By GREGORY N. HEIRES and RAYMOND MARKEY
Whether to vote in the 2020 presidential election is not an academic question.
Yet many progressives and other apathetic and cynical voters intend cast their vote for a third-party candidate or to sit out the election.
This isn’t an election in which you should throw away your vote. The stakes are too high.
“We do not have room for error in this election,” said MSNBC analyst Claire McCaskill, a former Democratic senator from Missouri.
Armed fascist militias following President Donald Trump’s call to action are now actively attacking demonstrators in our nation’s cities in an effort to help him win.
A victory by Trump would lead to an entrenchment of authoritarianism, a deepening of inequality, a continuation of the coronavirus health crisis, and a further weakening of vital government institutions adopted since the New Deal. It would also be a victory for white supremacy with fearful consequences for people of color.
Trump must be defeated.
Using the ballot box and voting for Democrat Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris in November is the first and most immediate step in doing so.
Third Party Help for Republicans
The last presidential election makes it clear that voters who decide to support a third-party candidate or abstain would once again hand a victory to Trump.
In the 2020 race, two third party candidates, Howie Hawkins of the Green Party and Jo Jorgensen of the Libertarian Party, have ballot access to at least 270 electoral votes, which is the number needed to win the presidency. Republicans are backing rapper Kanye West’s bid in an effort to siphon off votes from Biden.
During the 2016 presidential race, Trump said if people didn’t like him and didn’t like Democrat Hillary Clinton, they should vote third party or not vote at all. This was a very successful strategy.
If Clinton had received the Green Party’s votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Trump would not be president. The failure of Bernie Sanders ideological purists to support Clinton and a drop in the African-American vote sealed her fate.
Unfortunately, the Greens played the same role in the 2000 presidential election that they did in the close 2016 election. Ultimately, George W. Bush’s victory in our country’s closest presidential election was determined by 537 votes in Florida, where Greens received 97,488 votes. Eight years of Republican control of the presidency followed.
For all practical purposes, the Greens have functioned as a wing of the Republican Party in presidential elections. Not only have they been a very important factor in helping to elect Republican presidents, but their constant attack on Democrats have helped make Mitch McConnell the senate majority leader and enabled Republicans to maintain control of many state legislatures.
Trump: A Menace to Democracy and Working Families
The differences between Biden and Trump are so stark that it is puzzling–not just disturbing–that many Bernie supporters and other progressives are prepared not to vote.
The bankruptcy of Trump’s policies—-apart from his threat to our democracy–is quite apparent. But a brief review is in order.
Disenchanted Republicans cite the GOP’s failure to write a platform as a sad sign of how the party has lost its bearing and evolved into a cult of a personality. Indeed, the Republican convention was little more four days of a love vest for Trump that played up his law-and-order candidacy while ignoring his dismal record, which includes nearly 200,000 deaths and more than 6.6 million cases resulting from COVID-19, mass unemployment and a crashed economy.
But despite the absence of a platform, the underlying philosophy and policies of Trump’s party are clear:
• kill off Social Security by eliminating the payroll tax
• dismantle Obamacare, leaving millions of Americans without health-care coverage
• adopt more tax cuts to continue redistributing income and wealth to the economic elite and corporations
• disenfranchise African-American and new immigrant voters and
• ignore climate change.
Defying the usually practice of presidential nominees, Biden moved to the left rather than to the center after his nomination. For progressives, Biden’s shift to the left–together with Trump’s threat to our democracy–should weaken the argument for supporting a third-party alternative or sitting out the presidential election.
If progressive ideological purists and apathetic voters deliver the election to Trump, we will lose an historic opportunity to build a new movement to fight to put an end to the right-wing and neoliberal assault on worker families that has occurred over the past four decades.
Biden offers a vision of an expansive government with policies that would address the country’s deepening of inequality resulting from tax cuts, the attack on unions, elimination of business regulations and anti-worker trade deals.
The two most progressive candidates in the Democratic primary–Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—-played a major role in shaping the platform.
The party’s unity task force included strong supporters of progressive policies like Medicare-for-All and a Green New Deal, like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Pramila Jayapal (WA).
“The people who supported Bernie Sanders–this absolutely gives us a step forward,” she said Sara Nelson, the co-chair of the party’s economic task force, who is the president of the Association of Flight Attendants union, which backed Sanders. “We improved Biden’s policies, and you can always be stronger in the fight when you’re fighting from higher ground.”
A 21st Century New Deal?
Biden’s far-reaching agenda has led some political observers to compare it to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. His plan includes:
• Jobs and the Economy: a $200 increase in the monthly Social Security payment; raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour; a $400 billion program to buy American goods; and rescinding Trump’s tax cuts.
• Climate Change: A $17 trillion investment in green technologies research, cutting greenhouses gases up to 28 percent by 2026, the creation of millions of union manufacturing jobs to produce green energy products and rejoining the Paris Climate Accord, which Trump abandoned
• Race: The creation of $30 billion investment fund for minority business and crimination justice reforms that would include the creation of a $20 billion grant to encourage states to reduce incarceration rates, eliminate minimum sentences and decriminalize marijuana possession, expunge records of cannabis convictions and abolish the death penalty
• Health: a plan to expand Obamacare, insure 97 percent of Americans and create a public health insurance option similar to Medicare.
• Immigration: Reverse Trump’s policy of separating children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexican border, eliminate the travel ban on Muslim countries, protect the “Dreamers,” the children of undocumented immigrants, guaranteeing their eligibility for federal student aid
.
• Labor: strengthen the right to organize and hold corporations and executives personally accountable for interfering with organizing efforts; check corporate power by fighting wage theft; beef up enforcement of workplace safety protections; end mandatory arbitration clauses imposed on workers contracts; ban the permanent replacement striking workers; lift the prohibition on supporting secondary boycotts; ban state laws prohibiting unions from collecting dues or comparable payments from all workers who benefit from union representation that unions are legally obligated to provide, and expand protections for undocumented workers who report workplace violations.
Also, provide a federal guarantee for public sector employees to bargain for better pay and benefits and the working conditions they deserve; extend the right to organize and bargain collectively to independent contractors; ensure that workers in the “gig economy” receive the legal benefits and protections; expand long overdue rights to farmworkers and domestic workers and stop employers from denying workers overtime pay they’ve earned.
Most Progressive Agenda in Decades
“It’s the most progressive platform of any Democratic nominee in the modern history of the party,” Waleed Shahid, communications director for Justice Democrats, a group that backs left-wing challengers to incumbent congressional Democrats, told Vox’s Matthew Iglesias in July.
As for Biden, he has suggested, when discussing the challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic and the current economic crisis, that his challenge as president would be as great as what Roosevelt confronted during the Great Depression.
A Biden win would open a big opportunity for progressive change during the greatest social, political and economic challenges the country faces since the Great Depression. Biden needs a strong mandate. Third-party candidates and voter apathy pose a threat to that mandate and, worse, could deliver the election to Trump.
The New Crossroads blogger Gregory N. Heires is a former president of the Metro NY Labor Communications Council. Raymond Markey is a former president of the New York Public Library Guild Local 1930.
