Looking Beyond the Highest Office
On August 4, 2016, I was reading a FiveThirtyEight article by David Wasserman discussing the oft-ignored elections of state and local primaries and their impacts on our country’s deepening political division, as well as the disconnect between the interests of politicians and voters across all levels of government. In his analysis, Wasserman describes how low voter turnout has resulted in an overwhelming number of politicians who are more concerned with appeasing a vocal minority of their party’s voters, rather than serving as many of their constituents as possible. Nodding my head in agreement, I sighed at how broken and misrepresentative our politics have become, and later went home to realize that all my state’s primaries took place that day and that I never even knew.
While a lot of Americans talk a fair amount about who they plan to vote for in 2016 or about just how awful our whole system is right now, far too many voters like me have to Google which U.S. House or state Senate district they live in just to find out who the candidates are for upcoming state and local elections, and when those elections take place.
This discrepancy between national and local attention to elected government seems especially potent for progressive voters dissatisfied with the current options for this presidential election. Many proud Bernie supporters like me are now left wondering what can be done to sustain the political and cultural momentum stirred up by Senator Sanders’ campaign that has, at least for the moment, seemed to shift Democratic politics further to the left than they otherwise would have been.
I feel confident saying that the answer does not include voting for Jill Stein for president. Beyond her lack of policy experience, her questionable stances on vaccines and GMOs, and her incredibly oversimplified positions on key issues, the biggest problem with Stein’s candidacy is that it offers very little real change.
The Green Party’s lack of local infrastructure is a grievance cited by many leftists as a sign that it are more focused on publicity than grassroots action. Green funds are fairly scarce to start with, and the fact that the party seems to always devote more money and attention to failed presidential bids instead of a ground-up political infrastructure makes them seem both laughable and remarkably insincere to the general public. At the end of the day, a “conscience” vote for Jill Stein would do little to advance progressive causes, and, based on poll studies, would likely just siphon votes from Hillary Clinton.
While there are no ideal options for progressives or Berniecrats in this presidential election, receding into apathy toward our current system is not the solution either, especially for the millennials who helped power Sanders’s campaign to start with. After all, independent and third-party voices have played crucial roles in bringing less recognized issues to light. Dating back from the eras of abolition and the New Deal to more recent examples like the Tea Party and Our Revolution, large numbers of dissatisfied voters can effect real change in American politics, whether through the creation of a new party or the co-opting of their messages by one of the two major ones.
Even now, U.S. House candidates like Zephyr Teachout in New York and Lucy Flores in Nevada are making waves for sustaining the kind of reform for working-class people and marginalized groups that Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and other left-wing politicians have helped bring to the forefront of national politics. Hopefully, the renewed enthusiasm and increasing diversity of these possible new leaders can help shift the national conversation toward issues of income inequality, campaign finance reform, and racial and gender justice, among many others.
The bottom line is that whoever ends up being the next president of the United States, tackling issues that affect average people’s everyday lives will likely occur in non-presidential elections. We may not be close to a satisfactory level of progressive politicians yet, but if the success of Sanders’s campaign has taught the country one thing, it’s that the country is ripe for revolution. Well, a slow revolution anyway.
Granted, some states are easier than others to start grassroots support for progressive candidates, but the change that many on this campus and around the country claim to want simply cannot end with support for a presidential nominee whose run ended in the primaries. Too many people around the country depend on our continued support for us to give up on the election now because Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee.
While I am in no way indicting the Green Party or any other faction, the path to real progressive change ultimately does not lie in checking a box for commander-in-chief this November. It may not be glamorous or sexy or a fun conversation starter, but if you are asking yourself what you can do to support change in this and future election cycles, you may want to take a closer look at offices outside the presidency.