Normally, I wouldn’t engage with this, but this could be one of the most critical elections of any of our lifetimes and, yes, I am afraid for myself, for people like me, and for people who aren’t possessed of the power to defend themselves from what could very well be a long-term trend toward fascism in America.
This election, like all presidential contents of modern American politics, is one with a binary choice. Either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton will be our next president. The existence of third parties is not the existence of a third option. You’re going to counter that this election is different, and that the widespread dissatisfaction with the picks of the two major parties means that it’s the right moment—and perhaps the only moment—for a third party to seize the day.
For better or worse, that just isn’t borne by history or the current state of this election. I mean, look at the last time a third party issued a credible challenge for the presidency. In June 1992, independent candidate Ross Perot led the field with 39%. For reference, that’s almost five times the average of Gary Johnson’s performance and a full ten times that of Jill Stein. Perot only went down from there—not entirely unlike the downtrend we are starting to see with Johnson and Stein. Beyond the quirks of Perot’s campaign, his slump was partially born of the absence of party machinery to enable voter engagement and partially born of our partisan voting habits. Note that the machinery that Johnson and Stein have at their disposal is even less developed than that of Perot—especially so in the latter case—and that voters, including those who identify as independents, have become even more partisan at the polls in the interim. In shorter terms: if 1992 was an election that could have toppled the duopoly, 2016 is barely its stillborn younger sibling. It’ll be Trump or Clinton.
I urge you not to look at as falling in line. I urge you to see it as what it is: a choice between one candidate or the other. Presidential politics are not, and have never been, about the perfect candidate. For many voters in many elections—those, like you, whose candidate lost his primary—it’s not even about the best candidate. It’s about which candidate is better than the other.
Maybe that sounds like the lesser of two evils. A lot of times it is. But please understand that it can only ever be virtuous to spurn the lesser of two evils when a third good exists. That is not the case here. One of two people will become the 45th President of the United States. Your political profile and the vote you will cast with it serve only to make it more or less likely that each of those two will win the election. If you vote for Donald Trump, you will make it more likely that he will be our next the president and less likely that Hillary Clinton will be the same. If you vote for Hillary Clinton, you will make it more likely that she will be our next president and less likely that Donald Trump will be the same. Likewise, if you—as a left-leaning voter in a finite pool of other left-leaning voters—vote for a third party, you will only make it more likely that Donald Trump will be our next president. The likelihood that neither Trump nor Clinton will be our next president does not change because your vote was for someone else. As ever, it will be one or the other. Third options don’t exist.
You can say that you are “in no way supporting Trump,” as you have. But that isn’t enough. We need to be doing everything in our power—all of us—to stop him. Like it or not, the one and only way to do that is electing Hillary Clinton.
The idea that a Democratic Senate would accompany a Trump presidency is the opposite of political reality. The coattail effect of a Trump win could mean Democrats lose a seat in Nevada and lose our shot at any of the Republican seats in contention. Is it that you’re under the impression that Bernie or Bust voters are going to play nice with Democrats down the ballot? For one, what examples we have of the voting habits of the faction of Sanders voters who have placed themselves in opposition to the Democratic Party show that they are either willing to elect far-right candidates over Democrats or uninterested altogether beyond the top of the ticket. And I’m not especially confident that those who want “[to send a strong message] to the establishment that [they] don’t like the way the DNC plays” will line up to turn the Senate blue.
But suppose that—in spite of all political wisdom—Democrats are somehow able to retake the Senate in the same election that elevates Donald Trump to the presidency. It is already within the power of the executive to enforce our immigration laws. President Trump does not need Congress to sign off on his deportation agenda. He can start terrorizing undocumented immigrants on Inauguration Day. Maybe he gets the governors of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and every other state with a Republican at its head to activate their National Guard and help with the process. A lot of people die along the way.
Likewise, a Democratic Senate can’t do a whole lot to prevent President Trump from exercising the prerogatives of the Commander-in-Chief, so he follows through with his promise to order our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines to commit war crimes. He purges any officers who speak out or refuse to execute his orders and doesn’t stop until our military no longer has the leadership capacity to meet our objectives in the world. Hostile actors take advantage of the instability. Maybe Putin decides to annex more than Crimea—maybe he goes after a NATO country because President Trump has voiced his willingness to look the other way. The conflict escalates in the South China Sea, and President Trump suggests that Japan should arm itself with nuclear weapons if it wants protection. He offers the same to South Korea when he withdraws our troops. After all, he wants the biggest, best military presence we can muster in the Middle East for Operation: Take The Oil. If Congress won’t go along with it, he just ignores the War Powers Resolution like presidents before him.
A Democratic Senate also isn’t able to stop Republican-controlled states from creating their own hellscapes. President Trump will control both the Justice Department and, in time, the Supreme Court, so our Democratic Senate can do fuck-all to preserve abortion rights and marriage equality—even if states take it a step further and enact legislation far to the right of established federal law.
This is before I even get into the implications of completely gutting the federal government. This is before he shutters executive agencies like the EPA, which is within his power without the approval of that whimsical Democratic Senate.
The reality, however, is that a Trump presidency will almost certainly engender Republican control over both chambers of our Congress. And you can multiply the “Fuck, this is bad” factor of every above scenario by a thousand.
I’m going to level with you. The Democratic Party is not going to consider your protest vote an impetus for leftward change. It’s going to conclude that leftists are an unreliable bloc, and it’s going to look instead at the coalition that elected Donald Trump. It’s going to position itself to the right to get those votes when the country is in shambles two years into the Trump Administration and those voters are susceptible to the opposition party. When midterms roll around, the party is going to look a lot less progressive. The next president they run will be a populist, yes, but he’ll hardly have a left-wing bent. The Democratic Party is going to appeal to whatever voters can be made to vote Democratic. A vote against the Democratic Party is a vote for the irrelevance of your politics.
If you want to change the Democratic Party, the way to do it is from within.
A middle finger to the establishment is not worth bringing ruin to the lives of millions of women, immigrants, Hispanics, black people, working people, poor people, Muslim Americans, LGBT people and whoever else the Republican Party decides to oppress. It’s not worth legitimizing fascism in our political system. It’s not worth subjecting every effort at progress for the next quarter-century to a far-right Supreme Court handpicked by Donald Trump.
Please don’t play with people’s lives to make a statement.
