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A group of some of the most revered and longest-active environmentalists issued a dire warning to the next generation of activists on Monday: Don’t vote for the Green Party this year. And don’t sit out the election either.
The warning, coming in the form of a letter signed by more than 170 top environmental leaders, is an explicit recognition that third-party voting—including from within their own community—has tipped presidential elections in the past. It’s also a plea to those who remain on the fence about Joe Biden, or who believe that they should cast a protest vote for someone else, that the stakes are simply too high.
“Angry right-wing voters and liberal absentees put Trump in the White House in 2016,” the letter reads. “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.”
Warnings like these have become fixtures of election cycles ever since 2000, when Ralph Nader’s presence on the ballot likely cost Al Gore critical votes in Florida. In 2016, NextGen Climate, an environmental group that backed Hillary Clinton’s election, ran ads pleading with voters who cared about climate change to not take teh Libertarian candidate, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, seriously. President Barack Obama bluntly declared in one radio interview: "If you vote for a third-party candidate who's got no chance to win, that's a vote for Trump.”
What’s different in 2020 is the fresh proof of Obama’s argument. The margins by which Trump won the three critical Midwest states—Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—were all smaller than the total vote counts for Green Party candidate Jill Stein. And for those who have been in the trenches of environmental battles over the past five decades, the risk of it happening again are petrifying.
“If you don’t get somebody in office that you can work with, then protests and demonstrations don’t make a difference,” said Earth Day founder Denis Hayes, a letter signatory. “I’d much rather have somebody I can work with than a symbolic vote.”
“There is a strong motivation among disillusioned radical young people to vote third party now or sit out the election,” added Peter Harnik, the coordinator of Environmental Action, a pioneer activist environmental organization. “We felt like we've been there and done this in the past. This is not the election to make a purity statement.”
