Third-Party Choices: A Closer Look At the 2024 Contenders

I describe myself as a radical (d)emocrat. One aspect of that description is the firm (and non-radical) belief that the democratic experiment in the United States is hamstrung by the two-party system, where so many of us are forced to vote for “the lesser evil.”

One solution to this system is ranked-choice voting (RCV), where citizens rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate wins 50% + 1 of all first-choice votes, then the candidate with the least votes is eliminated and their ballots are awarded to the voters’ second choice, and so on, until one candidate wins 50% + 1 of the vote.

With RCV, there’s no real way to “split the vote.” The winning candidate is the one who most voters are at least okay with. RCV can also erase the primary system, with all candidates running in the final election and voters ranking them accordingly.

Some jurisdictions in the U.S. already use RCV, including the city of Burlington, Vermont. According to FairVote.org, “13 million voters in 51 cities, counties, and states in the United States” benefit from RCV. Data suggests (but do not yet prove) that RCV results in a total higher turnout, increased youth turnout, more active campaigning, decreased invalid ballots, and increased representation from minority groups, with better overall outcomes for candidates who identify as women and people of color. That’s why you should get involved in the effort to increase voter access to ranked-choice voting.

While RCV offers a promising solution to the flaws of the two-party system, most Americans can only choose one presidential candidate on their ballot. As we approach the election, it’s important to recognize that, alongside the major party candidates, a variety of third-party contenders will also be vying for your vote. Depending on your state, you could have over ten presidential candidates to choose from. Here in Vermont, I’ll have at least six, and possibly seven, candidates to choose from.

I’ll have more to say later about the nominees from the two major parties, but to be an informed voter, I present to you an overview of the third-party candidates you might see on your ballot.

The Third-Party Candidates

Dr. West — or as he’s more affectionately known, Brother West — is running as an independent, rather than as nominee of a third party. As of today (August 18, 2024), he will be on the ballot in seven states, including Vermont.

Brother West is is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at Union Theological Seminary. He’s graduated from and previously taught at Harvard and Princeton (he was the first black person to receive a Ph.D in Philosophy from Princeton). He’s authored over 20 books, mostly focusing on race, democracy, theology, and class (example: Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Political Life, co-written with bell books). He’s also recorded albums in collaboration with Prince, Andre 3000, Talib Kweli, KRS-One, Killer Mike, and others, and appeared as “Councilor West” in The Matrix movies.

Brother West’s justice-based platform is close to my heart. It provides justice-based policies and solutions around black motherhood, children, disabilities, economics, education, elders, the environment, gender, global justice, gun violence, health, immigration, sexuality, race, criminal justice transformation, voting, and workers.

The platform is not just a bunch of platitudes. It includes specific items such as a national red flag law to prevent gun violence before it begins, ending military funding to Israel, and free tuition at state and community colleges.

Unfortunately, he has appeared on the same stage with individuals who, according to Mother Jones, support the Chinese and North Korean regimes and Russian state propaganda operations. That’s probably a risk for all left-wing candidates, especially those who stand in moral opposition to capitalism and war, including the war between Russia and Ukraine. (See the section on Claudia De La Cruz below).

His platform also calls for disbanding NATO, though less as an attempt to support Russian aggression and more as an attempt to end war-mongering in general and move to a peace-based, diplomacy-oriented global justice system. I think Brother West has the right motivation here, but it won’t have the effect he wants it to. Idealism may be possible in the domestic sphere, but it doesn’t work for global politics.

The official nominee of the Green Party US, Dr. Stein is now running as the Green candidate for the third time (2012, 2016, and now 2024). A graduate of Harvard and a physician, Dr. Stein became activated in politics after realizing the connection between exposure to toxic chemicals and illness. She help lead the fight to clean up coal plants, close toxic waste incinerators, and fight mercury contamination in Massachusetts fishing. She’s co-founded non-profits around environmental justice and served on the board for Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Dr. Stein’s platform is based on People, Planet, Peace.

For the People, she aims to establish an Economic Bill of Rights that will guarantee free public education from Pre-K to graduate school, abolish student loan debt, turn any bank that is “too big to fail” into a public utility, and more. She wants to restore workers’ rights by raising the national minimum wage to $25, ensure 50% worker representation on corporate boards, ban “at will” employment and require just-cause termination, and a bunch more. Her “People” plank also has policies for housing, healthcare, voting (including instituting ranked-choice voting nationwide!), prisons and policing, social justice, and immigration.

For Planet, she adopts the “ecosocialist Real Green New Deal” created by the Green Party. She opposes it to the Green New Deal offered by the Democrats, which she says is non-binding and weak, thanks to its market-based incentives, its reliance on nuclear energy, and use of “net zero emissions” rather than actual zero.

Dr. Stein’s Peace plank includes getting rid of the Security Council at the U.N. “to ensure the U.N. is a truly democratic body,” removing the war powers from the president and re-affirming Congress’ sole power to declare war, closing the vast majority of foreign U.S. military bases, ending the failed drug war, banning the use of killer drones, robots, and military AI, and fully funding veterans programs and benefits.

As with Brother West, Dr. Stein has been accused of being a dupe of the Russians. She famously appeared at the same 2015 dinner with Putin and Russian sympathizer, former National Security Advisor and convicted (but pardoned) felon, Michael Flynn. Dr. Stein argues that she was invited due to her peace activism, and she used the opportunity to give a speech where she called out both Russia and the United States for their endless wars on terror.

According to a 2018 report commission by the U.S. Senate, the Russians promoted Dr. Stein’s 2016 candidacy to draw votes away from Secretary Hilary Clinton and get former President Trump elected. This does not mean Dr. Stein was in league with Russians, regardless of what Sec. Clinton has claimed.

The Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate is Chase Oliver, a single, openly-gay political activist from Atlanta whom Rolling Stone named “the most influential Libertarian in America.” He worked in the restaurant business prior to becoming a political activist, though I don’t know in what capacity (owner, chef, waiter, busboy, accountant?, I have no idea). You may know him as the person who received 2% of the vote in Georgia Senate election, forcing a runoff between Democratic Senator Warnock and the Republican candidate, Herschel Walker.

He describes himself as “armed and gay,” and says he discovered the libertarian party during a 2010 Pride festival. For an NPR profile, he summed up his libertarianism by saying, “If you’re not harming someone with force, fraud, coercion, theft or violence, if you’re not doing any of those bad things, your life is your life. Your body is your body. Your business is your business, and your property is your property. It’s not mine, and it’s not the government’s.”

Mr. Oliver comes from the more classical libertarian side of the national party and is opposed by libertarian groups that are more conservative when it comes to social issues. NPR characterized that wing as “a more hardline, edgy and sometimes inflammatory take on libertarianism that is more compatible with the Republican Party under Trump.”

Mr. Oliver’s platform includes classical libertarian economic policies (cut spending, balance the budget, reduce red tape, etc.), social policies (defend the right to privacy, protect civil liberties, decriminalize abortions [while banning Federal funding of abortion clinics], end the war on drugs, remove all gun restrictions, end the death penalty, etc.), and foreign policies (end all federal aid to any government at war, return active duty personnel to domestic bases, etc.).

His goal in this election is to increase the Libertarian Party’s ballot access by enticing members of Gen Z to vote for him.

I’m not going to pull any punches on this one.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is nutjob who is trafficking on his father’s good name against his siblings’ will. Not only is he a terrible candidate, he has already signaled his willingness to abandon his candidacy if either Vice President Harris or former President Trump agree to name him to their cabinet.

His platform, as if anyone in their right mind would care, can be found here.

Seriously, do not vote for this man.

A liberation theologist, mother, educator, and community organizer, Claudia De La Cruz‘s life has been dedicated to helping Black and Carribean working class communities in New York City and beyond. At the age of 13, she became an organizer in her church; in high school, she organized for for reproductive health and safe sex at community centers and in churches. She traveled to Cuba, fought for the Puerto Rican independence movement, focused on the struggle of Palestinians, worked with exiles from Chile, Columbia, Haiti, Venzuela and Santo Domingo. She attended the City University of New York, organized teenagers to study and harness the lessons of resistance movements, stood against the war in Iraq, organized young woman in Washington Heights, became a pastor, and co-founded The People’s Forum in New York City, “a political education space and cultural home for working-class organizers, leaders and intellectuals from all over the country, and around the world.”

The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) inherits the Leninist call for an international brotherhood (though in today’s terms, they call it a “multinational organization”) that “fights for a socialist transformation and abolishes the tyranny of the market…and the rule of private property and profit.” They continue, “There are two choices: it’s capitalism or it’s socialism. We choose socialism because it’s possible and necessary.”

Ms. De La Cruz’s revolutionary platform includes seizing the 100 biggest corporations and turning them into public properties; abolishing the Supreme Court, the Senate, and the Federal Reserve, recognizing them as tools that the ultra-rich use to control society; locking up war criminals and Wall Street con men (examples include Hunter Biden, Jared Kushner, and Jamie Diamond); ending all aid to Israel; cutting the military budget by 90% and focusing on “peace, not war, with China and Russia”; ending the war on Black America; defending women’s rights and the rights of the LGBTQ+ people; and saving the planet from capitalism by seizing fossil fuel companies and massive agricultural companies.

As you may imagine, I can sympathize with her agenda.

The same Mother Jones article that condemned Brother West condemned Ms. De La Cruz and the PSL, declaring that the PSL “has supported the North Korean regime and its pursuit of nuclear weapons and also hailed the Chinese Communist Party, defending it against various charges of human rights violations.”

The PSL, along with roughly a hundred other organizations and individuals, including Claudia De La Cruz, responded to the charges with an open-letter declaring “McCarthyism is back.” They argued that “The political and media establishments, both liberal and conservative, have initiated McCarthy-like attacks against individuals and organizations criticizing US foreign policy, labeling peace advocates as ‘Chinese or foreign agents.’ This campaign uses innuendo and witch hunts, posing a threat to free speech and the right to dissent. We must oppose this trend.”

Rachele Fruit, representing the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), is a veteran activist whose political journey began during the Vietnam War. The SWP, rooted in revolutionary Marxism, has long fought for workers’ rights and stands in staunch opposition to both major parties, which it views as tools of capitalist oppression.

According to the Militant, the official organ of the SWP, “Fruit is a hotel worker and a member of UNITE HERE Local 355. Before that, she has been an active member of the American Postal Workers Union, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, the International Association of Machinists and the United Food and Commercial Workers union.”

Ms. Fruit’s platform isn’t as easy to find as the others because she doesn’t have an official website, just the pages published in The Militant. The short version is “the SWP fights for independent working-class political action in opposition to the parties of the bosses — the Democrats and Republicans….The SWP and The Militant are part of the continuity of revolutionary Marxism — from Marx and Engels, V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, and the lessons of revolutionary struggle through to the Cuban Revolution.”

How My Ranked Choice Ballot Would Go

If we had ranked-choice voting for presidential candidates in Vermont, I would vote the following.

Dr. Cornel West would be in the first position. While I don’t believe his peace-based foreign policy works in the greed and self-interest of global politics, I could get excited about virtually all of his domestic policies, not to mention his ability to inspire Americans to become the best version of themselves.

Claudia De La Cruz might earn the second spot on my ballot. Like many of the people who naively voted for former President Trump in 2016, I’m eager to rid America of its oligarchy, and Ms. De La Cruz’s socialist revolution doesn’t shirk from the radical policies that would get us there. She wouldn’t live long enough to implement those policies, of course, because the oligarchs would assassinate her within the first 100 days, but I like what she’s putting out there.

My third and final spot would go to Vice President Kamala Harris.

While the third-party candidates offer compelling alternatives, my ranked-choice ballot reflects both my idealism and pragmatism. Stay tuned for my thoughts on Vice President Kamala Harris and the two-party race in a future post.