7 Strategic Axioms for the Anxious Progressive Voter

The election will be over in a few short weeks, but there are still many progressives who are angsting over who to vote for at the top of the ticket. Might a better understanding of the role elections play in people-powered social change help us make our decision?

Distilling hard-earned lessons from election dilemmas faced by earlier social movements, here are seven key insights you can bookmark and carry with you into the voting booth:

1. Vote Today for the Candidate You Want to Pressure Tomorrow

As generations of grassroots organizers have said: Elections are just one small part of larger movements for progressive change, so “vote for the candidate you want to organize against!”

Former U.S. President Abraham Lincoln doesn’t deserve credit for ending slavery any more than former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt deserves credit for the massive labor movement of the 1930s, or Lyndon B. Johnson for the accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement. These huge historic victories were won by the hard and dedicated work of social movements—millions of everyday people taking concerted action.

Voting is not a love letter, it’s choosing a bus, so choose the one that can get you closer to where you want to go.

At the same time, each of these presidents were an important part of the equation, inasmuch as they were responsive to the pressure exerted by people’s movements.

Who sits at the top matters for our chances at big progressive wins. And there’s no question that in 2025 and onwards, we are more likely to win progressive victories if we are lobbying, pressuring, protesting Vice President Kamala Harris (a rational actor who knows what it’s like to be a women, immigrant, and POC), than former President Donald Trump (an irrational actor who has shown more willingness to repress the left than listen to us.). Also, progressives are the junior partners in Harris’ coalition and she is at least partially accountable to us.

As Aurora Levins Morales says, “We are choosing an opponent, not a leader.” We’re picking our fight. Voting is not a love letter, it’s choosing a bus, so choose the one that can get you closer to where you want to go.

2. Who Are You Taking Into the Polling Booth With You?

When you go into the voting booth on November 5, you are not just voting for yourself. Think of all the people you are in solidarity with—often the most marginalized and vulnerable people—who will be brutally impacted by a future Trump presidency: Muslim Americans when Trump issues his Muslim Ban 2.0; the 15 million undocumented immigrants who he plans to “round up,” cage, and forcibly deport; women who will increasingly lose the right to make decisions over their own bodies; Palestinians whose lives will be further brutalized under Trump; Ukrainians who will be abandoned by Trump’s sycophancy to Russian President Vladimir Putin; transgender students when Trump uses federal law as a cudgel to override critical state-level protections; working people who will lose hard-won rights, safety, and pay while the rich get runaway tax breaks; not to mention how one of our very last chances to preserve a livable planet will be lost to Trump’s climate denialism and plan to “drill baby, drill.” These are the people who will be impacted by your vote. Bring them with you to the voting booth.

3. Even on Palestine, Trump will be far worse than Biden-Harris

President Joe Biden has been terrible on Palestine. (As has pretty much every other U.S. President.) We don’t know if a future President Harris would break with Biden on Palestine, but with statements like, “I will always fight for the Palestinian people to be able to realize their right to dignity, freedom, security, and self-determination,” who knows. It’s evident to anyone on the left that Democrats should take concrete action to halt the violence (including an arms embargo, immediate humanitarian aid delivery, and an end to settler violence) not only because it’s the moral course of action, but because not doing so will likely cost them crucial votes from the Arab-American community and beyond. Right now, however, Harris seems unwilling to take that risk; instead, she is courting Republicans, taking money from the Israel lobby, and pursuing a broadly centrist election strategy. Once elected, however, she may be more susceptible to pressure than her predecessor, and certainly than her opponent. Not to mention, a fresh Democrat in the Oval Office could bolster senators to join Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) call for an arms embargo when his bill comes to the floor mid-November.

We don’t know how any of this will play out, but we do know that, with Trump promising to “give Bibi whatever he wants” and calling for repression of student protesters on campuses, progress on Palestine will be much harder under Trump. Don’t take our word for it; here’s how the co-founder of the Uncommitted Movement, Abbas Alawieh, describes how hard it would be to organize for a free Palestine under a future Trump presidency:

Trump’s son-in-law is fantasizing about million-dollar condos on Gaza’s beach. He’s taking campaign contributions from people who want the full annexation of the West Bank. So we also have to be very clear about the rise of global authoritarianism, of which Trump and the Republican Party’s MAGA extremism is a face. We have to take stock of what it would look like for Trump to be president and whether we’re doing the difficult work of this moment—which is not pretty, and a lot of folks don’t want to hear it—in the sense of telling people and being clear about what our organizing would look like under Donald Trump.

4. I Want a Better (Climate) Catastrophe

Regardless of who we vote for in 2024, we’re in for a very rough climate future. Neither Harris nor Trump are going to do what is truly necessary on climate (just like no existing government anywhere in the world is doing so.) But under Trump—who is a full-on climate denier—we know that it will be far, far worse: He will pull the U.S. our of Paris accords; “start drilling on day one”; he’s already made a $1 billion deal with fossil fuel CEOs to give them “whatever they want”; and the official blueprint for Trump’s program, Project 2025, calls for a “whole-of-government unwinding” of U.S. climate policy. So when you fill out your ballot, are you going to vote for a better catastrophe (Harris) or the worst possible climate catastrophe (Trump)?

People and the planet are suffering, and under a second Trump term, people would suffer worse. So, let’s defeat Trump today and fight for a Green New Deal tomorrow.

5. How Will You Feel the Morning After?

Pause for a moment. Imagine it’s Wednesday morning, November 6, and you’re waking up to a Trump victory. How do you feel?

Take that terrible gut-check feeling to the polls with you. When a friend of mine did this thought experiment with herself, she immediately headed to Pennsylvania to knock on doors.

Take a cue from these sorry notes from real voters who recall waking up on a brisk morning in 2016 to the nightmare that Trump had taken the election and imagining the ensuing chaos.

6. Things Getting Worse Won’t Get Us Closer to Things Getting Better

If you’re considering staying home in November because “maybe things have to get worse before people wake up,” or abstaining to “put the Dems on notice,” you should know that this notion is unsupported by historical evidence. Worsening conditions are not correlated to larger-scale progressive mobilization. Indeed, the opposite is more true.

What does put wind in progressive sails is seeing people’s movements win, and the belief in the possibility that things could change for the better—what social movement scholars call “raised expectations.” From Black Lives Matter to Medicare for All to the Green New Deal, we have been on a trajectory of raising expectations for over a decade now.

Think about it: Are four more years of having to fight defensive actions against Trump’s mass deportations, climate denial, even more weaponry to Israel, and the possible end of democracy itself (“Vote for me once and you’ll never have to vote again.”) really going to help your cause?

No. But what will help our cause is a partial victory now—defeating Trump and his fascist posse—that’ll also put us on more fertile political terrain for more victories to come. This election is not about our own personal expression. It’s about stopping fascism. It’s about mitigating pain and suffering.

7. Voting Your Conscience Means Voting Strategically

Too often it feels like we’re made to choose between two bad options. Harris is hardly an ideal candidate, and it’s hard for some of us to cast our individual vote for her “in good conscience.” But isn’t that the capitalist logic of our era tricking us into thinking that voting is primarily an individual choice, an act of personal expression?

A truly discerning conscience considers the broader context and the collective consequences of our actions, not just how we might feel in the moment. It’s not about staying “pure”; it’s about building and wielding collective power and putting ourselves on a trajectory to win structural change. It’s not about “me”; it’s about “us.” Voting is a strategic—and collective—act of harm reduction.

And, reality check: We are voting in a broken two-party system in which corporations are people and a handful of states get to call the election due to an outdated Electoral College. Our massive national election could come down to a few thousand votes in seven key swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.)

So dithering over whether to vote for Harris in California is somewhat of a waste of time. Better to phone a friend in Pennsylvania and see if they have a plan to vote. And what if friends in swing states still can’t bring themselves to pull the lever for Harris? Luckily there’s a time tested way to vote with both our head and heart: Vote swapping. Voters across the country are teaming up to defeat Trump in swing states and cast protest votes in safe states. And you can join them.

It Really Is up to Us

We’re living through an epoch that is defined by crisis. Decades of neoliberal policies*—passed under both Republican and Democratic administrations—have culminated in crisis after crisis, where millions of Americans have been harmed, and no one has been held accountable.

Somewhere along the way we started waking up to the fact that the people who broke America aren’t going to fix it; and that it’s up to us to win an America that works for the many, not just the few.

However, we do not yet have enough people power to win the changes we want—to defang Big Oil or stop weapons shipments to Israel—but progressive forces have more momentum than we’ve had in decades. To continue to gain ground, we need to keep building our movements and elect more people’s candidates.

But right now our forward trajectory depends on stopping Trump in his tracks. Our organizations, movements, and people’s candidates are engaged in an incredibly consequential contest for the future. It’s up to us to defeat Trump in 2024. We can’t count on anyone to do it for us. We need all hands on deck. That means voting for Harris and working to persuade others to do the same.

But even as we give that absolutely critical task all we’ve got, we must remember that a single presidential election won’t get us out of this mess. Voting is just one tool in a larger landscape of struggle that we engage in together. In fact, we can use this election to build long-term progressive power.

Rather than volunteering with the Harris campaign or the Democratic Party, we can volunteer for grassroots people’s organizations, like Working Families Party and Seed the Vote, and donate through Movement Voter Project, which funds long-term progressive grassroots organizations who do voter mobilization cycle after cycle. All these efforts are also working to elect people’s champions in down-ballot races.

And join forces with these organizations who are preparing to pressure a Harris administration. We’ve got to get ourselves ready to go on Day One—because no one is going to do that for us either.

So let’s power through this election, and in January 2025 unite to advance a non-fascist, as-progressive-as-we-can-make-it agenda. Another world is possible—if we build it.

*To list all the elite failures of the past decades would blown us way past the max word count on this article, but here’s a sampling: from the Iraq War to the Deep Horizon oil spill; from Hurricane Katrina to Helene; from the financial meltdown and the foreclosure crisis to runaway rents and skyrocketing inflation; from the opioid crisis to the expanded carceral state; from runaway economic inequality to persistent racial injustice; from pandemic deaths to toxic misinformation; from sending weapons to the Israeli bombardment of Gaza to unfolding climate catastrophe.

Some language was incorporated with permission from the 2020 project NOT HIM, US, written by Jonathan Matthew Smucker and Andrew Boyd.