SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
third-party
The Third Party Spoiler Argument Is No More!
The sad truth is that in 130 congressional districts there is, in reality, only one party, and the Democrats lose by 25 percent or more time after time, that is, if they even run a candidate at all.
Apr 29, 2026
When you write a book called The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own: How Working People Can Build Independent Political Power, you provoke a lot of angst in some of your readers. More than a few are still haunted by the memory of Ralph Nader and his quixotic 2000 presidential campaign, good fun until, as many believe, he took the election away from Al Gore, the Democrat, and gave it to George W. Bush, the Republican.
Spoiler, spoiler, spoiler echoes in their minds as this year’s make-or-break November elections approach. Won’t talk of third parties encourage defections from the Democrats and risk helping MAGA? Better, it is thought by the worriers, to bury all such discussion.
Even my friend Bob Kuttner, the astute political commentator, knocks me down with the age-old observation that the “American constitutional system, with its lack of proportional representation for minor parties, makes it almost impossible for new parties to gain a lasting foothold.”
That’s certainly the case when the focus is on presidential races. The story, however, is entirely different at the state and local level, where independent third parties have won thousands of offices and have helped to reshape America. The Populists did it in the 1880s and 1890s, the Socialist Party did it in the early 20th century, and the Minnesota Farm-Labor Party did it in the 1920s. These third parties led the charge to stop child labor, legalize labor unions, and rein in the corporate robber barons. They, not the Democrats, constructed the foundation of the New Deal that elevated the lives of working people.
I would like third party skeptics to take a four-step cure:
Step one: Close your eyes and recall what happens on just about every election night. What do you see about five seconds after the polls close? Half the voting districts in the country flash red. They are immediately lost to the Democrats again and again and again. The sad truth is that in 130 congressional districts there is, in reality, only one party, and the Democrats lose by 25 percent or more time after time, that is, if they even run a candidate at all.
Step two: Admit that in those districts the Democratic Party is ineffectual and therefore the spoiler issue isn’t an issue. Repeat once a day: The spoiler problem does not exist in the 130 congressional districts that the Democrats lose by 25 percent or more.
Step three: Take a strong dose of Dan Osborn, the working-class candidate who is running for Senate in Nebraska as an independent and is doing better than any Democrat has done in decades. Why? In deep red America the Democratic brand is poison, but progressive populism can take hold and grow when contested by independent working-class candidates. Run as a Democrat and you’re defeated before you start.
Step four: Think more carefully about what works. While progressive groups like the Working Families Party do admirable work reforming the Democrats in blue and purple districts, their identity as progressive Democrats makes it almost impossible for them to have any impact in red America. (See Chapter 6 of my book.)
I hope that these four steps make it easier for the worriers to hear the central argument of my book:
Working people are alienated from the Democratic Party and need a political home of their own, especially in red America.
We need to understand the causes of that alienation and how a new political home can be built outside the two major parties without becoming a spoiler in any shape or form.
It’s time to put aside the spoiler canard. In fact, it’s time to get used to the fact that more and more independents are running in red America, attacking both billionaire parties. The Democrats, not the independents, are becoming the new spoilers as they realize that they are now the third party. (See Montana right now.)
You may find other points of contention in my new book, and I’m happy to talk about them all, but the third-party spoiler problem isn’t one of them. Take a look and decide for yourself.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Elon Musk's New Far-Right Nazi Party for America
It’s the opposite of Trump, who was interested only in building a vehicle for his own self-advancement. Musk is far more dangerous.
Jul 13, 2025
There are always worse political figures waiting in the wings.
In Israel, for instance, Benjamin Netanyahu is a relative moderate compared to some members of his cabinet, like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who believes that letting two million Palestinians die of hunger in Gaza is “justified and moral.” In Russia, ultranationalists to the right of Putin espouse racist and anti-immigrant views, while the country’s Communist Party recently declared that Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin was “a mistake.”
And then there’s Donald Trump, whom scholars consistently rank as the worst president in U.S. history. Even here, in a country of only two main parties and a blanderizing political discourse, worse options abound. Imagine if Trump’s successor actually believed in something other than his own enrichment and self-aggrandizement? What if Trump is simply preparing the ground for an authentically far-right leader to take over, someone even more extreme than Vice President J.D. Vance or Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR)?
Elon Musk is prepared to use a lot of his considerable fortune to test that proposition.
What Musk Believes
It’s tempting to believe that Elon Musk decided to create a new political party in a fit of pique because of his personal falling-out with Donald Trump. In public, however, Musk links his decision to the recent passage of Trump’s legislative package and the several trillion dollars that the measure will add to the national debt. After bonding with Trump over eviscerating government, Musk was no doubt appalled to discover that the president, in the end, turned out to a more conventional tax-less-and-spend-more Republican.
Either way, Musk announced last week the creation of his new America Party. The details of the party platform are scant, as you might guess from a party created by tweet. Musk has naturally emphasized “responsible spending,” debt reduction, and deregulation. He has also added pro-gun and pro-crypto planks to his expanding platform along with “free speech” and “pro-natalist” positions.
These preferences might qualify the America Party as a typical libertarian project—if it weren’t for Musk’s Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration, his support of the neo-Nazi party Alternative for Germany, and his fantastical accusations of “genocide” against the South African government for its treatment of white farmers. Not surprisingly, Musk entertains extreme views on race, genetics, and demography. As The Washington Post reports:
He has warned that lower birth rates and immigration are diluting American culture and the cultures of other majority-White and Asian countries. “We should be very cautious about having some sort of global mixing pot,” he said earlier this year. He has called unchecked illegal immigration “civilizational suicide” and “an invasion,” though he himself was working illegally, in violation of his visa, after he deferred his enrollment in a Stanford University graduate program to launch his career in the United States in the 1990s. He also warns that declining birth rates are leading to “population collapse,” and, having fathered over a dozen children, stresses the importance of “smart people” having more kids.
In his latest sign of malign intent, Musk removed controls from the artificial intelligence component of his social media platform. The newly unshackled Grok—named after a verb in Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land that means a deep, intuitive understanding—began to rant anti-Semitically. As they say in Silicon Valley: garbage in, garbage out.
You might argue that it doesn’t really matter what Musk says or does, given that his approval rating plummeted to 35 percent during his tenure as DOGE-in-chief. Even his popularity among Republicans has dropped from 78 percent in March to 62 percent after his break with Trump in June.
But Americans are political amnesiacs. The ravages of DOGE, the insults traded with Trump: all of that could disappear down the memory hole once Trump’s economic program starts to hurt the blue-collar constituents that supported his 2024 candidacy. That’s when Musk will likely dust off his earlier criticisms of the “big and beautiful bill” and start promoting his new party in earnest.
Billionaires Gone Wild
Trump, a billionaire who has consistently overstated his assets and his importance, proved that an idiot with a big bank account could buy the presidency. Now along comes Elon Musk with even more money, a bigger ego, and a comparable lack of shame.
Musk’s political trajectory resembles Trump’s in other respects as well. They’re both supreme opportunists who have changed their political views to suit the moment. Musk used to donate to both Democrats and Republicans, considered the prospect of a Trump presidency to be an “embarrassment,” and believed in the importance of addressing climate change. He was always something of a libertarian in his embrace of the free market, but there was little indication in the early 2000s that he would veer off into extremes.
If historian Jill Lepore is right, however, Musk is just returning to his roots. His current views uncannily echo those of his grandfather, J.N. Haldeman, who moved from Canada to apartheid South Africa where his racist views were more the norm. She writes that Haldeman, in the 1930s,
joined the quasi-fascistic Technocracy movement, whose proponents believed that scientists and engineers, rather than the people, should rule. He became a leader of the movement in Canada, and, when it was briefly outlawed, he was jailed, after which he became the national chairman of what was then a notoriously antisemitic party called Social Credit. In the nineteen-forties, he ran for office under its banner, and lost. In 1950, two years after South Africa instituted apartheid, he moved his family to Pretoria, where he became an impassioned defender of the regime.
Like his grandfather, Musk escaped from his country of birth, in this case a South Africa just then shrugging off the apartheid system that had drawn J.N. Haldeman there. Eventually in Silicon Valley, Musk found a like-minded community. He palled around with Peter Thiel—and created PayPal together—before eventually falling out over artificial intelligence. Thiel, too, has uber-libertarian beliefs, as do other Silicon Valley disrupters like Marc Andreesen who have shifted rightward. They all have a fondness for the latest avatar of the Technocracy movement, Curtis Yarvin, himself a refugee from saner realms of the political spectrum, who has waxed rhapsodic over replacing a democratically elected president with a CEO-in-chief.
And that, perhaps, is the position that Musk imagines for himself. So what if the Constitution forbids a foreign-born president? As Trump has made clear, the Constitution too is ripe for disruption.
Anticipating Musk’s Next Political Move
Vladimir Putin was once a fairly conventional apparatchik before he donned the costume of a Russian nationalist. Viktor Orban was an ego-driven liberal before he found political opportunity in Hungary as an illiberal autocrat. Elon Musk’s political evolution could be compared to the trajectory of these two opportunists.
Elon Musk has indeed cultivated a relationship with Putin over the last two years—after initially supporting Kyiv following Russia’s 2022 invasion—and has floated pro-Russian peace plans to end the conflict in Ukraine. Musk met with Orban at Mar-a-Lago, along with Trump, and has tweeted support in the Hungarian leader’s direction from time to time. But the illiberalism of Putin and Orban is not really a model for Musk.
Instead, he has gravitated toward something even less palatable: the Alternative fur Deutschland. The AfD, founded in 2013, built its base on anti-immigrant sentiment, attracted extremists with its anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic rhetoric, and capitalized on anti-elite anger by railing against heat pumps. Musk has framed his support of the AfD as a defense of “free speech,” a familiar tactic of those who routinely engage in hate speech. In an op-ed in the German Welt am Sonntag newspaper that was calculated to influence the German elections, Musk wrote that only the AfD could save Germany by “ensuring that Germany does not lose its identity in the pursuit of globalization.” This was a particularly rich observation from one of the most powerful promoters (and beneficiaries) of globalization.
Musk himself lost his earlier identity as a globalizer to become today’s xenophobe. It’s a new type of “whitewashing” whereby internationalism somehow loses its prefix in the laundering process.
The center, however, is not giving up so easily. Even as a larger portion of the electorate is supporting the AfD, the German establishment is mobilizing against the right-wing party. The country’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution determined in May that the AfD is an extremist organization. More recently, the Social Democratic Party began the process of banning the AfD, which requires that a qualifying group meet two criteria: it must threaten Germany’s democratic order and it must be sufficiently popular to pose such a risk. If, after a lengthy legal process, the party is deemed unconstitutional, it is dissolved.
Obviously, such a process can’t dissolve public support for the party’s positions. Currently the AfD is polling at 23 percent, behind the Christian Democrats (28 percent) but ahead of all other parties. For the time being, these other parties are refusing to collaborate with the AfD at a federal level, though there have been some cases of collaboration at the subnational level. A ban—of a party or of collaboration with that party—may be satisfying, but it doesn’t address the reasons that the party is flourishing.
The Musk Effect
In the first flush of Brexit and Trump’s electoral victory in 2016, Steve Bannon attempted to build a National International out of far-right governments, parties, and movements. He largely failed. Now, Elon Musk has stepped up to the plate, with his media platform and his deep pockets.
As NBC reports:
Musk has posted online in support of right-wing street demonstrations in Brazil and Ireland. He has welcomed a new conservative prime minister in New Zealand and expressed agreement with a nationalist right-wing politician in the Netherlands. He’s met in person several times with the right-wing leaders of Argentina and Italy. His social media app X has complied with censorship requests from right-wing leaders in India and Turkey.
As Bannon discovered, the obstacles are many to creating a far-right network. Simply put, entities devoted to the politics of hate often end up hating each other as well.
Musk faces numerous speed bumps at home as well to the creation of a third party. The administrative hurdles are enormous, which is how the Democrats and Republicans have managed to preserve their duopoly. “I was on a Zoom call yesterday with people talking about this,” one political analyst told The New York Times. “A lot of them predicted that he’s the kind of person who, when he finds out how hard this is, he’ll give up.”
But Musk, like his Silicon Valley buddies, knows how to apply maximum pressure to weak points in a system in order to make it crack. He has promised to focus on just a few races where he might have the greatest likelihood of winning. It’s the opposite of Trump, who was interested only in building a vehicle for his own self-advancement.
Musk is far more dangerous. He actually has ideas. They’re terrible ideas, to be sure. But they are motivating him to build something more durable and, in the long term, potentially more disruptive.
It’s too terrifying a prospect to grok.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Workers Want a New Political Party: The Question Is Not Whether to Build It, But How
The monied interests can’t stop the growing working-class understanding of the self-evident truth: The billionaires have two parties; we need one of our own!
Jun 28, 2025
In our YouGov survey of 3,000 voters in the Rust Belt States of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin, 57% of the respondents supported a new political formation outside the two major parties; Only 19% opposed. This finding is especially notable because these voters were asked to support a very radical statement of anti-corporate populism:
Would you support a new organization, the Independent Workers Political Association, that would support working-class issues independent of both the Democratic and Republican parties. It would run and support independent political candidates committed to a platform that included
- Stoping big companies that receive tax dollars from laying off workers who pay taxes;
- Guaranteeing everyone who wants to work has a decent-paying job, and if the private sector can’t provide it, the government will;
- Raising the minimum wage so every family can lead a decent life; and
- Stoping drug company price gouging and putting price controls on food cartels.
Every demographic group supported this proposal, led by 71% of Rust Belt voters less than 30 years of age, and 74% of those who feel very insecure about losing their job.
So How Do We Build It?
The knee-jerk response when hearing about building a new political party is to either think too big or too small, or to think it just can’t be done given the nature of our two-party system.
Some believe a new party will only be possible with the emergence of a charismatic figure who leads us out of the wilderness. They long for a progressive version of President Donald Trump, someone who can capture the Democratic Party—as he did with the Republicans—or smash it into smithereens. As my insightful friend put it: “Needless to say, your new party needs a charismatic leader. Mr. Trump is an entertaining idiot celebrity millionaire with a Borsht Belt sense of timing and a mean streak as deep as the Grand Canyon. Top that! Where is your Fidel or your Lech Walesa or your Jesus Christ?”
That’s exactly what’s wrong with building a new party on the back of a charismatic leader. Good luck finding one.
Imagine if unions and progressives formed an Independent Workers Political Association and fielded dozens of working-class independent candidates in bright red congressional districts.
Others argue for the “go small” approach, running independent progressive candidates to capture local seats on town councils, school boards, and as county supervisors. Local offices are an important part of developing a new party, but it is very hard at the local level, except in large, prosperous cities, to enact policies that meet the needs and interests of working people. Focusing locally often means delivering small or delivering not much at all. It is a start, but it doesn’t speak to the alienation workers feel about national politics.
The biggest argument against third parties, however, is the limitation built into our two-party system. A third party in most cases becomes a spoiler, siphoning away votes that help the worst party win. For instance, if an independent working-class candidate enters a race as a third party, most of their votes will come from the Democratic candidate, and most likely assure victory for the Republican. There are still many, especially among labor leaders, who blame Ralph Nader for the election of Geroge W. Bush in 2000.
This argument is true on a national level, but it no longer applies to many congressional races because much of the country now has a one-party system. Nearly 60% of all House races in 2024 were won by 25% or more. In 132 districts, the Republican won by 25% or more (and there were another 112 similarly lopsided Democratic districts). And between 2020 and 2024, the Republicans won 20 Senate races by 25% or more. You can’t be a spoiler in a one-party race. The terrain for challenges in those contests is wide open.
Dan Osborne Showed How That Could Be Cone in Deep-Red Nebraska
Republican Deb Fisher won the Nebraska Senate seat in 2012 by 15% against Bob Kerry, the Democrat. In 2018, she upped her margin of victory to 19%. In 2024, running for a third term, she was viewed as so strong a favorite that the Democrats decided not to waste resources by running anyone against her—a true one-party race.
Two working-class organizers noticed the vacuum in Nebraska and sought to identify a labor candidate who would run as an independent. After canvassing many state and local labor union people, they found Dan Osborne, a pipe fitter and former local union president who had led a strike against the Kellog corporation. They pitched him on the idea, and he decided to give it a go.
Together they raised funds, designed literature, formulated ads, and traveled around the state speaking to voters about the needs and interests of working people.
It scared the hell out of Fischer and Republicans, who ended up pouring millions of dollars into the race as Osborne gained traction.
Osborne threatened to unseat the three-term senator, but lost by 6.7%, a strong showing compared to the 20% margin by which former Vice President Kamala Harris lost to Trump in the state.
Imagine if unions and progressives formed an Independent Workers Political Association and fielded dozens of working-class independent candidates in bright red congressional districts, especially the 20 one-party districts in the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Our polling strongly suggests those candidates, running on a strong populist economic platform, would do very well.
Would they win? Some might, but even if they all lost, close challenges and strong campaign rhetoric would help elevate issues important to working people and might even lead to concessions on the part of the opposition during the heat of a close campaign. And, as in Nebraska, a credible challenge will force campaign spending into districts where candidates unfriendly to labor are expected to win in a cake walk.
But as Ringo Sang, “You Know It Don’t Come Easy.”
The monied interests in the U.S., with trillions of dollars at their disposal, will make sure the two major parties come down hard on any efforts to build a new working-class political formation. They will spend millions to trash working-class candidates like Dan Osborne. They will try to outlaw third party efforts by making it nearly impossible for newcomers to gain ballot lines. Already, the New York state government, run by Democrats no less, has banned the use of the words “independence” and “independent” from ballot lines.
But the monied interests can’t stop the growing working-class understanding of the self-evident truth: The billionaires have two parties; we need one of our own!
How Do We Move Forward?
I can’t tell you what you should do, but I can share what I’ll be trying to do. I’m not a political organizer. I’m not an elected political or labor leader with a large base. I represent no one. But I am an educator, especially an educator of working people. My job and the job of the Labor Institute is to create educational programs, conduct research, and write articles that engage working people in the discussion of whether a new political formation should be built, and if so, how to do it.
Too many activists see education as a side show, a diversion from the goal of building something new. But every successful movement that has challenged the monied interests, from the anti-abolitionists to the rise of the trade union movement, required an educational core. People not only need to move forward, but they need to understand why.
It’s going to be a fight, and it’s going to take some time. But working people are more than ready for something new.
In the late 19th century, the populists fielded 6,000 educators to build the most powerful anti-corporate movement our country has ever experienced. That educational core helped to build an interracial working-class political formation that fought hard to protect the lives and livelihoods of small farmers and factory workers against the robber barons and Jim Crow. They spread the ideas that eventually led to controls on corporate power. Their dreams became the basis of the New Deal, the growth of the labor movement, and the establishment of working-class power and prosperity after WWII.
Sadly, that power and prosperity has been whittled away over the last generation. The Democrats, once the party of the working class, seemed to have switched sides. Working-class prosperity was transferred to the richest of the rich. Now, we need a new educational effort that addresses how to provide decent jobs and livelihoods for all working people, instead of fattening the wallets of the superrich, (something we have started to do with our Reversing Runaway Inequality educational programs.)
Those with large, vibrant constituencies, like labor union leaders, will have to take on the task of organizational building. They will need to test the waters by fielding independent working-class candidates in one-party districts, and running ballot initiatives that protect working-class needs, like prohibiting compulsory layoffs at corporations that receive taxpayer money.
It’s going to be a fight, and it’s going to take some time. But working people are more than ready for something new. Our polling shows that clearly.
Now is the time to build the politics of the future, instead of coming up with reasons from the past for why it can’t be done.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Is Bernie Sanders Launching a Third Party? 'Not Right Now, No'
"Real change in this country will come about when an organized working class leads the fight for justice," the Vermont senator said in a new interview.
Nov 27, 2024
An email Sen. Bernie Sanders sent to supporters this past weekend fueled speculation that he could be laying the groundwork for a new political party in the wake of Democrats' crushing defeat in the 2024 election.
But in an interview with The Nation's John Nichols published Tuesday, Sanders (I-Vt.) said that he's not considering forming a party to challenge the entrenched Democratic and Republican establishments—at least not at the moment.
"Not right now, no," Sanders told Nichols, who asked the senator directly about his email to supporters and whether he intends to create a new party.
The senator argued in the email it is "highly unlikely" that the Democratic leadership will "learn the lessons of their defeat and create a party that stands with the working class and is prepared to take on the enormously powerful special interests that dominate our economy, our media, and our political life."
Sanders, who caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate, told Nichols that while he's not currently backing the creation of a new party, he is making the case that "where it is more advantageous to run as an Independent, outside of the Democratic primary process, we should do that." He also emphasized the need for more working-class candidates across the country.
"Real change in this country will come about when an organized working class leads the fight for justice. We need working-class candidates to help us do that."
The senator said the upstart campaign of Independent Dan Osborn—a union steamfitter who launched an unexpectedly close challenge to two-term Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) while shunning the state's Democratic establishment—"should be looked at as a model for the future."
"He took on both political parties," Sanders said of Osborn, who outperformed Vice President Kamala Harris by 14 percentage points in Nebraska and is now launching a PAC aimed at helping working-class candidates run for office.
"He took on the corporate world," Sanders continued. "He ran as a strong trade unionist. Without party support, getting heavily outspent, he got through to working-class people all over Nebraska. It was an extraordinary campaign, and it tells me that the American people are sick and tired of seeing the rich getting richer. They think billionaires dominate both political parties. They want real change, and Dan's campaign raised those issues in a very significant way."
Since Trump's victory earlier this month, Sanders has been scathing in his assessment of the current state of the Democratic Party and its long-term trajectory as it hemorrhages working-class support.
"The Democratic Party is, increasingly, a party dominated by billionaires, run by well-paid consultants whose ideology is to tinker around the edges of a grossly unjust and unfair oligarchic system," Sanders told Nichols. "If we are ever going to bring about real change in this country, we have got to significantly grow class consciousness in America."
In his email over the weekend, Sanders wrote that Democratic leaders "are much too wedded to the billionaires and corporate interests that fund their campaigns," making them reflexively hostile to the kinds of transformative changes needed to "build a multi-racial, multi-generational working class movement" with the power to challenge the nation's deeply unequal economic and political status quo.
"How do we recruit more working-class candidates for office at all levels of government? Should we be supporting Independent candidates who are prepared to take on both parties? How do we better support union organizing?" Sanders asked in the email. "These are some of the political questions that, together, we need to address. And it is absolutely critical that you make your voice heard during this process."
"Not me. Us," he added, reprising the central message of his 2020 campaign. "That is the only way forward."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Climate Groups Warn Third-Party Vote 'Could Hand Our Planet's Future Over to Trump'
"Every vote for Dr. Jill Stein or Cornel West instead of Kamala Harris makes it more likely that Donald Trump will win," wrote a coalition of leading environmental groups.
Oct 25, 2024
A coalition of leading U.S. environmental groups warned Thursday that a third-party vote in next month's election could help usher in climate disaster by improving Republican nominee Donald Trump's chances of victory, a risk they said the planet can't afford as time runs out to avert catastrophic warming.
Voting for Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, in the November 5 election is imperative because they represent "our best chance at making more progress over the next four years," 350 Action, the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, Climate Emergency Action, Earthjustice Action, Food and Water Action, Friends of the Earth Action, and other climate groups wrote in an open letter addressed to "potential supporters of Jill Stein or Cornel West."
While the letter thanks Stein, the Green Party candidate, and West, who is running as an Independent, "for raising important issues in this election," the groups argued that Harris "is the only candidate with a record of success addressing climate change," pointing to her tie-breaking vote in support of the Inflation Reduction Act and legal action against oil companies during her tenure as California's attorney general.
Trump, by contrast, "waged the worst White House attack ever against the environment and public health while in office," the groups wrote.
One analysis estimates that a second Trump presidency could result in an additional 4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions by 2030, negating recent progress in renewable energy development and inflicting large-scale climate damage. Fossil fuel industry attorneys and lobbyists are already drawing up executive orders for Trump to sign should he prevail on November 5.
"He has made clear that his second term will be even more extreme, drawing from the detailed anti-environment proposals and plans contained in Project 2025," the climate coalition wrote in the open letter. "Every vote for Dr. Jill Stein or Cornel West instead of Kamala Harris makes it more likely that Donald Trump will win."
In a separate social media thread on Thursday, the youth-led Sunrise Movement—a signatory of the new open letter—wrote that "this election will decide the temperature on our planet for thousands of years."
"It will decide if we have a fighting chance to stop the climate crisis or not," the group added. "Voting alone or voting third party won't save us. Let's be honest—financing a genocide, competing on who can be crueler to immigrants, or thumbs-upping fracking is fucked. A Harris presidency won't stop violence. No president ever will."
"But neither will disengaging or throwing away our votes. This election might not save the world but it will set the scene," said Sunrise, which has been working to mobilize young voters in swing states to back Harris. "We have six years to stop the climate crisis and we can't afford to give four of them away to Trump. What your summers look like in 2047, where your family might live in 2063, whether tens of millions of more people become climate refugees or not will be deeply impacted by the election results."
And we have to vote like it because since 1968, no 3rd party candidate has won a single state, let alone the presidency.
So yes—we must vote, and we have to do so much more if we truly plan to win.
— Sunrise Movement 🌅 (@sunrisemvmt) October 24, 2024
Tens of millions of ballots have already been cast in dozens of states across the U.S. ahead of Election Day, with officials reporting record turnout in battlegrounds such as Michigan and Georgia.
Stein and West are among several third-party candidates on the ballot in critical states that could decide the presidential contest. Recent polling has shown that Stein and West are both polling around 1% in the key state of Michigan, where Harris and Trump are in a dead heat.
Michigan has received significant attention this election cycle given that it was the birthplace of the Uncommitted National Movement, which began as a primary campaign effort to push President Joe Biden to halt U.S. support for Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip.
The movement has since shifted its focus to pressuring Harris to back an arms embargo against Israel, something she has declined to do. While Uncommitted opted against endorsing Harris last month, it said it opposes the Republican nominee and warned that "third-party votes in key swing states could help inadvertently deliver a Trump presidency given our country's broken Electoral College system."
"We are going to be voting for the world's climate future even if we are reluctant to admit it."
Stein has dismissed the notion that she's a potential "spoiler" candidate, arguing her supporters would likely opt to stay home instead of vote for Harris or Trump if there was no third-party choice.
But speaking in Michigan earlier this month, Stein supporter Kshama Sawant—a former member of the Seattle City Council—acknowledged that "we are not in a position to win the White House" and said she views the Green Party candidacy as an opportunity to "deny Kamala Harris the state of Michigan."
"And the polls show that most likely Harris cannot win the election without Michigan," Sawant added.
That approach could be devastating for the planet, progressive lawmakers and climate advocates have argued.
"If Donald Trump is elected, the struggle against climate change is over," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote in a social media post on Thursday. "The United States will withdraw from the movement toward sustainable energy."
Kumar Venkat, a carbon footprint analyst, wrote in an op-ed for Common Dreams on Friday that "if elected, it is reasonable to expect that Harris will build on the Biden administration's work and keep the U.S. on the net-zero path."
"Donald Trump has made it exceedingly clear that he does not believe climate change is even a problem," Venkat wrote. "Between Project 2025 pushing for a 'whole-of-government unwinding' of U.S. climate policy and the fossil fuel industry drafting detailed plans to dismantle the Biden administration's climate rules, it is a safe bet that we will no longer be on a trajectory to net-zero emissions if Trump is back in the White House."
"We are going to be voting for the world's climate future," he added, "even if we are reluctant to admit it."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Time for a United Front Against Trump and Realism About Harris
The policy that Harris has defended for the war on Gaza is despicable, yet she is the only candidate who can spare us from another Trump presidency, which—from all indications—would be far worse than the first one.
Oct 14, 2024
With Election Day just three weeks off and voting already underway in some states, the race for president is down to the wire. Progressives could make the difference.
While no one in their left mind plans to vote for the fascistic and unhinged former U.S. President Donald Trump, some say they won’t vote for Vice President Kamala Harris because of her loyalty to President Joe Biden’s support for the Israeli war on Gaza. That might enable Trump to win with enough electoral votes from swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Those seven states are where progressives may well hold the future in their voting hands.
If it becomes a reality, the Trump-Vance administration will force progressives back on their heels, necessarily preoccupied with trying to mitigate the onslaught of massive damage being inflicted by right-wing zealots with vast government power.
The policy that Harris has defended for the war on Gaza is despicable. At the same time, she is the only candidate who can spare us from another Trump presidency, which—from all indications—would be far worse than the first one.
The need is urgent for dialectics—“a method of examining and discussing opposing ideas in order to find the truth”—in this case, the truth of what’s most needed at this electoral crossroads of fateful history.
“The harms of the other options” mean that the best course of action is to vote for Harris, 25 Islamic clerics said in a letter released last week. They focused on an overarching truth: “Particularly in swing states, a vote for a third party could enable Trump to win that state and therefore the election.” The U.S. clerics called such a vote “both a moral and a strategic failure.”
Personally, as a resident of solid-blue California, I have no intention of voting for Harris. But if I lived in one of the seven swing states, I wouldn’t hesitate to join in voting for her as the only way to defeat Trump.
Some speak of the need to exercise conscience rather than voting for Harris. Yet in swing states, what kind of “conscience” is so self-focused that it risks doing harm to others as a result of a Trump presidency?
If it becomes a reality, the Trump-Vance administration will force progressives back on their heels, necessarily preoccupied with trying to mitigate the onslaught of massive damage being inflicted by right-wing zealots with vast government power.
On domestic policies—involving racism, reproductive rights, civil liberties, the environment, climate, labor rights, the social safety net, civil rights, voting rights, LGBTQ rights, freedom of speech and the right to organize, the judicial system, and so much more—the differences between the Trump and Harris forces are huge. To claim that those differences are insignificant is a nonsensical version of elitism, no matter how garbed in leftist rhetoric.
On foreign policy, Harris is the vice president in an administration fully on board with bipartisan militarism that keeps boosting the Pentagon budget, bypassing diplomacy for ending the Ukraine war while stoking the cold war, and—with vast arms shipments to Israel—literally making possible the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
At the same time, anyone who thinks that Trump (“finish the job”) wouldn’t be even worse for Palestinian people—hard as that is to imagine—doesn’t grasp why Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is so eager for Trump to win.
The leadership of the Uncommitted Movement has sorted out the political options. The terrain was well described by Uncommitted leader Abbas Alawieh, who said last month: “At this time, our movement opposes a Donald Trump presidency whose agenda includes plans to accelerate the killing in Gaza while intensifying the suppression of anti-war organizing. And our movement is not recommending a third-party vote in the presidential election, especially as third-party votes in key swing states could help inadvertently deliver a Trump presidency, given our country’s broken Electoral College system.”
As his frequent collaborator C.J. Polychroniou noted last month, Noam Chomsky “has repeatedly made the argument that voting for a third-party or independent candidate in a swing state would accomplish nothing but increase the possibility of the most extreme and positively nuts candidate winning the election.”
In an interview with Jacobin a few weeks ago, Alawieh had this to say:
As someone who has family who lives in South Lebanon right now—who are living under the terror of U.S. weapons raining down on them from the Israeli military—I do not have the luxury of giving up on the only one of the two major parties where there is room for this debate. To be clear, there’s room for this debate not because the Democratic Party is friendly to Palestinian human rights. There’s room for this debate because A) the Republican Party is not the party where we can have this conversation; not a single federal elected official on the Republican side even supports a cease-fire as this genocide has raged on, and B) the Democratic Party speaks of being the party of justice and inclusion, and there are more and more of us within the party who are insisting that the party change its immoral and illegal support of sending weapons to harm and kill civilians.
Similarly, another prominent Uncommitted Movement leader, Palestinian American Layla Elabed, said: “We urge Uncommitted voters to register anti-Trump votes and vote up and down the ballot. Our focus remains on building this anti-war coalition, both inside and outside the Democratic Party.”
This is certainly not the presidential election that we want, but it’s the one we have. The immediate task is to prevent a Trump victory. His defeat is essential to keep doors open for progressive change that a new Trump presidency would slam shut with extreme right-wing power.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Dark Money-Backed 'No Labels' Drops Third-Party Presidential Bid
One observer quipped that No Labels was calling it quits "to spend more time with their lobbyists."
Apr 04, 2024
Less than a month after No Labels announced it would nominate a "unity ticket" for the 2024 presidential election, the group said Thursday that it is abandoning its longshot third-party White House bid.
"No Labels has always said we would only offer our ballot line to a ticket if we could identify candidates with a credible path to winning the White House," the group said in a statement. "No such candidates emerged, so the responsible course of action is for us to stand down."
As Common Dreams reported last month, No Labels—whose own leader has admitted is "not in it to win it" but rather to "give people a choice"—has poured millions of dollars in dark money contributions into a quixotic run that critics like MoveOn executive director Rahna Epting warned could "swing the election to Donald Trump," the twice-impeached former Republican president and presumptive GOP nominee, 91 federal and state criminal charges notwithstanding.
No Labels had floated former Republican Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, a failed 2024 GOP presidential contender, as possible "unity ticket" candidates. However, the group ultimately found no takers.
Top No Labels donors include billionaire and multimillionaire Trump supporters like Nelson Peltz, private equity executive Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone, and former 20th Century Fox CEO James Murdoch. Louis Bacon, the billionaire CEO of hedge fund Moore Capital Management, donated $1 million each to No Labels and the Republican Party after giving the maximum allowable contribution to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, formerly one of the conservative Democrats in Congress and now an Independent.
Even with all that financial backing, No Labels' path to the ballot has been dubious. MoveOn has urged states to investigate the group for allegedly misleading voters through deceptive canvassing methods that result in their disenfranchisement.
The U.S. two-party system has been criticized for monopolizing political power at the expense of democracy and voter choice by actively working to thwart all viable third-party and independent candidates. However, political pragmatists note what they say is the folly of running unwinnable races.
"Third-party candidates are the fools gold of this election," MoveOn said on social media, adding that neither No Labels nor conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy "have ballot access in all 50 states and mathematically cannot win."
"They can only play spoiler," the group added.
However, while Democrats and Republicans often automatically gain ballot access, the two parties are largely behind state laws that create often insurmountable barriers for third-party and independent challengers.
Other progressives also welcomed the news of No Labels' withdrawal—but with a warning. Melanie D'Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, quipped on social media that No Labels was quitting "to spend more time with their lobbyists."
"Billionaires pump millions into No Labels, and in return, their politicians push policies that transfer wealth from the working-class back to billionaires," she added. "Just because they aren't running a presidential candidate doesn't mean they aren't still a serious threat to democracy."
Keep ReadingShow Less
It's Almost 2024. Where’s the Party of the Working Class?
Is it possible to build a political party that truly speaks to the needs of working people in an era of runaway inequality and incessant mass layoffs?
Dec 27, 2023
A quarter century ago, the late labor leader Tony Mazzocchi issued a dire warning. Unless a labor party was created, working people would abandon the Democrats and flock towards authoritarians who would promise job protections and economic stability. Mazzocchi found enormous resonance among workers when he declared, “The bosses have two parties. We need one of our own.”
That rings even more true today for many working-class people. But is it possible to build a political party that truly speaks to the needs of working people in an era of runaway inequality and incessant mass layoffs?
Because neither Mazzocchi nor other labor leaders wanted to create a spoiler party that would siphon off Democratic votes and elect Republicans, the idea never found a way to gain significant traction. But the opportunity to create a new party would be more likely if one of the two major parties imploded, which might be happening right now to the Republican Party as it wallows in the fantasy world of Trump’s election lies and conspiracies.
Liz Cheney, the former number-three ranking Republican leader in the House of Representatives and the daughter of George W. Bush’s vice president Dick Cheney, has impeccable conservative bona fides. But she no longer has a home in a party dominated by Trump acolytes. After voting to impeach President Trump and having co-chaired the January 6th congressional investigation, she lost her Wyoming seat in the House to a MAGA Republican.
Having worked all my adult life in support of labor, it saddens me even to speculate about a battle for the allegiance of the working class between the corporate Democrats and the right-wing Republicans.
Cheney is currently considering a third-party presidential run which, in effect, would create a second Republican Party. Because she sees Trump as a clear and present danger to democracy, she wants to defeat him by denying him ‘moderate’ Republican votes. (These days the definition of a ‘moderate’ seems to be anyone who accepts that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.)
She is aware that her presidential run could launch a rival Republican party, but said, “I don’t know if our party can be saved. We may need to build a new party.” And so, it is conceivable we could soon have three major parties—the Democrats, the Trump Republicans, and the Cheney Republicans.
Which of these is the party of the working class?
Not the Cheney Republicans. Her party would draw the corporate never-Trumpers who also are fiscal conservatives, seeking to balance the federal budget and trim social welfare programs. These corporate Republicans would have little use for labor unions and labor law protections. They would stand in opposition to raising the minimum wage and would oppose facilitating union organizing. They would also likely advocate for an increase in the Social Security retirement age, which harms many in the working class who tend to die younger than higher-income people. As a result, it’s highly doubtful that Cheney and her backers would be able to attract much working-class support or that of any labor unions.
The Democrats might be feeling cocky from a Republican Party implosion. That should make it much easier for Democrats to retain working-class support. Then again, there is the risk that the Democrats might move even closer to Wall Street as the Cheney party becomes a serious competitor for the backing of wealthy financiers who are socially liberal and alienated by MAGA. Unlike the Democrats, Cheney wouldn’t have to straddle between supporting policies that enrich the well-to-do while also claiming to support the working-class.
Starting with Bill Clinton, the competition for Wall Street cash pulled the Democrats further away from the working class, who the Dems thought had no place else to go. It could happen again.
Moving even closer to Wall Street could compound the difficulties that the Democrats already have. Not only are white working-class voters moving away from the Democrats, but so are Black and Hispanic voters. Biden’s support among non-white voters has fallen from the 70 percent he received in 2020 against Trump, to 53 percent today. And the decline has been dramatic among non-white voters with no college education and whose incomes are less than $50,000 per year. Many of those voters are unlikely to rush toward the Trump or Cheney Republicans, but they might instead sit out the election, which would be enormously harmful to the Democrats.
This creates an opportunity for the Trump Republicans to draw working-class voters by focusing on job security. But the Republicans seem fixated on culture wars and therefore run the risk of alienating working-class people of all shades and ethnicities who have become more liberal since 2010 on key social issues, including immigration. The research done for my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, strongly suggests that the number one working-class issue is job security, not critical race theory, not gendered bathrooms, or Mickey Mouse. Taking on corporate power has resonance, and for good reason. These workers have suffered through nearly 30 million mass layoffs since 1996.
Right-wing Republicans have made a handful of selective anti-corporate gestures. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Oh.) is going after Silicon Valley corporations over privacy issues and wants to break them up. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is pushing legislation to help shareholders change corporate woke policies. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) even introduced a bill to get corporate money out of politics. Also, there are Republican attacks against corporations over diversity policies. There are attacks against corporate climate change-oriented investment policies, and even attacks against Disney for opposing legislation that would be harmful to the LGBTQ+ communities in Florida. But if you have had the stomach to listen to the Republican presidential debates you have heard the candidates competing to flash their anti-labor credentials, too.
It’s unlikely that the current flock of Trump Republicans will accelerate working-class support. But that could change in a hurry if they dared to attack corporate mass layoffs, the way Trump did by successfully pressuring the Carrier Corporation to refrain from moving a facility from Indiana to Mexico in 2017.
A much better outcome for the working class and the country would be for the Democratic Party to attack wasteful mass layoffs caused by stock buybacks and leveraged buyouts. When GM recently announced a $10 billion stock buyback designed to please Wall Street, the Democrats were silent. They missed an opportunity to hold the company to account for enriching Wall Street instead of investing more in clean car research and development. Rather than compete with Tesla, the top officers and Wall Street hedge funds pocketed the money. Stock buybacks before 1982 were considered stock price manipulation. The Democrats should call for their elimination.
Allow me to walk out on a limb and make an early projection: The party with the nerve to take on Wall Street and fight against each and every mass layoff is likely to become the party of working people.
Having worked all my adult life in support of labor, it saddens me even to speculate about a battle for the allegiance of the working class between the corporate Democrats and the right-wing Republicans. It just shows how far the Democrats have drifted away from the real needs of working people.
And sadly, Tony Mazzocchi’s statement may soon need amending: “The bosses have three parties: we need one of our own.”Keep ReadingShow Less
Voting for President Is Not an Exercise in Personal Expression
Whatever flaws you may see in Joe Biden, he is the only actual alternative to Trump’s reign.
Nov 26, 2023
Many Americans are unhappy about the likely 2024 choice being offered them for president—Joe Biden versus Donald Trump. However, two third-party alternatives surfaced recently: Jill Stein of the Green Party and West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who appears to be seeking the “No Labels Party” nomination.
They join two other non-major-party candidates, anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and left-wing intellectual and activist Cornel West.
These candidates appear to offer voters a broad menu of political ideologies and beliefs from which to choose—from Kennedy’s contention that Americans are enslaved by vaccination record-keeping to Manchin’s claimed centrism to West’s plans for abolishing poverty and Stein’s condemnation of corporate-dominated politics.
Voting for Nader, the candidate who appeared to have stronger liberal credentials, proved to have far-reaching consequences—but the opposite of what most Green Party voters would likely have desired.
One thing that is not on the third-party menu is an opportunity to vote for someone who could actually become president. There isn’t a ghost of a chance Jill Stein, Joe Manchin, Robert F. Kennedy, or Cornel West will be elected.
Nonetheless, their campaigns could have a powerful impact: helping elect Donald Trump. The Green Party achieved an equivalent disaster before.
In 2000, the Green Party fielded a candidate, Ralph Nader, against Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore. In what turned out to be a remarkably close election, the result turned on Florida.
Nader received 97,488 votes in the state, votes that otherwise would have tilted strongly in favor of Gore: In his book, Crashing the Party, Nader acknowledges that 13% more of his voters would have gone for Gore than for Bush. These 12,700 votes would have given Gore an indisputable victory.
Instead, the vote was close enough for a right-wing Supreme Court to be in a position to halt the voting when Bush was only 537 votes ahead, bestowing Florida—and the presidency—on Bush.
How did voting for the Green Party work out?
Foreign Policy: The neocons around Bush had long targeted Iraq for overthrow. Following 9/11, they lied us into an invasion that led to 4,500 dead American soldiers, more than 165,000 dead Iraqi civilians, and a Middle East in the chaos that spawned ISIS.
Climate change: In Al Gore, we could have had a president in 2001 who really understood the climate threat. Instead, we had the pro-oil Bush presidency, initiating nearly two decades of political stagnation on the emerging climate crisis.
Democracy and Constitutional Rights: Bush got to appoint two right-wing Supreme Court justices, who joined three other Republican Justices to give us the 5-4 decision in the money-rules-all Citizens United case. The two Bush justices were also part of 5-4 majorities in cases that (1). invented a personal constitutional right to own firearms, and (2). eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, precipitating an avalanche of laws disenfranchising large numbers of minority, elderly, and youth voters.
Voting for Nader, the candidate who appeared to have stronger liberal credentials, proved to have far-reaching consequences—but the opposite of what most Green Party voters would likely have desired.
Third party candidates regularly tell us we’re entitled to express our own views in voting. But voting for president is not an exercise in personal expression and it is not like seeking your true love or dream candidate. Voting is what you do to effect the best outcome for your country among the real possibilities.
The GOP has ceased to be a normal party that respects majority rule and the rule of law, and Donald Trump has made clear his intentions of dismantling our democracy. Whatever flaws you may see in Joe Biden, he is the only actual alternative to Trump’s reign.
It’s as simple as this: If you vote for supposed “progressives” Jill Stein or Cornel West, you’re reducing the votes needed to stop Trump.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Don’t Fall for No Labels’ Trap
They are working behind the scenes to get Trump, an existential threat to our democracy, back into the White House.
Aug 30, 2023
When I first came to Congress, I was enamored with the alleged ideal behind No Labels and their mission to take partisanship out of politics. A world where people can work together on ideas that help the American people despite ideological differences.
Boy was I wrong.
Their nonpartisan agenda is and always has been dishonest. My first disagreement with No Labels came when I realized they were only looking out for megadonor special interests, advocating for lowering taxes on the rich and powerful, and weakening regulations for big business, making it easier for them to exploit workers or the environment.
Now why would major Republican donor Harlan Crow give money to No Labels for a third-party candidate?
After a short while, I became concerned about who was funding them. One day, I called them to ask, and they told me they would “quietly remove me from their membership rolls.” I told them, “I don’t do anything quietly.”
I left the organization and the Problem Solvers Caucus. Then No Labels got involved in electoral politics. In 2014, they endorsed Republican Cory Gardner for Senate, despite the fact that he was challenging Mark Udall, the sitting Democratic senator from Colorado. So much for “no labels.”
Late last year, it was reported that the organization is rife with toxicity and corruption. No Labels is apparently taking a page out of the Donald Trump playbook.
Fast forward to today.
No Labels is now working behind the scenes to recruit a “third-party” candidate for president if President Joe Biden and Donald Trump are the two nominees. This is a recipe for disaster.
Instead of staying out of the current presidential race, No Labels is setting up this scheme to be a spoiler in the 2024 presidential election to prevent Biden from being reelected. They are working behind the scenes to get Trump, an existential threat to our democracy, back into the White House.
They know what they’re doing. No Labels doesn’t want a president in the White House who stands up to corporate interests like Joe Biden. They want someone like Donald Trump who turns a blind eye to rules, regulations, and laws.
No Labels isn’t even hiding it anymore. They just announced they are on the ballot in 10 states, including Arizona and Nevada where President Biden won by a very narrow margin in 2020.
No Labels knows that advocating for a third party is only going to take votes away from Joe Biden and attempts to give the electoral college victory to Donald Trump.
Candidates like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) or former Utah Republican Gov. Jon Huntsman will only take votes from Biden, not Trump.
No Labels is doubling down on this anti-democratic approach. One of their billionaire donors is Harlan Crow—the same Harlan Crow who has been acting as Justice Clarence Thomas’s benefactor, taking him and his extreme MAGA wife, Virginia Thomas, on trips all over the country.
Now why would major Republican donor Harlan Crow give money to No Labels for a third-party candidate? Because he understands it’s all just a ruse to get Donald Trump back into the White House. To cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans. To eliminate regulations for polluters. And to push for an extreme agenda.
Reporting has only begun to scratch the surface of these anti-democratic plans from No Labels. But until they break through, we need to speak out.
No Labels is counting on you and me to go along with their plan. They know many Americans are disillusioned with the two-party system and want to vote for someone other than a Democrat or Republican. But this is not the way to do it. This is sabotage in the most anti-democratic way. Don’t fall for their trap. Don’t be duped.
Keep ReadingShow Less
See More
Most Popular
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
News & Opinion
Trending
Common Dreams, Inc. Founded 1997. Registered 501(c3) Non-Profit
Privacy Policy