Don’t Vote for Joe Biden: The Case for the Green Party in 2020 Daniel Cashmar Follow Apr 15 · 9 min read

AP Photo/John Locher

As Bernie Sanders has now endorsed Joe Biden, Biden supporters are expecting Bernie supporters to simply fall-in-line and support Joe Biden. I don’t think we should do that because we have nothing to gain from it. Nearly every argument in favor of Joe Biden — like the Supreme Court — can be contradicted by his political history (voting to approve Antonin Scalia, his treatment of Anita Hill, and saying Obama’s Supreme Court pick shouldn’t be “too liberal,” for this example). We would all have a greater impact on electoral politics if we voted for the Green Party. The Green Party is to the left of the Democrats on virtually every issue, but they poll in relative obscurity. If we want a government that represents us and works for our interests, the way we vote needs to change immediately.

Winner-take-all

There are many forms of voter suppression and disenfranchisement in the United States, but the one I’m going to focus on is winner-take-all voting. With winner-take-all voting, many votes across the country simply don’t matter. If you live in a deep blue state and vote Republican, your vote literally does not matter. If you live in a deep red state and vote Democrat, your vote literally does not matter. Of course, this is not the case for swing states.

In Arkansas, Trump beat Clinton with around 60.6% of the vote. But, he received 100% of the state’s electoral votes. Those ~380,000 people who voted for Clinton had no effect on the outcome of the race in Arkansas nor in the country. However, if those people had instead voted for the Green Party, it would have raised the Green Party’s total vote count by around 20%. Ultimately, nothing would have changed in 2016. Hillary Clinton would have still lost Arkansas and still lost the election, but it would have had a meaningful impact on future leftist causes.

In fact, everyone who settled for Clinton wasted their votes in the end. We didn’t get anything for it. Now, Joe Biden, the candidate for the Democrats, has not even moved to the left of Hillary Clinton in 2016 on the most important issues because we all demonstrated that we would vote for the Democrat no matter what.

Negotiating with the DNC

When you buy a car, do you shop around or do you buy the first car you see? Of course, you would shop around and look for the best price. But, if the car salesman knows that you will 100% buy the car from them because you have no other choice, they have no incentive to lower the price. You’ve lost all leverage in the negotiation. However, if there is serious competition, that car salesman will do what it takes to get the sale.

The same can be said of voting. If you agree to vote for Joe Biden without him giving major concessions, with Medicare for All and the Green New Deal being two of the most important, then he has no incentive to move left at all. He knows he has your vote and so he doesn’t need to work for it. However, if you are willing to wait for those major concessions or even vote for the Green Party, it signals to the DNC that they can’t just force terrible candidates upon you. They will need to actually earn your vote.

Of course, the Green Party will not win in 2020 even if we all vote for them. That’s not the point. The point is to show the DNC that we’re willing to reject the Democratic candidate. If the Green Party passes the 5% threshold of the national popular vote total, they would receive federal funding that would significantly increase their campaign funding. The Green Party would then become a threat to the DNC, and they would need to make serious concessions — consistently — to win our votes.

Organizing is power. If a large enough group of us threatens to vote for the Green Party or even does vote for them, the DNC will need to acknowledge this. In the end, the DNC is responsible for voter apathy. It’s their responsibility to turn people into voters and, contrary to popular belief, those apathetic non-voters and third party voters are not privileged. We can make it easier for them to reach out to us by creating a single, large group of us, such as Green Party voters. There is power in numbers.

Edit (4/16/2020): This is a response to one or two people claiming that this logic only gives Joe Biden and the DNC an incentive to move right — not left. This claim is demonstrably wrong in 2 ways.

This is likely based on Chuck Schumer saying, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” The Democrats lost Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin to Donald Trump. The logic of appealing to the right clearly did not work. The 2020 Democratic presidential candidates proposed some of the most progressive policies we’ve ever seen from Democrats. For example: universal basic income, total student debt cancellation, more than doubling the minimum wage, Medicare for All, and the Green New Deal. This is because Bernie Sanders forcibly shifted the Democratic Party left. We were collectively bargaining as a massive, unavoidable group categorized as Bernie supporters. After a disastrous loss to Donald Trump in 2016, they could not afford to ignore us again because we were organized and loud. This will always be the case so long as we are organized and loudly demanding the policies we want.

Enthusiasm Gap

This all brings us to the enthusiasm gap between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Trump’s supporters fervently support him and would figuratively, and — no doubt for some — literally, swim across a river to vote for him. Biden supporters are not nearly as enthused. Anecdotally, when I hear Biden supporters speak of Joe Biden, they always say something along the lines of, “He wasn’t my first or second choice — he wasn’t even my tenth choice! — but we have to vote for him to stop Trump.” Does that sound like an enthusiastic voter?

In 2016, we learned that we couldn’t put of all of our faith into traditional polling methods. Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump in almost every single poll and in one of them, she was leading him by 14 points. Yet, she still lost. There are many factors in a campaign, but one thing that connects every losing presidential campaign of modern years is the enthusiasm gap.

53% of Trump supporters are very enthusiastic about supporting him. Contrast that with the 24% of Biden supporters that are very enthusiastic about supporting him. John McCain lost with 17% of his supporters identifying as very enthusiastic, Mitt Romney lost with 23%, and Hillary Clinton lost with 32% — a larger percentage than what Joe Biden has!

Serious Concerns with Joe Biden as a Candidate

First, we must recognize that no matter what Joe Biden does and what concessions he may give, there are people who will never support him for completely legitimate reasons. His questionable conduct with women and children, the recent accusation by Tara Reade, and the other women who came forth about him paint a disturbing painting of a man that wants to save the soul of America. The people that are deeply disturbed by these things will simply never vote for Joe Biden.

Joe Biden did relatively well during the 1-on-1 debate with Bernie Sanders because the moderators did not fact-check him when he lied about his political history on Social Security. In fact, he’s overall had a very supportive media backing him during these recent months. This is perfectly illustrated by the New York Times admitting that they deleted a damaging portion of a sentence because the Biden campaign asked them. What will happen when Biden has to face an unfriendly media, an unfriendly competitor, and unfriendly moderators? We’ve already seen him lose his temper during this campaign trail. What will happen when the President antagonizes him?

As the campaign is right now, I don’t see his path to victory. No one can argue that Trump is a good president — in fact he may be the worst of all time — but, Biden has been effectively a non-entity during this entire pandemic. When he does show himself, we get embarrassing soundbites and clips that the Republicans will use in their attack ads and their rhetoric in the coming months. Trump has already started attacking him over his numerous gaffes.

The Democratic candidates of 2020 who now endorse Joe Biden brought up legitimate issues with his political history and questioned his judgement. These issues have not gone away. He voted for the War in Iraq, he is responsible for the 1994 crime bill, and in his opposition of desegregation busing, said, “Unless we do something about this, my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point. We have got to make some move on this.”

Additionally, his current proposal on Medicare is a joke. Lowering the age of eligibility to 60 is not even as progressive as Hillary Clinton’s proposal of 50 to 55 in 2016. The pandemic has shone a very harsh light onto the failings of our private healthcare system and he needs to address that with real change. Incremental progress during the destruction caused by a pandemic is ridiculous. He needs to take this campaign seriously.

Edit (4/17/2020): This is a response to some people saying that Joe Biden has better policies than Donald Trump. You can see debates about this all over the Internet so, I’m not going to waste time on that here. But I will write that it’s beside the point. Let’s just assume that Joe Biden has amazing policies. None of those policies will matter if he doesn’t actually win the election. The entire point of running a presidential campaign as a major party candidate is to win the general election. Right now, Joe Biden and the DNC are not doing what it takes to win; which is to earn the votes of the left through real policy concessions.

Edit 2 (4/17/2020): This is a response to someone saying that these issues with Joe Biden’s history (like voting for the War in Iraq and voting to confirm Antonin Scalia) are not only so far in the past as to be irrelevant, but that Joe Biden also regrets those decisions. Joe Biden’s “regrettable” decision to confirm Antonin Scalia meant 30 years of a conservative Justice on the Supreme Court. Joe Biden’s “regrettable” treatment of Anita Hill has given us an on-going 28 years of another conservative Justice. Joe Biden’s “regrettable” vote for the War in Iraq meant over 1,000,000 dead Iraqis. Joe Biden’s “regrettable” authoring of the 1994 crime bill means that 11% of black children have at least one parent in jail. We need a President who has the courage and the proper judgement to not make such disastrous decisions in the first place.

Looking Back and Forward

If we all would have voted for the Green Party in 2016, nothing would have changed in that election but, the DNC would have never attempted to cross us again. The consolidation around Joe Biden right before Super Tuesday would likely have never happened and we would likely have Bernie Sanders as the presumptive candidate for the Democrats right now. He would have been the compromise between a growing Green Party and moderate Democrats.

As things are currently, Joe Biden is likely going to lose the election. In which case, settling for him will again have been a waste of a vote. Of course, things may change. He may select a popular progressive as his VP and adopt Medicare for All and the Green New Deal as his policies. In that situation, I would actively encourage everyone to vote for him. But until that happens, we should seriously consider voting for the Green Party. There are seven months until the election and I look forward to seeing what concessions Biden is willing to give us, or I will look forward to voting for the Green Party.