Don’t Retreat, the Ballot Box Belongs to Working People

After a loss like the one we just endured this Election Day, it’s easy to feel alienated from any left electoral projects. After all, we live in a rigid, two-party system, where the majority of people don’t feel represented by either party.

Some of us are debating whether to retreat from elections altogether. I understand the instinct; I never expected to find myself in electoral politics. I grew up in a working-class, union household on Long Island and got my start as a youth organizer before getting involved in direct action against police violence.

But if we’re serious about power and reducing suffering, we cannot abstain from elections. While we could just take our ball and go home, the power vacuum would still get filled — just not by us.

Of course, elections should not be our only — or even our primary — tool to build power. But given the fact that our power is limited and our opponents are so well-funded, we can’t afford to leave any tool on the table. My party—the Working Families Party—has done something very few independent parties have been able to do: win at both the state and local level. In Philadelphia, where the City Council reserves two seats for a minority party, we ran against Republicans and swept them out.

Now, decisions are negotiated not between Democrats and Republicans, but between Democrats and the Working Families Party. It’s allowed us to win, for example, a landmark eviction diversion program that keeps tens of thousands of people in their homes every year and has made Philadelphia an outlier when it comes to national eviction trends.

In states like New York and Connecticut, we’ve used the fusion voting system to give real representation to working people. It was once a widespread practice, but it was banned in many states after working-class people began gaining too much power. It works by allowing multiple parties to endorse the same candidate, who then appears on the ballot separately under each party. All of the candidate’s votes are added to their total, which allows for more constituencies and sets of issues to be represented in our politics.

Just imagine a presidential election in which hundreds of thousands of voters in key swing states are Working Families Party (WFP) voters, and the Democratic nominee has to win their votes to defeat the Right. That’s possible if we can grow our power and pass fusion in more states and cities around the country.

We’ve also won in places where we don’t have ballot access by primarying corporate Democrats and flipping purple seats. This year, we added dozens of new WFP leaders in states like Wisconsin, Arizona and New Mexico. And in Delaware, WFP-backed Kamela Smith unseated the 20-year incumbent and sitting Speaker of the State House.

It took the conservative movement five decades to dismantle the gains of the New Deal and Civil Rights era, to implement a pro-corporate agenda and rig the courts. They certainly didn’t leave any tool on the table in their ruthless pursuits. Our job now, over the next several years, is to scale our own experiments so that our local wins build to state wins, and our state wins build to national wins.

In other words, we want to be the ones with the power instead of the ones left to fight it.

Trump and his crew of billionaires, grifters, failsons and hangers-on want us to give up, to surrender to their attacks before they come to our doors. As with any authoritarian project, cynicism is their most powerful weapon. They want us to learn helplessness from defeat.

Instead, we need to be honing and sharpening our tools, rigorously applying the lessons of each win and loss, until we are the ones with the power to govern.