club” and Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo recently did interviews with Jill Stein and her running mate, Butch Ware, and she has gained the endorsements of Jeffrey Sachs, Tariq Ali (admittedly not a U.S. voter, but important nonetheless), and the Muslim American Public Affairs Council. (The latter interview, unfortunately, is behind a paywall.) Interestingly, these were far more confrontational than any interviews I have seen with mainstream candidates. The points on “The Breakfast Club” made by guest host Angela Rye, for instance, ranged from ridiculous (you haven’t won an election) to condescending (how many members of the House of Representatives are there? Unfortunately, Stein incorrectly said “600,” which is not far off from the total House and Senate membership of 535, but since when has this question been asked of any other candidate?). Hasan is well-known for his adversarial interview style, which is generally to be commended. But he began the segment by dredging up the 2016 election and the “spoiler” idea, essentially casting doubt on the candidate before the interview even began. He says that “had all those Stein votes gone to Clinton instead, Trump would never have won the electoral college nor the presidency.” He then asks, “Will her candidacy give us Trump again?” But this is purely a convenient hypothetical. There are a number of things that could have happened to make it so that Trump hadn’t won. Would Hasan talk about all of them? Would he blame Trump voters and say that had fewer people decided not to vote for Trump, Trump wouldn’t have won? We could look at how the media played a big role and how Hillary Clinton ran a smug and abysmally ineffective campaign. Why aren’t those facts mentioned as critical context for why we got Trump in 2016? Assuming an alternate reality where every single third party voted differently than they actually did in the past and using that as a framing for this year’s election is simply unfair. It’s “pure fantasy,” as Jonah Walters pointed out in Jacobin in 2016. He wrote, “[C]linton actually won the popular vote by upwards of two million ballots.Trump is our president-elect thanks only to the all-important electoral college, a pro-slave state relic from the antebellum years.” But Hasan chose to double down on the point that Stein voters are spoilers and that she cannot win now. Why even listen to the debate if you believe his first two points?
The truth is that we are constantly being told that third parties are bad and that they cannot ever win…. by people who do not support third parties! But Gallup polling in 2023 showed that 63 percent of Americans want a third-party option. So the delegitimization of third parties is essentially a way of saying that “resistance is futile,” as Stein has put it. But resistance against politicians and a political system that perpetuates gross injustice is always morally necessary. Chris Hedges, who consistently talks of the moral imperative to act against injustice, especially through acts of civil disobedience, says:
If we do not hold fast to moral imperatives, we are doomed. Evil will triumph. It means there is no right and wrong. It means anything, including mass murder, is permissible. [...] A moral stance always has a cost. If there is no cost, it is not moral. It is merely conventional belief. [...] The question is not whether resistance is practical. It is whether resistance is right. We are enjoined to love our neighbor, not our tribe. We must have faith that the good draws to it the good, even if the empirical evidence around us is bleak. The good is always embodied in action. It must be seen. It does not matter if the wider society is censorious.
This logic holds with voting, too, I believe. While some people believe that voting doesn’t matter, the fact is that millions of people will be voting, and there are many, many forces at work trying to keep us from considering our third-party options. We have a chance to push back against that. We always do. The historian Howard Zinn pointed out that “political power, however formidable, is more fragile than we think.”
The fragility of power is suggested by the recent behavior of two top Democrats, Keith Ellison and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Both lashed out at Jill Stein online earlier this month in moves that could be interpreted as a sign of concern among the Democratic establishment in light of the polling showing Stein advancing in swing states. Notice how both pointed out that Stein only “shows up every four years.” (What does this actually mean? Are they implying that a candidate ought to run for the presidency outside of the election cycle?) On September 14, Ellison tweeted:
If you’ve ever been annoyed by politicians who only show up at election time, then you’ve got to be annoyed with @DrJillStein. She claims to be an unconventional alternative but she’s nauseatingly conventional. She shows up every 4 years making lavish promises but has no record of producing anything except Republican victories. Hard Pass.
AOC released an Instagram video trashing the Greens on Sept. 1. A viewer of hers had asked a question (“how do I tell my friends who are Jill Stein voters they are wasting their time and effort?”) and AOC responded:
If you have been your party's nominee for 12 years in a row, [...] and you cannot grow your movement, pretty much at all, and can't pursue any successful strategy, [...] and all you do is show up once every four years to speak to people who are justifiably pissed off, [...] you're not serious. [...] [T]o me, it does not read as authentic, it reads as predatory.
There are serious factual errors here: Stein last ran in 2016 (not “for 12 years in a row”), she only ran this year because Cornel West decided not to pursue the Green Party nomination, and 150 Greens hold office. You can criticize the Party for being small or for anything that’s factually true, but making up lies is just wrong (although par for the course for AOC lately, apparently). Since 1985, the Party has won 1,500 races—sounds like a lot for a party that “doesn’t do anything” except run for president. And the Party has to run a presidential candidate to maintain its ballot access. This hit piece in The New Republic notes that growth is down in the party, but growth may not be a great metric. In politics, there are always setbacks. Two progressive members of the “Squad,” Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, were recently ousted from office due to Big Money in politics. That’s certainly no reason not to support progressive politics or candidates. Looking back at the past, the sewer socialists got a lot done but were not huge in numbers and were concentrated in particular regions. And look at what a small number of hard Right politicians accomplished when they leveraged their power last year. In politics, it’s not just pure numbers, it’s about how you use the numbers.
But to return to AOC’s point, the real “predatory” agents here, in fact, are the corporate-run parties that use their deep pockets to kick challengers off ballots and to subvert democracy itself. These are the parties that offer platitudes (Harris) and demagoguery (Trump) and a worsening of the most existential issues we face, including climate.
For people who dislike both candidates and want a change from what they are offering or those who are undecided, these are the facts: there are leftist candidates who are offering uplifting platforms that address the serious crises we face. Major political parties emerge from minor parties—think of the radical Republicans in the United States, or the U.K. Labour Party in its early days—so the fact of a party being “minor” shouldn’t make one reject them out of hand.
Every vote cast for a candidate makes them more electable, and the choice is yours.
Thanks to my colleagues at Current Affairs: Alex Skopic and Nathan J. Robinson for their comments and suggestions on this draft and graphic designer Cali Traina Blume for creating the image.