This Election Day, please vote for Kamala Harris. Here's why.

Why voting third party or staying home are not options. And why I, a lifelong leftist activist, think the only feminist thing to do is vote for Harris.

Editorial note based on early feedback: I shouldn't have to say this but if you send me a threat over this post, then your concern is something other than feminism or human rights, and I will publish your threat and the email from which you sent it in this newsletter.

I've raised tens of thousands of dollars for Palestinian relief* and done all I can to stop the genocide, while also doing all I can to stop increasingly rampant anti-semitism at home. Threatening me will not stop the genocide, but voting third party is a vote for Trump, and therefore for more genocides and violence, against both Palestinians and Jews, as well as millions of other vulnerable people, most of whom will be women and children.

A week from today, those of us in the US who have not lost our right to vote (as many have) will go to the polls.

I’m begging you to vote for Kamala Harris.

Next Tuesday, we get to choose whose judges we want making decisions about our bodies and our lives; whose justice system and police we want handling protesters; whose executive orders we want addressing our freedoms; who we want negotiating with foreign leaders; who we want to pick judges whose careers may outlive many of us.

Our choice is a deeply problematic one, but ultimately, it’s a choice between more and less violence.

If you’re reading this newsletter, it’s because you believe I have something worthwhile to say. So I hope, if you’re considering not voting, voting third party, or God Forbid voting for Trump, that you’ll be willing to at least hear me out when I tell you that there is no valid option other than voting for Kamala Harris.

Please vote next Tuesday for the only person who has any hope of not making things so much worse. Kamala Harris will be more than just president; she will determine which judges make decisions about our lives, which crimes our government prosecutes, whether we enter into more wars and support more genocides, or whether we scale back the brutality.

Most of what I write is a coherent whole, intended to be read from start to finish. You can certainly do that with this piece, but I’ve also written it with specific thoughts and objections in mind. So you might get more out of this piece if you jump around to the parts most relevant to you.

If You’re Considering Voting Trump or Staying Home

If you’re weighing the benefits of voting for Trump versus staying at home, I urge you to stay at home. But if you read my work, I believe that Kamala Harris is the bet candidate for you, and the only reason you might disagree is because you have been misled and manipulated.

Trump wants to destroy life for women across every issue I talk about:

• He wants to ensure that it’s hard, and maybe even impossible, to leave your marriage—including and perhaps especially if it’s abusive.

• He will appoint judges who will make it even harder to get a restraining order, get an abuser’s guns taken away, and more.

• He will erode parents’ rights to make choices about their own children, from the cradle to the grave.

• He intends to put even more immigrant babies in cages.

• He will arm movements that kill children abroad, while allowing the death penalty for children at home, and supporting police who shoot and assault children.

This is by no means a complete list. It goes on and on, and I do mean on. If you are actually considering voting for Trump, I want you to consider the main barriers women face in the world, in their marriages, and when advocating for their children. You will find, with minimal research, that he has a plan to make every single one of those issues dramatically worse.

Is Kamala Harris doing enough for women, for other minorities, for working people? No. But she does not have a plan to make life actively worse, and has several plans to make life better by, for example, better funding childcare, increasing access to affordable housing, providing down payment assistance, rebuilding our broken healthcare system that is killing mothers (and especially Black mothers) in record numbers, and more.

A vote for Trump is a vote for the overwhelming majority of struggling people to struggle more, and in many cases, to remove all prospects they have for a hopeful future.

But I don’t think many of my readers are considering voting for Trump. So I want to talk instead to those of you who are, like me, angry that yet again Democrats have moved to the right, ignoring the will of the people and the best interests of those who suffer most both here and abroad.

To My Angry Leftist Readers Who Want to Stay Home or Vote Third Party

It is no secret that I am a leftist. I am devastated at the widespread suffering that our culture has normalized—from genocide to the normalization of abject poverty. The state of the United States is a global embarrassment, and the fact that we could do so much better but choose not to is depressing.

Please don’t allow your demoralization about the state of things to inspire you to throw away any hope for the future.

Many of my colleagues, my sisters in this fight, have urged some of you to vote third party or stay home, in protest against the genocide. I respect them, and their message. You’re not going to hear me vote-shaming people, or blaming anyone other than fascist monsters for the horrific state of this country. I still love and respect the people who are doing what they think is right to stop horrific violence.

But I want my American friends and readers to note that most of this rallying is coming from people outside of our country, who may not fully understand our system, and who simply do not understand the weight of this election.

I want to give you a very simple counter-message:

Neither candidate stands where we want them to, where so many of us need them to, on a number of issues. So we have to vote as an act of harm reduction, and frankly, as an act that preserves the future of voting, of democracy, and potentially of humanity.

Donald Trump has been clear and explicit about his plans not only to enact a federal ban on abortion, but also to punish, potentially with death, women who seek abortions and anyone who helps them.

He already kidnapped immigrant babies and put them in cages, and now he wants to do it again.

He has been clear that he wants to end voting, and that he will engage in mass violence against protesters, especially pro-Palestinian protesters.

Our culture is not where I want it to be, and many of the things that matter to me, and to many of you, are not on the ballot.

So the question is: Do we vote to make the things that are on the ballot—abortion access, domestic violence, family courts, courts in general, privacy, immigrant rights, racial justice—better? Or do we vote to make those things worse?

This is the trolley problem in real life. Do we vote for a candidate who will likely continue to support another country’s genocide? Or do we vote for a candidate who we know will intensify that genocide, expand or create other genocides, engage in genocide in this country, and escalate every atrocity this country is currently experiencing or has ever experienced?

There is not a third choice. Those are the only two choices.

Third party candidates cannot win—and don’t even want to

My mom spent the end of her pregnancy with me arguing with Ralph Nader about the appropriate car temperature. Ralph is a beloved consumer activist and lawyer, a human right activist, and a long-time third party candidate. He ran most famously for the Green Party in 2000. He’s a spectacular human being who spent years building and growing third party opportunities.

My family has been involved with third party politics since before I was born. I tell you this solely that you understand that I’m not some center-leftist Democrat shill. I know the problems of the two-party system. And those problems are exactly why I think you need to vote within that system.

Our electoral system is set up such that a third party cannot win. Even if every single progressive in the United States voted for Jill Stein, she still could not win. That’s because, at most if all progressives voted for her, she would only get 25% of the vote. That’s without even getting into the electoral college difficulties inherent to a third party run. She’s not even on the ballot in enough states to win.

Stein has never won any major election, but for some reason thinks she can now win the biggest one.

This, at its core, is the problem of third party politics. Third parties grow and are built at the local level. That’s where they can win. But opportunist candidates invest nothing in local politics, nothing in building local infrastructure, nothing in growing their parties. They seek only fame and celebrity from races they cannot win, because there is no infrastructure—electoral or otherwise—to support them.

Vote third party in local elections. Vote third party if you live in an electorally safe state, even. But if you live in a state where your vote has even a minuscule chance of determining the outcome of the election, a third party vote is a vote thrown away.

Voting third party only during presidential elections is a losing strategy that centers exactly what the far right wants. If you do this, you don’t really care about building a viable third party in this country. Please, instead, vote for a candidate who won’t destroy the possibility of a viable third party via the courts, executive orders, and a brutal and violent crackdown. Then spend the next four years working with and for third parties in your state.

There is no moral purity in a system built upon genocide and slavery

A reader I respect made a simple, and compelling, argument to me a few days ago: You cannot vote for genocide. A vote for Harris is a vote for genocide.

I understand, and sympathize, with this position. The problem is that it reduces the election to a single issue. And it prioritizes individual moral purity over collective liberation.

There is no moral purity in an American system that was built upon genocide. Living here means living with multiple mass genocides enacted in the creation of this country. Even more importantly, the United States has engaged in multiple mass genocides, through virtually every election cycle. We murdered at least a million Iraqi civilians. We killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians with a nuclear bomb most agree was totally unnecessary, have participated in mass slaughter on virtually every continent for the entirety of American history. And the genocide of Palestinians is hardly new.

But we’re not just voting on the current genocide(s). We’ve voting about whether we want more genocide, more violence and genocide at home. We’re voting about, potentially, whether we want to ever be able to vote again.

No one benefits from any vote against Kamala. The sole beneficiary is the conscience and ego of the person voting against her. Thousands of slaughtered Palestinians, thousands more in danger of death and torture, will not benefit from a Trump presidency, or from your individual vote of conscience, in any way. Indeed, all evidence shows that Trump will escalate the killing and expand it to other nations.

But there will be real beneficiaries to a vote for Harris. That potentially includes current victims of genocide, but definitely includes immigrant children who will not be kidnapped from their parents; women who will not get the death penalty for abortion, and millions of incarcerated Americans who will not see their almost-nonexistent rights even further eroded.

The list of potential beneficiaries of a Harris presidency is essentially infinite. That’s because Harris will get to pick multiple Supreme Court justices, not to mention numerous federal judges, each of whom will determine the fate of millions of Americans when issues come before the court. The judiciary determines what rights you have, and who enforces them. A Trump judiciary will destroy basic liberties for everyone, and will likely be so terrible that it’s difficult to predict the long-term consequences. Under a Trump judiciary, there could literally be no future for your children, for my children, for all of our children.

Voting is harm reduction. Do you want to reduce harm or do you want to stroke your own ego?

The courts are everything

Every victory for civil and human rights over the past two centuries has ultimately depended on the legal and political system—and almost always, on the Supreme Court. These are the systems through which our activism is filtered, and moving these systems as far left as possible is critical. We’ve already seen how having a centrist president doesn’t matter when the Supreme Court is packed, as evidenced by the death of abortion rights.

I’m married to a civil rights lawyer, and we already see in our daily lives how judges influence matters of life and death. Here in my home state, a massive uprising against a center training police for urban warfare has merged with the movement for Palestinian liberation. The result has been explosive, with protesters often facing decades in prison for crimes such as donating money to a bail fund.

What ultimately happens to them will depend on what happens to the courts. Our rights only exist when there is a court that can enforce them. Otherwise, the police, the military, and every other system of power operate with impunity.

Whose judges do you want making decisions about protesters? About freedom of speech? About women who seek abortions? About whether children should go to prison or be executed?

Fascism thrives on demoralization

An unjust world depends on the demoralization of people who might otherwise work to change it.

When we become demoralized, we fight less. Or we give into impulsive choices like throwing away our vote on a candidate we know can’t win.

This is a dark moment in history. Our moral obligation is to meet the darkness with hope for the future, with hope that we can preserve some of what we have now so that we can build better.

This is all that has ever worked in this country, in this system. We didn’t end slavery, or Jim Crow, or coverture, or any other system by overthrowing the government. We ended it by voting, over and over, for the less bad choice.

The Republicans, the fascists, have always had a 50-year plan. They’ve always held their nose and voted for someone who was less than ideal, allowing them to slowly and steadily reshape the judiciary and inch closer to the candidate they really wanted: a true and vocal fascist. They’ve used our system for their own ends.

We must be as strategic as them, accepting that change will be slow, and will require focus, planning, and using every lever of the system to our advantage.

Voting actually does matter—that’s why the right wants to take it

This Election Day, like many before it, my husband will be on call to work election protection. In the middle of the night, when Republicans try to throw away the votes of marginalized and primarily Black voters, he and a few colleagues will be the ones getting the call to stop them.

They will do anything to throw out votes, because voting is one of the few powers we have in this deeply broken system.

Emma Goldman once quipped, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”

Voting does not change things quickly. It does not change enough. But over history, it has changed almost everything. Here is a very brief list of what voting has changed:

• slavery, via court cases, a civil war, and eventually an emancipation proclamation

• Jim Crow segregation, via court cases under justices appointed by elected officials

• women’s right to vote, via elected officials

• abortion rights (and now, an end to abortion rights) via Supreme Court cases

• the right of women to own property, have credit cards, have bank accounts, work, be free of discrimination at work, pump breastmilk at work, not be sexually harassed at work, seek equal pay to men, and more, all via political legislation enacted by elected officials (and notably, these rights are enforced through appointed judges who are chosen by elected officials, so if you actually want to see them enforced, you have to vote)

Activism takes many forms. It begins as a fringe, moves to the center, but then ultimately depends on the political process to codify anything as a legal right.

The revolution is not coming to save you any time soon in a country as deeply militarized as this one. But your vote can save people right now.

Eventually, perhaps we will work our way to a better system. That requires that we vote.

Or maybe we’ll overthrow the whole thing and start over, with sudden and joyful change. That’s not happening today, and the people who will be victimized by the system (including yourself) between now and whenever that happens need you to vote for harm reduction now.

To vote for anyone other than Kamala Harris is to declare defeat. It’s a statement that, because democracy is not currently functioning very well, we should give up and destroy it.

That’s what the fascists want you to do.

It’s certainly what the people who want to kill even more children want you to do.

Will you stand with them in the voting booth?

If you’re already voting for Harris

If you’re already voting for Harris, I can imagine you nodding your head in agreement, and maybe even feeling a little self-righteous. Thank you for your vote.

The vote is just the beginning. It is not enough. If Harris wins, there is massive work to do. Over the next week, though, please do me a favor:

Don’t talk to your friends who aren’t sure like they’re stupid or bad. The criticism of Harris on the left is very real, and research suggests that shaming people pushes then toward the other candidate. Your friends are grappling with a moral dilemma. Don’t treat them like that makes them stupid or inferior.

Help people vote. Please.

In most states, you can vote early. Today. Find your polling place here. Find information about early voting in your state here.

*The emailed reactions to this email have been absolutely unhinged. I’ve got one seemingly unstable reader accusing me of using fundraisers for Palestinian children as a “down payment fund.” If you’re not like her, though, I would encourage you to donate to PCRF here. Or you can donate directly here.

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