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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."
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A Note on the 'Lesser of Two Evils' Voting Argument in 2024
Why people, and radicals in particular, fail to grasp the reasoning behind this argument is truly mind-boggling.
Sep 10, 2024
One of the most bewildering reactions on the part of certain segments of the U.S. left (whatever that means these days) is that every time there is a crucial election, and the voice of reason dictates casting a ballot in a direction which will help the most to keep out of public office the most extreme, and often enough the positively nuts, candidate in the race, is to scream that this is a case of “the lesser of two evils” thinking and to imply in turn that the one making such an argument is, somehow, a sellout.
Noam Chomsky, of all people, has been the recipient of such brainless reactions for much of his life as he 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.
Why people, and radicals in particular, fail to grasp the reasoning behind such an argument is truly mind-boggling. Either they don’t understand the nature of U.S. politics, with its winner-take-all election system, or they are simply wrapped up in the “feel-good” factor in politics to even notice such subtleties. But since even a fairly bright elementary student would most likely be able to understand the difference between a winner-take-all election system and proportional representation, it would be logical to conclude that what we have here is nothing less than a display of the politics of feeling good, which basically translates to acting in whatever manner makes one feel good, politically speaking, regardless of the consequences of those actions.
Now, one might say that when the Comintern adopted Stalin’s thinking in the 1920s that “social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism” and proceeded later to lump together Hitler’s Nazi party and the German Social Democratic Party that it was doing so out of conviction that the capitalist world was teetering on the brink of collapse and that the communists would inevitably emerge as the victorious party.
But what is the excuse of the tiny segment of U.S. self-professed radicals who fail to see that in order to advance the program of socialism we must first defeat Trump at the ballot box? Incidentally, this also happens to be the official stance of the Communist Party USA. Yet, one can already hear the argument that U.S. communists must have also fallen victims of the picking a lesser of two evils mental attitude. However, in numerous conversations I've had with radicals (leftists, anarchists, and communists) across Europe, their own thinking was also in line with the reasoning of the Communist Party USA—namely, that priority number one of U.S. progressive voters should be to defeat wannabe dictator Donald Trump in the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
Can this be done by voting in a swing state for someone like Cornel West or Jill Stein when these candidates have zero chance of winning? My chances of being attacked and killed by a shark, which are estimated to be one in 3.75 million, are far greater than either of these two candidates making it to the White House in November 2024.
Oh, but I forgot! Such realizations hardly matter in comparison to how good it might make one feel by voting for a candidate outside of the two existing parties. Who cares if the candidate who would love to turn the U.S. into an autocracy wins the election? The other candidate is simply the lesser of two evils, which is like saying that it makes no difference to live under a political regime that is inadequate in realizing the ideals of a decent society and one that is bent on a process of societal fasticization.
Still, there is something even more bewildering with the lesser-of-two evils dictum that is thrown around by small segments of the left. Generally speaking, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, there have been two doctrines about voting: the official doctrine, “which holds that politics consists of showing up every few years, pushing a lever, then going back to one’s private pursuits,” and the “left doctrine.” For the latter, “politics consists in constant direct popular engagement in public affairs, including a wide variety of activism on many fronts. Occasionally an event comes up in the formal political arena called an ‘election….’ It’s at most a brief departure from political engagement.”
The third doctrine about voting, which is the “lesser of two evils” principle, has appeared on the political scene rather recently and, as Chomsky highlighted, is “now consuming much debate on the left.” The debate, he went to say, “also falls within the official doctrine, with its laser-like focus on elections.”
Most leftists, radicals and communists know fully well what the Democratic Party represents. Moreover, the recently held Democratic National Convention, with its pathetic effort to reclaim the mantle of "freedom” in a simultaneous display of militaristic jingoism, gave us ample warnings of what lies ahead. It takes no political genius to see that Kamala Harris is yet another centrist and wholly opportunistic Democrat who will change her tune as the circumstances dictate. Or, as the British political philosopher John Gray aptly put it, to recognize that she has “been abruptly transformed by compliant media from a vice-president commonly acknowledged to be barely competent into an uplifting national leader.”
Leftists, radicals and communists living in capitalist societies know that elections are hardly the stuff of political participation that will turn things around. Only grassroots activism can bring about meaningful change. But whenever elections come up, and proportional representation is not in the picture, we hold our nose and vote for the lesser-known threat to what is left of the democracy we have. And then we go back to real activism in order to change society and the world for the better.
It's not complicated.
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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.
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