Why Green Voters Need to Vote For Joe Biden, Not Third Party

We the undersigned are lifelong activists in the environmental movement. Many of us have been taking to the streets to prick the public conscience since the 1960s. Others have served the cause as writers, public interest lobbyists, scientists, community organizers, and leaders of environmental organizations. Some of us started Earth Day in 1970; some were engaged in the protests and legislation to save California’s redwood forests in the 1970s; others helped organize the Seabrook nuclear power plant demonstration in 1977, a massive act of nonviolent civil disobedience; still others led the outcry over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 and the resistance to the Standing Rock pipeline in 2016. Some got arrested just months ago in peaceful demonstrations at the “Fire Drill Friday” climate crisis rallies on Capitol Hill.

We have learned in the course of decades that militancy can build awareness of the environmental threat to human life itself, and activists younger than we have inspired us with the Green New Deal and the Sunrise Movement and by becoming visionary leaders of a new generation. But in 50 years of agitation, we have also learned what the powerful know. Elections matter most in the end. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a ballot is a good guy with a ballot, and this year, our ballots will be cast for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Some of us supported Biden in the Democratic primary. Others backed one of his rivals. Now, only one candidate, a humane, progressive alternative to four more years of decay, can beat Donald Trump. Many of us have voted for third-party candidates in other elections, convinced that a party called “Green” was the only principled choice. Not this year. This year the only meaningful green votes will be cast for the single candidate who can end Trump’s disastrous presidency. Only by rallying behind the Democratic Party can we end the Trump administration’s unprecedented malignancy, fear mongering, pathological lying, and atrocious policymaking. This is not the year to make a utopian statement or to waste a single vote. This is the year to unseat Donald Trump and his shameless congressional enablers.

Angry right-wing voters and liberal absentees put Trump in the White House in 2016. In 2020 the same unholy team could keep him there. Progressives who vote for the Green Party candidate, or write in Henry David Thoreau, or refuse to vote at all for lack of an ideal choice will give Donald Trump precisely what he wants, and enough such pious gestures will produce catastrophic results.

Four years ago, Trump carried Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, which lifted him into power, by margins of less than 1 percent. He would have lost all three if the votes cast for the Green Party had gone to Hillary Clinton instead, let alone the votes of the many thousands of progressives who failed to show up at all. The result was an unchecked race toward an uninhabitable climate, a broken country, and a horrifying narcissist who has brought America to its knees.

Twenty years ago, the Green Party snatched the White House from a climate-change leader and handed it to George W. Bush. In Florida, no less than 97,488 progressive voters snubbed Al Gore for Ralph Nader, letting Bush win the state, and therefore the presidency, by 537 votes, or so the Supreme Court ruled. The result was no moral victory for Green voters. The result was the Iraq War, hundreds of thousands of violent deaths and environmental devastation in the Middle East, two conservative Supreme Court justices, including the chief justice and a right wing reactionary, and eight unrecoverable years of accelerated climate change.

This fall we have two choices—another four years of Trump, freed from all constraints and empowered by a subservient Senate, or a progressive Democrat who actually cares about our society, the environment, and future generations. In his 36-year Senate career, Biden was an enlightened voice on nearly every issue, despite well-known mistakes. During eight years as vice president, he nudged President Obama toward better policies. Now he has a plan to invest $2 trillion in a lifesaving program to arrest and reverse the catastrophe of manmade climate change that Trump may accelerate beyond repair. Sure, he isn’t perfect. Which of us is? But in the 2020 election, the most crucial since 1864, we have only two meaningful options: We can make a lifetime humanitarian our president, backed by an able cabinet and a progressive Congress; or expand the strongman rule of Donald Trump, who desecrates his office every day, spreads racism and a fatal virus for political gain, ignores environmental justice, embraces the fossil fuel industry, and calls the climate crisis a hoax.

Every generation is accountable for its leaders, and we are accountable for Trump. We can beat him and his congressional enablers at the polls or help him stay in power by wasting our votes or staying home, leaving us to explain to children not yet born that we were too pure to vote for Democrats. All we have to lose are our country and the planet.