With the 2024 presidential election looming, there’s a growing sense that our options are terrible. At the same time, the threat of a Trump 2.0 has seen a ramping up of “lesser evilism” with people holding their noses and voting for Kamala Harris in order to keep Trump out.

Socialist Alternative thinks we need a different approach. We’re endorsing Jill Stein in this election, as the strongest independent left candidate. Ultimately, we need to break with the Democrats, organize fights beyond the elections, and build a new mass working-class party so we don’t keep having elections dominated by two bad options.

Below we respond to some of the common “lesser evil” arguments made during this, and other elections.

What’s wrong with you? Do you want to see Trump elected?

Trump 2.0 is a major threat to working-class people. His administration will enrich corporations and billionaires while using divide-and-rule tactics against the working class by scapegoating immigrants, LGBTQ people and the “radical left”. Even though his last administration was deeply unpopular, if Trump wins, the Democrats only have themselves to blame, along with the undemocratic voting system in the US that they uphold.

Ralph Nader is often held up as the example of how left-wing third party campaigns help the Republicans, but the actual history and numbers show this isn’t true. In the 2000 election, Bush did beat Gore in Florida by 537 votes, which was less than Nader’s 97,488 votes in the same state. But those Nader votes were dwarfed by the 308,000 registered Democrats in Florida who voted for Bush. Even that ignores the undemocratic suppression of thousands of predominantly African-American votes in the state that the Democrats refused to challenge.

Democrats have lost support everywhere, even in their traditional strongholds, because standing up for working people and the oppressed runs counter to the interests of their billionaire donors. Harris could win back hundreds of thousands if not millions of votes if the Democrats refused to fund Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, increasingly escalating into a regional conflict. But that’s not going to happen.

Whatever Kamala Harris’s problems are on other issues, she’s still an important ally against Trump’s attacks on abortion rights.

The Republican attack on abortion rights is a serious danger and the 2022 Dobbs decision was a horrible defeat. But that defeat was enacted under Democratic rule. Since the original Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973, Democrats have held up their defense of abortion rights as a key reason to continue voting for them.

But the Democrats have been far less interested in actually winning concrete gains for abortion rights. In 2008, Barack Obama ran on a promise of codifying Roe v. Wade into law. From 2009-2011, the Democrats had control of the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives. But no such pro-abortion legislation happened. In 2021, the Democrats once again obtained a majority in the White House, Senate, and House, but refused to codify Roe.

While the Dobbs decision occurred under a Democratic administration, Roe was won in the first place under Nixon’s Republican administration. Abortion rights weren’t won by getting a Democrat elected, nor because Nixon was a particularly nice guy. Rather, they were won because of mass pressure from below, including walkouts and occupations from the women’s movement. Moreover it was the product of the wider revolutionary wave of the 60s and 70s, including the anti-Vietnam War movement, the black liberation struggle, and a wave of wildcat strikes.

Key to defeating attacks on abortion, along with other right-wing attacks, is building a militant working-class struggle on the ground, something Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party are opposed to.

I agree that we need to build struggle on the ground, but organizing will be easier under Harris than Trump.

Trump’s increasingly authoritarian bent poses a real threat, from using the military on protesters and jailing political opponents, are a real danger. His administration would pose a threat to democratic rights, organizing, and unions. But voting for Democrats isn’t the way to protect those rights.

Democrats themselves have been willing to weaponize the police and repressive measures against protesters. During the George Floyd protests, Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, mobilized the Minnesota National Guard, who terrorized nonviolent protesters. The struggle  on the ground we need isn’t directed against one person, but the entire billionaire class.  If our movements actually pose a threat to them, the capitalists won’t be afraid to crack down, regardless of whether there’s a Democrat or a Republican in office.

The threat posed by Trump and the right wing won’t go away if Harris wins. Biden’s win in 2020 shows otherwise. Trump’s threats are best challenged through the struggle itself. During Trump’s term, protests at airports forced the reversal of Trump’s Islamophobic “Muslim ban,” while the longest government shutdown in history was ended by a sick-out of air traffic controllers and the threat of a strike of flight attendants.

A new party would be good, but national elections are terrible terrain for third parties. Why don’t you focus on local elections?

The entire capitalist electoral system is terrible terrain for working-class politics. But our hard-won democratic rights, from the local to national level, give working people an important voice we can’t abandon. While local elections can provide important opportunities, we can’t cede national politics to the parties of big business.

People who make the “local first” argument often cite the way the right-wing Tea Party built up support in local and state elections, laying the basis for Trumpism. But the Tea Party and Trump didn’t pose a threat to big business the same way the left does.

In 2013, Socialist Alternative won a city council seat in Seattle through our candidate Kshama Sawant. Over the course of a decade, we used our city council position to win major gains from a $15/hour minimum wage to taxing Amazon. But this drew the wrath of big business, with Amazon pouring over $1 million to defeat us in the 2019 election. This was followed by a right-wing recall campaign two years later.

Local, state, or national, big business will do whatever it takes to stop anything that threatens their rule. Limiting ourselves to local elections isn’t going to trick the ruling class not to stop us.

Maybe we can vote third party in a different election, but this is the most important election of our lifetimes. The stakes are just too high.

The fact is, every election in recent memory has been the most important of our lifetimes. The 2028 election will be as well. And so will 2032. And onward for the foreseeable future. If you’re waiting for an unimportant election to build a new party, all you’ll do is wait. And the stakes will keep getting higher.

A fundamental flaw of lesser evilism is viewing each election in isolation, and not the overall direction of establishment politics. In the US, politics has shifted to the right because the Democratic Party has consistently betrayed the trust people have placed in it, and billionaires like Elon Musk are prepared to back candidates like Trump to protect their profits. 

Capitalism’s crisis and the need for an alternative are an ongoing problem that can’t be put off until the capitalists agree not to raise the stakes. Lesser evil voting for Biden during the previous “most important election of our lifetimes” didn’t get rid of Trumpism. In this election we’re paying the consequences of Biden’s failures.

The high stakes of this election are precisely why we can’t wait. Building a political voice for workers, youth, and the oppressed isn’t something that can afford to wait for an unimportant election.

Kamala Harris may not fit your standards of purity, but it’s not like Jill Stein is perfect either.

Opposition to lesser evilism and the parties of big business isn’t about moral purity. As Marxists, we reject that approach to morality. When Kamala Harris assures big business of her commitment to defending fracking, or tells Guatemalan migrants “do not come” or stands by Biden’s breaking of the potential rail strike in 2022, these aren’t minor breaks with moral purity. They’re symptoms of the commitment of Harris and the whole Democratic Party to serving the capitalist class.

Jill Stein has clear problems. Stein and the Greens have been largely absent from politics between presidential elections. They’re overly focused on what could be achieved in a hypothetical Green presidency. Meanwhile they haven’t participated meaningfully in the  recent resurgence in the labor movement.

What matters, however, is that Stein is currently the strongest independent left candidate. The best possible showing for her, even though she won’t win, would demonstrate that a significant section of US society is serious about breaking with the parties of big business. Building on this would be an important step towards what we really need: a new, independent party of the working class.

How does voting for Jill Stein connect with building a new working-class party?

Voting for Stein on its own won’t stop wars, defeat the right-wing divide-and-rule attacks, or end climate change. For that, we will need to take the streets. The strongest possible vote for Stein can play a role, however, in building that fight.

Whether Trump or Harris wins, we need a movement to fight back. That movement needs to grow beyond Stein’s current support. We need a movement to fight the billionaires who profit off the status quo, and one that can win over workers who mistakenly view Trump as anti-establishment.

We need to link all these movements into a political force. This can lay the basis for a new working-class party.

A new party is itself a step towards higher struggle. We need to fight for socialism within such  a party. Ultimately, we need a revolutionary socialist movement of workers and young people to take on the capitalist system and the war, poverty, and oppression that comes with it.