Shame on the Vote Shamers
Has It Really Come Down to “Vote for the Lesser of Two Rapists”?
Whenever the subject of politics comes up, #BlueNoMatterWho Democrats never miss an opportunity to tell people something to the effect of “Voting for a third party Presidential candidate is a vote for Trump,” or “not voting is a vote for Trump.” As former Democratic Presidential candidate Marianne Williamson put it, “You’re voting for Trump either way.” Even Bernie Sanders, ostensibly an independent when he’s not running for President, got in on the act, calling Donald Trump “the most dangerous President in modern history,” and calling supporters who choose not to vote for Joe Biden “irresponsible.”
This is not new. During the 1980 election, the first in which I voted, Democrats told would-be third party voters that “a vote for Anderson is a vote for Reagan,” and gave the usual lecture to the effect of “If you don’t vote for a Democrat for President, the country will be ruined, and it will be your fault.”(Even slavery abolitionists in the 1800s were attacked because they refused to vote for the Whigs, who thought that whether or not black people in a given state were enslaved or free should be voted on by eligible voters (i.e., white men) in that state.)
Whether directly or indirectly, wittingly or unwittingly, the objective of Democratic vote shamers is to shame voters they encounter—who often are not even Democrats — for not wanting to vote for whatever Democrat is on the ballot for President that year. Perhaps it’s time to turn the tables and shame the shamers.
First of all, if you suggest that those who refuse to vote for Democrats do so because they are privileged, shame on you. Nonvoters are not privileged, by and large. They are disproportionately likely to be poor, and also disproportionately likely to be people of color. Part of the reason why Hillary Clinton lost Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to Donald Trump is that turnout of voters in cities with large and disproportionately poor minority communities in places like Detroit and Flint, Michigan; Milwaukee; and Philadelphia plummeted when compared to 2012. Third party voters and nonvoters are disproportionately likely to be among the tens of millions of Americans who lack health insurance, or the even larger number who live paycheck to paycheck — the people living in urban food deserts, on reservations, and in towns that corporate America left for dead ages ago. That’s who you are shaming if you shame nonvoters and third party voters.
And if you obsess over third-party voters and ignore the role of voter suppression and other forms of election-rigging in Democratic candidates’ losses — and in who wins Democratic primaries, too — then shame on you. Through various means including illegally removing people from voter rolls, draconian voter ID laws, “lost” mail-in ballots, and closing of polling places disproportionately frequented by left-leaning racial minorities and college students, sold-out election officials rig elections for the candidates they favor. The number of voters illegally removed from the voter rolls in various swing states that Trump “won” in 2016 was many times his margin of victory in those states. The same was true in 2000, when the number of Democrats (predominantly people of color) disenfranchised by Florida’s voter deregistration scheme was dozens of times more than George Bush’s margin of “victory” in the state. That voter deregistration scheme in Florida was centered around falsely accusing people of being ex-felons, who weren’t eligible to vote in Florida at the time. And there are still millions of actual ex-felons, disproportionately people of color or poor, who aren’t eligible to vote in various states. But will you hear about any of that from vote-shamers? Not on your life!
If you act like people who aren’t die-hard Republicans owe Democratic candidates their vote, and blame those people rather than people who actually vote for the Republican if the Democrat loses, shame on you. I’ve never been a registered Democrat — or Republican — and haven’t voted for a Democrat for President since 1992. Not going to. I don’t believe in voting for corrupt warmongers. If you want to pitch your candidate to someone who might actually be interested, go ahead. Just don’t come knocking on my door.
If you make hyperbolic, fact-free statements like “Biden is 1000 times better than Trump” and accuse people who don’t want to vote for the Democratic Party’s flavor of the year of being “purists,” shame on you. Would you have accused 19th century abolitionists (those who had the right to vote, that is) who wouldn’t vote for the moderately pro-slavery Whig Presidential candidate, Henry Clay (who owned slaves himself), of being “purists,” too? Lots of your antebellum counterparts did just that, shaming abolitionists who in overwhelming numbers refrained from voting altogether or voted for abolitionist third party candidate James Birney. But if you’re thinking “Now is different; that doesn’t apply,” think again. Joe Biden has one of the worst political records of any Democratic politician in modern history. To boot, he is showing early signs of dementia, and there are numerous sexual
assault and harassment/groping allegations against him (which I covered in detail here). So in this particular election, if you support Joe Biden because the alternative (assuming Biden is the nominee) is Donald Trump, you’re pushing not only a “lesser of two evils,” but also a “lesser of two sexual predators” argument. Shame on you.
If you tell people who intend to vote for a third-party candidate that they’re wasting their vote, and dismiss the possibility that third-party candidates can be influential, shame on you. First of all, if you are one of the tens of millions of voters who live in states — New York, California, Kansas, Indiana, etc.—where elections that are close overall are never close in that state, and despite considering the Democrat the “lesser evil” you still vote for them, it is you who are wasting your vote by needlessly voting for a candidate who does not share your ideals.
Furthermore, even though third parties — other than the Republican Party, founded in 1854—have never had lasting electoral success in the US, they have been influential on many occasions. Here it must be acknowledged that, rather than being motivated by ill intent, many who dismiss the role of third parties in American politics do so because they do not know of their significant role in the US as well as other countries whose electoral systems have been unfriendly to third parties.
Third parties played a vital role in the abolition of slavery. Slavery abolitionists were labeled “fanatics” for challenging the two pro-slavery parties and accused of “spoiling” the 1844 election of Henry Clay with the candidacy of the Liberty Party’s James Birney. But the abolitionist movement kept gaining strength through both third-party electoral efforts and direct action such as slave revolts, the Underground Railroad, and public protests such as William Lloyd Garrison’s public burning of the US Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Law. Ultimately, abolitionists joined forces with northern industrialists to form another third party, the Republican Party. Maybe you’ve heard of them. Though they’re known for their right-wing extremism today, in the 1800s what they were most known for was abolishing slavery.
The Independent Labor Party, formed by trade unions in New York, ran radical economist Henry George for Mayor of New York in 1886 on a platform including such demands as the eight-hour day, equal pay for women, and municipal ownership of streetcars. George finished second, ahead of future US president Theodore Roosevelt. The People’s Party, which grew out of the Populist movement during the last third of the 19th century, campaigned against the rapaciousness of Wall Street and big agribusiness. Its 1892 candidate for President, James Weaver, won 8% of the vote. The Populists were absorbed into the Democratic Party within a few years, but following closely on its heels was the Socialist Party, which elected thousands of candidates to local and state office and two members of Congress. Co-founder Eugene Debs, who ran for President five times, won nearly a million votes in 1920 while in prison for protesting World War I. Pressure from the Socialists and other activists led to a period of reform during the early 1900s, including a progressive income tax, labor laws, antitrust legislation, and health and safety regulations. In addition to being a strong voice for the labor movement, the Socialist Party was the first American political party to be ideologically committed to women’s equality, and played a key role in winning the right to vote for women in 1920.
As the Socialist Party was weakened by repression in response to its labor and antiwar activism, the Communist Party grew into a formidable force in the labor movement in the 1920s and 1930s, playing a leading role in union organizing and major strikes all over the country, as well as organizations of poor rural farmers and unemployed people. These actions pressured the US government to enact the New Deal in the 1930s. Though it did not achieve even the modest electoral success of the Socialist Party due to the US government’s persistent repression of radicals throughout the early 1900s, and many of its leaders were jailed under trumped-up charges, it was the first US political party to fully embrace racial equality, and black and white members alike played important roles in the civil rights movement.
The US Green Party advocated equal rights for gay, lesbian and bisexual people, including gay marriage, from its inception in 1984. The same is true for single-payer national health insurance (branded “Medicare For All” in the US), and it also began advocating for legalization of marijuana decades ago. The Green New Deal was originally proposed by the Green Party in 2006, and called for a much more comprehensive and earlier economic transition to cope with climate change than the 2019 Congressional resolution introduced by Edward Markey and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
All of the above contributions of left-wing third parties to social change in the US occurred with precious few instances where third party votes could credibly be argued to have cost a “lesser evil” establishment candidate the election. A possible exception to that — though only if one assumes that a significant number of voters who were anti-slavery gave any consideration to voting for a pro-slavery candidate — was the 1844 Presidential election. The abolitionist Liberty Party candidate, James Birney, received three times as many votes as the margin by which the Whig Party’s Henry Clay lost New York, the electorally decisive state, to Democrat Andrew Jackson. (The Whig Party was the “lesser evil” pro-slavery party.) But within a decade, the Whig Party virtually ceased to exist, supplanted as a major party by the Republican Party, which subsequently elected the President who abolished slavery.
Similar stories of third parties playing a significant role in major social reforms abound in other countries, even countries like Canada and Great Britain with electoral systems equally as hostile to third parties’ electoral success as the United States. In Canada, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, a socialist party that governed the province of Saskatchewan from 1944 to 1960, and its successor the New Democratic Party, played major roles in the introduction of universal healthcare in Saskatchewan in 1962 and nationally by 1968. The story is similar in the UK, where the Labour Party, founded in 1900, became Britain’s second-leading party during World War I and the governing party soon thereafter, implementing many major reforms such as the National Health Service.
In short, voting for third party candidates is not a wasted vote, it doesn’t typically “spoil” the election of major party candidates (who don’t own our votes anyway), it isn’t a reflection of privilege, and it doesn’t make you a “purist”; it’s one of the tools in the toolbox of oppressed groups and their allies as they fight for justice. Those who yearn for major social change in the United States and many countries around the world have often turned to third parties as a tactic for advancing causes ranging from the abolition of slavery and segregation, women’s suffrage, opposition to wars, labor law reform, and universal healthcare, and third parties have indeed advanced those causes on many occasions. I don’t actually want to shame anybody for their criticism of third party voting if it is grounded in lack of awareness rather than malice. What I have tried to accomplish in this article is to educate critics of third party voters about the good reasons why they vote the way they do. If you have read this far, hopefully I have gone a ways toward accomplishing that goal.
Jeff Melton is a social psychologist, copy editor (oceaneditors.com), writer, and longtime activist on a plethora of social justice issues. If you like what you’re reading here, please consider supporting my work on Patreon so that I can do more of this. Even $1 will help!
