Two Sides of a Breaking Coin

Hello, I hope that your summer has been going great.  

This is a very exciting time for the Forward Party – we will be making a major announcement later this week!  It might even make history. 

This week on the podcast I interview Matthew Hoh, the US Senate Candidate for the Green Party in North Carolina.  Matt recently made news because the Democratic Party kicked him off the ballot despite his submitting thousands more certified ballots than required.  Their reasoning?  “There could have been fraud,” despite there being no evidence.

“This reminds me of some of the arguments made by Republicans,” Matt says in our interview, and it’s not hard to see what he’s talking about.  It’s apparent that the Dems simply didn’t want the Greens on the ballot.  

Many are concerned that the Republican Party has taken on an authoritarian nature in the age of Trump.  Brian Klaas wrote about it this week in an excellent piece in the Atlantic.  I agree with this read wholeheartedly, and distinguish between the tens of millions of Americans who identify as Republicans and the Party itself.  If one of two parties goes dark in a two-party system – as it has in the United States - the entire system can crumble very quickly. 

Logically then, some people see Democrats as the last hope for American democracy.  There are structural reasons why that’s not going to work.  As Klaas writes, “In a two-party system, the other side will win eventually,” particularly in a country where 88% of people think we’re on the wrong track.  For example, the Democrats are virtually guaranteed to lose the House in the Fall. 

It’s the system itself that needs to evolve.  Everything else is a holding action, at best.

And it’s not as if the Democrats are immune from political temptation.  They kicked Matt off the ballot, regardless of the laws as written, because it serves their short-term ends.  They are spending millions boosting extreme Republican candidates in primaries – those who are ‘threats to democracy’ – because they think these candidates will prove more beatable in the general.  This could come back to bite when some of these extreme candidates – for example Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania – wind up competitive in the general.  Indeed, there are officials rooting for Trump to run again – which he will – because they see him as the only candidate they can defeat.  Democrats in Nevada are spending seven figures fighting a November ballot initiative for open primaries and ranked choice voting because they see it as against their political interests, even though the Democratic Party of Nevada uses ranked choice voting in their own operations. 

If there’s one thing the parties agree on, it’s that competition is to be avoided.  The two parties have carved the country up like a turkey.  90% of Congressional districts are uncompetitive in the general election – most people have no meaningful say in their representation.  In this system there isn’t any real need for either party to actually tend to or respond to people. Problems get worse not better, and people lose faith and become dispirited and angry. 

When I was running for President, I would often say, “We automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs in the Midwest and the South.  That’s what turned many of those communities from purple to red.”  You know what no one would ever say to me?  “Wow.  When we get to 8 million we should really do something about it.”  The reality on the ground is irrelevant except to drive discontent, which is rising everywhere. 

There needs to be a new movement – and party -  that includes people of different backgrounds and beliefs to rise up and change things for the better. We are building it now; the Forward Party is gaining steam more quickly than I could have imagined.  And this week is an enormous week for us. 

One race in November that could demonstrate what a third-party movement can do is in Utah.  Here, the Democrats did something very selfless – they declined to run a candidate.  This has left Evan McMullin, an Independent, with a chance to defeat Mike Lee, a Trump-endorsed incumbent, in a competitive Senate race.  Utah is a state that Trump won by 21 points, and would ordinarily be thought of as entirely uncontested. 

Here, Democrats realized that they would be the spoiler.  And, after a year of courtship, they voted 782 to 594 to decline to run a candidate, despite being exhorted to do so by many within their ranks. 

This was remarkable in part because we rarely see this kind of perspective and patriotism from within our party politics.  Can millions of others break free and begin to put country over party and work together in new ways?  The survival of our democracy depends on our being able to answer yes.