Seven Ways the Election Will Shape the Future of Science, Health and the Environment

By Andrea Thompson, Tanya Lewis, Lee Billings, Sophie Bushwick, Clara Moskowitz and Kate Wong, Scientific American

02 November 20

Climate change, nuclear arms control, the pandemic and more will be determined by whoever wins the White House and Congress

hen all the votes are cast and counted in this year’s momentous November 3 election, the results will have deep and potentially long-lasting impacts on numerous areas of society, including science. President Donald Trump and his challenger, former vice president Joe Biden, have presented vastly different visions for handling crucial issues—ranging from the deadly coronavirus pandemic to the damaging impacts of climate change and immigration policies.

The election’s outcome—not just who wins the White House but who controls Congress—will determine what laws get passed, how budgets are allocated and what direction key science-related agencies (such as NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) will take. The past four years have been marked by extensive deregulatory efforts that affect climate and public health. The Trump administration has also taken various steps that could undercut access to health care. And it has appointed industry officials to scientific advisory boards and made other moves that are likely to diminish the role and influence of scientific expertise. This approach has shown up acutely in what many public health experts see as the disastrous handling of the pandemic at the federal level—which has, in turn, undermined the reputation of storied agencies, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Here, Scientific American takes a look at how the election could shape a few key scientific issues, depending on who wins.

Will We Bend the Pandemic Curve?

Undoubtedly the most immediate issue Biden or Trump will face as president is the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 227,000 people in the U.S. to date. Trump and his administration have consistently downplayed the threat to the public. They have failed to address severe testing shortages, flouted basic public health guidelines by holding large rallies and refusing to wear masks (while mocking those who do), and even proved unable to contain outbreaks in the White House itself. The administration has been accused of interfering with federal health agencies for political gain. It has refused funding to the hardest-hit states and communities and, in concert with Republicans in the Senate, opposed pandemic relief bills that included extending the extra unemployment benefits of $600, thus letting them lapse.* Although several potential vaccines are in the final testing stages, none are on track for approval before the election. The president himself has repeatedly spread misinformation about COVID-19, promoting ineffective and dangerous therapies and falsely calling the disease no worse than the flu. He has, again and again, claimed the U.S. is “turning the corner” on the public health crisis, despite record-high numbers of cases and hospitalizations. His own chief of staff recently admitted that “we are not going to control the pandemic.”

Biden, by contrast, has put forth a detailed COVID-19 plan to make testing more widely available and to guarantee that testing and treatment are free. The plan would also continue supporting vaccine development and ensure states have adequate protective equipment and staffing. Further, it would provide economic relief for workers and small businesses and paid emergency leave. Biden has pledged to put scientists and public health experts front and center in daily pandemic briefings. His plan additionally includes preparing the country for future pandemics by supporting research and developing robust disease-surveillance programs. He has promised that on his first day in office, the U.S. would rejoin the World Health Organization (which the Trump administration pulled out of earlier this year). He also aims to restore the White House’s National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, which was established by then president Barack Obama in 2014—and disbanded by the Trump administration in 2018. Biden has stopped short of calling for a national mask mandate but has said he would require masks in all federal buildings and interstate transportation.

“The biggest priority will be ending the pandemic and continuing to shepherd vaccines,” says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University. “That’s going to be very challenging because of the loss of trust in health agencies like the CDC.” Biden would need to reengage the public and rebuild that trust, and he should also invest heavily in research and pandemic preparedness and response, Rasmussen adds.

How Clean Will the Air Be?

Despite Trump’s pledges to ensure the U.S. has clean air and water, his administration has undertaken significant environmental deregulations. Some of the biggest changes have been to rules addressing greenhouse gases and other air pollutants. The administration has repealed the Obama-era Clean Power Plan (which set limits on carbon emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants) and now allows states to set their own rules. It has also weakened the fuel-efficiency standards for cars, permitting more tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases, and has loosened restrictions on toxic mercury emissions from oil- and coal-fired power plants.

A second Trump term would likely continue down the same path. It could, however, face some legal challenges: agencies have not always followed clearly set procedures for rulemaking, which leaves some Trump-era changes open to being overturned by the courts. “This administration’s track record in court is pretty bad,” notes Hillary Aidun, a fellow at Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

The Trump administration’s existing rollbacks would add the equivalent of an estimated 1.8 billion metric tons of excess carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2035, according to an analysis by the Rhodium Group, an independent research outlet. Analyses from both academic scientists and the Environmental Protection Agency have shown that less stringent air pollution regulations can lead to thousands of premature deaths and cause or exacerbate lung illnesses.

Biden has been vocal about reversing Trump’s actions and strengthening regulations—as well as addressing the disproportionate harm pollution causes in Black, brown and low-income communities. Some actions would be easier to undo than others. It would be relatively simple to revoke or alter executive orders and guidance, such as the Trump administration’s directive not to use Obama-era estimates for the social cost of carbon.

Biden can also issue his own executive orders, as he has pledged to do to set a target for reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. Rule changes completed within the past 60 legislative days could be overturned by the new Congress, though this is only likely to happen if Democrats win control of both chambers. Some older regulations, such as the revisions to fuel-efficiency standards, would have to be altered through the laborious federal rulemaking process, which can take years. (There is one exception to the fuel-standards rule: a Biden administration could rescind the withdrawal of California’s waiver to set its own more stringent regulations—which other states would then be free to adopt.)

Who Will Have Reliable and Affordable Health Care?

Trump and congressional Republicans have repeatedly tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act, or ACA. The law provides health insurance to more than 20 million Americans and protects up to 129 million people with preexisting conditions (which could include COVID-19). Repeal efforts have thus far failed, and the Trump administration has not revealed a plan for replacing the coverage. Instead Trump has issued a toothless executive order claiming he will protect insurance for those with preexisting conditions. He has signed several other executive orders that he contends will reduce drug prices, but the details are murky, and the orders are far from being implemented. Meanwhile, in a highly unusual and widely condemned move, his Republican party rammed through Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat—just a week before the election. In early November the court is scheduled to hear a case to decide whether the entire ACA is unconstitutional because of its individual mandate to purchase health insurance. The court’s six-to-three conservative majority could also threaten to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that guarantees the right to an abortion. The Trump administration has already chipped away at women’s reproductive rights through a series of rules that threaten insurance coverage for abortions and contraception. If reelected, he could roll these rights back even further.

Biden was part of the Obama administration, which created the ACA, and he has said that if he is elected, he will build on it rather than replace it. His health plan would add a public option to the ACA, increase tax credits in order to lower premiums and provide coverage for Americans who would have become eligible for Medicaid if their state had not refused to expand it. Biden’s plan aims to make health care more affordable by allowing the public option section to negotiate costs with providers and by repealing the exception that allows pharmaceutical companies to avoid negotiating with Medicare over drug prices. He would also work to shore up access to contraception and abortion by protecting Roe v. Wade, restoring funding to Planned Parenthood and rescinding the so-called Mexico City Policy that bars federal funding to global health organizations that perform or promote abortion as a method of family planning. Biden also says he wants to reduce the unacceptably high maternal mortality rate among women of color and to guard the ACA’s health care protections, regardless of gender, gender identify or sexual orientation. He supports paid leave for workers and has floated a plan to address gun violence.

But Biden’s ideas face some potential roadblocks. “One thing that’s really important to realize, [with a six-to-three conservative majority in the Supreme Court and 200 confirmed judges nominated by Trump], is: anything Biden does is going to be immediately challenged,” says Tim Jost, an emeritus professor at the Washington and Lee University School of Law. And of course, in order to pass any health care legislation, he would likely need a Democratic majority in the Senate.

Who Will Keep the U.S.—and the World—Safe?

In the high-stakes arena of nuclear weapons, the differences between the two candidates could not be clearer. Biden has expressed support for existing arms-control agreements as a way to prevent nuclear proliferation—and annihilation. In contrast, Trump has consistently sought to weaken U.S. participation in such agreements, arguing that unilateral freedom of action is better than accepting safety-boosting norms set by international partnerships.

This “America First” approach has led to numerous setbacks in nuclear nonproliferation during Trump’s first term, most notably the U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2018. More commonly known as the “Iran deal,” this 2015 agreement between Tehran and the member nations of the United Nations Security Council was meant to halt Iran’s nuclear-weapons program in return for the lifting of crippling economic sanctions—many of which the Trump administration has now reinstated. Iran has responded in kind by continuing its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Biden has stated he would seek for the U.S. to rejoin the deal.

Similarly, Trump has denounced the only active nuclear arms agreement between the U.S. and Russia—the New START treaty enacted in 2010, which aims to prevent a ruinous cold war–style arms race by limiting the sizes of both nations’ nuclear arsenals. The treaty expires in February, 15 days after the next presidential inauguration, but it includes a provision that it can be renewed for up to five years. Trump had previously called for China to join the treaty (which would be unlikely) before the U.S. would renew, placing New START in limbo. Russia and the Trump administration now seem to be moving toward a short-term extension, but the treaty’s fate remains uncertain. Biden has said his administration would renew it.

Despite his high-profile courting of North Korea’s authoritarian leader Kim Jong-un, Trump has failed to contain the rogue nuclear state’s ongoing development of warhead-carrying missiles that threaten the U.S. and its allies. Biden, in contrast, has compared Kim to Hitler and vowed to take a tougher stance against his regime’s aggressive nuclear aspirations. But even so, according to Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear-arms expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, in the aftermath of Trump’s actions, “it’s not clear that [a Biden administration] can put Humpty Dumpty back together again.” As for another four years of Trump? “It’s probably back to the arms race and proliferation,” Lewis says.

Who Will Be Allowed to Enter the Country?

Trump has followed through on his campaign promise to restrict immigration, establishing a number of barriers to reduce the number of both authorized and unauthorized entrants to the U.S. Biden has pledged not only to tear down Trump’s restrictions but also to reform the U.S. immigration system to encourage entry. “Currently, we are not taking advantage of America’s ability to attract the best and brightest workers in the world,” reads a statement on his campaign Web site. Evidence suggests that immigrants boost the economy in general—and they play a particularly significant role in academia and technology.

The president’s anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric are already impacting U.S.’s ability to attract foreign-born talent. The number of new international students has fallen each year since 2016, depriving colleges and universities of their tuition—and the tech sector of their abilities. After graduation, many such people continue working here: for example, more than 80 percent of international students who earn doctorates in artificial intelligence at U.S. institutions remain in the country after graduation. In fact, more than half of the nation’s AI workers were born abroad, and as China strives to overtake it in this field, the U.S.’s ability to attract AI researchers will be vital. Artificial intelligence is only one example. Any highly technical research field, such as quantum computing, relies on skilled workers with specialized knowledge, many of whom come from beyond U.S. borders. This reliance is so important to both academia and technology companies that the Trump administration’s onerous new visa rules for skilled workers have drawn lawsuits from entities in both fields.

If Biden wins the election, his proposed immigrant-friendly policies could restore the U.S.’s reputation as an attractive destination for scientists from all over the world. If Trump remains in power, his administration will likely continue to restrict people born elsewhere from entering the country, driving many stars of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other fields to take their valuable talents elsewhere.

Where Will We Go in Space?

The next administration must decide whether to push on toward Trump’s goal of sending astronauts back to the moon by 2024 and then on to Mars in the 2030s under the Artemis program. Budget uncertainties and technical challenges make the deadline for a moon landing tight. The main hurdle in returning to Earth’s satellite is transportation, and NASA is developing its Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket for the mission. It is also contracting with three commercial companies to develop vehicles to touch down on the moon’s surface and then launch astronauts back to lunar orbit for the return trip.

New presidential administrations have a history of changing space-exploration plans, with the inevitable result of delaying any eventual goal by forcing NASA to change gears. Former president George W. Bush had instructed the agency to head for the moon under the Constellation program, but his successor Obama cancelled Constellation and directed NASA to make a charge for an asteroid instead. When Trump took office, the U.S. set its sights back on the moon—resulting in neither goal being achieved so far. If Trump wins again, he will presumably continue on the current course. Biden has not explicitly stated his space goals, but he might at least push back the Artemis time line, as suggested by a U.S. House bill introduced in January 2020.

What Will Happen to Our Shared Lands?

The fate of more than a quarter of the nation’s land—and with it, a sizable chunk of its greenhouse gas emissions—is in the hands of the next president. The federal government owns some 640 million acres of land in the U.S., managing its use for purposes ranging from conservation to energy development. Nearly 20 percent of the country’s emissions come from producing and using oil, gas and coal extracted from these public lands, which encompass ecologically important wilderness areas, as well as culturally and scientifically significant national monuments. Tensions over how to balance preservation of the land with natural-resource development have always existed. But against the backdrop of the unfolding climate crisis, the stakes are now higher than ever before.

Trump’s administration has made vast tracts of public land available for resource extraction. It has opened up parts of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas development—and now proposes to do the same with most of the nearby National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. The latter is the country’s largest single piece of public land; it contains critical habitats for polar bears, caribou and other animals. In September the administration released its plan to open more than half of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest—an intact temperate rain forest that stores about 8 percent of the carbon held in all the forests in the lower 48 states combined—to logging, which would release greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere.

In Utah, Trump has drastically downsized the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments, which contain hundreds of key fossil and archaeological sites. This change leaves nearly two million acres of previously protected land open to uranium mining, oil and gas drilling, and road construction. In New Mexico, his administration is looking to sell oil and gas leases in the area around Chaco Canyon, the sacred ancestral grounds of Navajo and Pueblo peoples. Since taking office, the Trump administration has offered millions of acres of public lands across the country for fossil-fuel-lease sales. And in July it rewrote the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)—a foundational conservation law—to limit environmental review of, and public input on, proposed infrastructure projects, among other changes. In his pursuit of his “energy dominance” agenda, Trump will continue to push for deregulation, exploration and fossil-fuel extraction on public land if he is reelected.

If Biden is elected, he has pledged to take executive action on day one that would include “permanently protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other areas impacted by President Trump’s attack on federal lands and waters” and “banning new oil and gas leasing on public lands and waters.” Importantly, Biden would be able to nominate new people to lead the Department of the Interior and its subagencies, including the Bureau of Land management, which control most public land. And he could, with the support of a Democratic Congress, undo Trump’s changes to NEPA.

Dear Fellow Progressives: Please Vote for Biden

By Daniel Ellsberg and Michael Ellsberg, Reader Supported News

02 November 20

is the season for some progressives to argue that the best way to build a progressive political movement in America is to stick it to the centrist Democrats – who have rejected progressive nominees and platforms – by voting for a third party in swing states.

If that helps elect what many regard as a “greater evil” Republican, some third party supporters argue, it will radicalize significant parts of the electorate, help the third party grow, and gradually increase the prospect of victory for genuinely progressive politics.

As die-hard progressives, we strongly disagree. Few beliefs among progressives have been so thoroughly tested in empirical reality over the last twenty years – and few have been so thoroughly discredited – as the idea that running third party candidates in swing states during close elections is a good way to build a progressive voting bloc.

In 2000, Ralph Nader, running as a Green, received 2,882,955 votes, which was 2.74% of the popular vote.

In 2004, Nader (running as an independent) received 465,642 votes, which was 0.38% of the popular vote. The Green Party’s candidate, David Cobb, received 119,859 votes, or 0.10% of the popular vote.

These two candidates combined received about 20% of the votes that Nader alone received in 2000. An 80% decrease in your voting bloc is not exactly grounds for confidence that “boycotting” or “protesting” the two-party duopoly via voting for a third party in swing states is likely to expand your voting bloc.

Why did the Nader and Green voting base fall off a cliff after 2000? The answer is obvious. In 2000, Nader was more-or-less open that he was intentionally trying to help get George W. Bush elected, under the (now discredited) theory that hard-right regimes somehow swell the ranks of radical voters.

In his book Gaming the System: Why Elections Aren’t Fair and What We Can Do About It, William Poundstone cites a reporter who asked Nader in 2000: “you would not have a problem providing the margin of defeat for Gore?" Nader reportedly replied, "I would not at all. I'd rather have a provocateur than an anesthetizer in the White House. Remember what [Reagan secretary of the interior] James Watt did for the environmental movement? He galvanized it. Gore and his buddy Clinton are anesthetizers."

In another instance, Nader said he’d prefer Bush over Gore because “it would mobilize us.”In a 2000 Outside magazine article, Jay Heinrichs wrote: “When asked if someone put a gun to his head and told him to vote for either Gore or Bush, which he would choose, Nader answered without hesitation: ‘Bush.... If you want the parties to diverge from one another, have Bush win.’” And in another interview, Nader told Dana Milbank that a Bush victory would “rally the left.”

Nader’s subsequent strategy of campaigning hard in swing states aligned with his theory that Bush would be preferable over Gore for progressives. Many of Nader’s most prominent supporters in the progressive movement, including one of us (Daniel), along with Michael Moore, and a dozen former “Nader’s Raiders,” urged Nader to stick to his original goal: winning 5% of the national vote, which would qualify the Greens for federal funding.

The obvious way to do that, we said, would be for Nader to withdraw in swing states, and instead campaign in large cities in safely red or blue states such as California, New York, and Texas, where he could reach many progressive voters at once. And these voters would feel comfortable supporting the Greens under such a strategy, since most potential progressive voters did not share Nader’s view that Bush would be preferable to Gore.

But Nader chose to abandon his declared 5% strategy. Instead, he campaigned aggressively in swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Florida in the final days of the election, favoring fewer total votes but more votes in swing states. This was his apparently-intentional strategy of trying to defeat Gore.

Nader’s intention was fulfilled. He received 97,421 votes in Florida, vastly more than Bush’s 537-vote margin of victory in the final official count in Florida, the state that tipped the election to Bush.

Of course, not all Nader voters in Florida would have voted for Gore had Nader not run in Florida; some would have voted for Bush, and some would not have voted at all. In 2004, Nader stated that “In the year 2000, exit polls reported that 25% of my voters would have voted for Bush, 38% would have voted for Gore and the rest would not have voted at all.” If those percentages held in Florida, that would mean a net gain of 12,664 votes for Gore had Nader not run in Florida – again, far above the 537 vote margin.

Nader and many Greens fairly point out that numerous other factors led to Bush’s razor-thin victory. There was widespread, unjust disenfranchisement of minorities in Florida, which the Gore campaign did little or nothing to challenge. There was the extraordinarily weak campaign by Gore, which caused 300,000 Democrats in Florida to vote for Bush, and half of all registered Democrats in the state not to vote at all. Then there were the infamous butterfly ballots and “hanging chads.” And of course, the Supreme Court’s nakedly partisan ruling in Bush v. Gore.

Thus, Nader defenders complain, with some justice, that it’s unfair and disingenuous for Democrats to focus on him and the Greens as the single cause for Bush’s victory, given all of these other factors (some of which were self-inflicted by Gore’s campaign). Of course Nader’s swing-state strategy was not the only cause of Bush’s victory, or even the main one.

But it’s at least as disingenuous for Nader and his supporters to claim – as most of them have done ever since – that their choice to campaign in swing states was not even one significant cause among others for Bush’s victory. First, it’s disingenuous because – as quoted above – Nader more-or-less admitted that he was intending to be one such cause, and his actions aligned with that intention perfectly.

Second, as described above, Bush’s narrow victory in Florida was the result of multiple factors, each of which alone influenced more votes than the final margin of victory. Thus, each variable was a sufficient cause, holding the other variables constant. If you are clearly one of those sufficient factors which tipped the election to Bush – and particularly if you knew you were likely to be one such factor, and intended to be so – then pointing out all the other factors does not absolve you of your part. Nader and the Greens have refused for twenty years to take any responsibility for their intentional swing-state strategy being one factor among others that helped to elect Bush. This obdurate refusal to take any responsibility is absurd. It’s a state of denial of Trumpian proportions.

By intentionally becoming one factor among many that led to Bush’s victory, Nader’s chosen course contributed to catastrophic results for victims of Bush’s policies in the Middle East. (This is not to let off the hook the craven presidents, Democrat and Republican, who have shrunk from “losing” Bush’s wars ever since, as previous presidents acted in Vietnam.)

Was Bush “no different” than Gore, as Nader and the Greens repeatedly claimed during the election? While it’s impossible to know if Gore would have invaded Afghanistan after 9/11, it seems exceedingly unlikely he would have used that crisis as an excuse to invade Iraq, a totally unrelated country. After all, Gore – for all his obvious faults from a progressive perspective – was not a neocon. He was not part of a movement that had been promoting the invasion of Iraq since before the election and (we now know) started planning for it early in 2001, well before 9/11.

Bush’s Iraq War is one of the great moral stains of the 21st century. In 2006, the Lancet – one of the world’s premier medical journals – published a study estimating that the first year and a half of the Iraq War led to 654,965 excess deaths of Iraqis, and that the vast majority of those deaths were violent. In 2015, Physicians for Social Responsibility embarked on a comprehensive review of the literature, and concluded that the Iraqi death toll from our invasion had likely topped 1 million.

One team of researchers recently concluded that the global “war on terror” that Bush initiated has led to 37 million refugees across the Middle East – which is close to the entire population of Canada becoming refugees.

Nader’s refrain that there was no significant difference between the major parties or between their two candidates in 2000 – he called them “Tweedledum and Tweedledee” – proved disastrously wrong. As did his prediction that a Bush victory would lead to a surge in progressive voting. Yes, the Republican was even worse than his Democratic opponent – far worse. And no, Bush’s aggression and domestic criminality did not “rally the left,” either in 2004 or 2008.

On the contrary, far from helping to build a progressive voting bloc outside of the Democratic party, Nader’s reckless strategy of running in swing states in 2000 decimated the very voting bloc he had built up across the nation.

The numbers speak for themselves. After their 80% dip in votes in 2004, Nader and the Greens never fully recovered. They went up a bit in 2008. Nader, running as an independent again, received 739,034 votes, which was 0.56% of the popular vote. Cynthia McKinney, running as the Green Party candidate, received 161,797, which was 0.12% of the popular vote. The two candidates combined received less than a third of what Nader received in 2000.

Then in 2012, Nader didn’t run, and the Green vote went back down. Jill Stein received just 469,627 votes, which was 0.36% of the popular vote. Stein went up in 2016, when she won 1,457,218 votes, which was 1.07% of the popular vote. Still, this was just about half of the votes that Nader received in 2000.

Where is the progressive “rally” that Nader’s swing state strategy and his preferred Bush victory was supposed to cause in 2000? In fact, there was not a rally but a free-fall, and Greens haven’t fully recovered, ever. Their judgment of running in swing states, risking if not favoring “the greater of two evils” to “mobilize” progressives, is horrendously misguided and destructive.

Of course, terrible judgment isn’t the only thing that keeps a progressive third party from growing. The fact is, our nation has a voting system that stacks the decks wildly in favor of the two-party system. There are many changes to our voting system that could break up the two-party duopoly, and we support all of them.

Chief among these changes is ranked-choice voting with instant runoff (as Maine and many cities now have). This allows voters to voice their support for an alternative party, without risk of helping to elect a greater evil. Another valuable change would be switching to larger multi-member House districts in states, with proportional representation, rather than smaller single-member House districts. This would allow smaller parties to gain a toehold in federal politics.

We should also abolish the electoral college. Doing so would avoid the loser of the national vote from gaining power, as happened with Bush and Trump (and could happen again this year). Ending the electoral college could also support the growth of alternative parties, as (without swing states) it would be harder for a tiny number of votes to swing an election; thus, fewer people would fear supporting an alternative party. While formally abolishing the electoral college might be impossible politically in the short run, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would have the same effect, and may be easier to enact.

But we don’t have these changes yet. And in the absence of such changes, third parties in the US are doomed to minor status. Except for Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 (a former Republican president), no third party candidate has received 20% of the popular vote since 1860.

Thus, while third parties currently have almost no chance of gaining any traction in the U.S. (because of the features of our voting system mentioned above), they now always run the risk of electing greater evils. Trying to grow a third party as if desirable electoral changes were already operative – when they are not – is not merely a failure to deal with reality; it’s wildly irresponsible.

Since 1950, the two major parties have been (as Greens correctly point out) dismayingly similar in nuclear policy and the military budget. But in domestic matters, they have never truly been Tweedledum and Tweedledee. With Amy Coney Barrett in the Supreme Court now (on the heels of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh from Trump, plus Alito from George W. Bush), the possible overturn of Roe v. Wade is just one dramatic example.

This year – in terms of climate policy, the pandemic, race, and maintaining democracy – the “greater evil” is indeed vastly greater. It is reckless to risk that greater evil in the name of a strategy of growing the progressive movement that has been thoroughly disproven over the last twenty years.

So, what’s the answer for progressives who want to see a powerful progressive party in America?

The answer, by now, should be obvious. Progressives should set out to dominate the Democratic party.

In 2016, Bernie Sanders did the right thing, and ran in the Democratic primary. The result? 13,210,550 votes for a candidate that was every bit as progressive as Ralph Nader; this amounted to 43.13% of the total vote in the primary. Bernie’s 2016 showing was the most votes a truly progressive candidate has ever received in a modern American election – far more than Nader’s peak of 2.8 million in 2000.

Unlike Ralph Nader in 2000 – who never stood a chance, because of our voting system, which prevents third parties from gaining any traction – Bernie had a solid chance of winning both the Democratic primary and the general election in 2016.

Third party progressives always say “the Democratic party can’t be reformed.” But Bernie’s impressive achievement in 2016 strongly contradicts that claim. He didn’t win, but he showed decisively that a grassroots insurgent movement, running on small donations without corporate or billionaire funding, can become a significant force in Democratic politics. Third party supporters counter that the Democratic establishment squashed the Bernie movement. That’s true, but come on ... no insurgency sails in without resistance. This one is far from over.

Did Trump winning in 2016 swell the ranks of progressive voters in 2020? If anyone could “rally the left” to swell the vote, you’d think it would be Donald J. Trump. That had looked equally true in 2000 and 2004 under Bush. Instead, as we’ve seen, eight catastrophic years of Bush – including the Iraq War and universal domestic surveillance – dramatically decreased votes for a progressive candidate. And the same thing has happened under Trump.

In the 2020 Democratic primary, Bernie received 9,680,042 votes. His fellow progressive Elizabeth Warren received 2,831,566 votes. Their combined total in 2020 was almost 700,000 fewer votes than Bernie alone received in 2016.

Bernie’s insurgent, grassroots movement rallied after eight years of Obama, a centrist Democrat, not after four years of Trump, a proto-fascist.

Why? The answer is obvious. When a climate-denier and would-be dictator like Trump (or a warmonger like Bush) is in power, some proportion of progressives feel it’s more urgent to get him out than to get a progressive in; like most Democrats, they see a centrist like Kerry in 2004 or like Biden now as a safer bet for doing so.

We believe the next Bernie-like progressive Democratic candidate with a chance of winning is far more likely to rise after four years of Biden, than after four more years of Trump. (If there’s even a democracy after four more years of Trump!)

For a whole range of reasons – most urgently, the climate crisis, which can only be turned around this decade – we need a far more progressive president in 2024 than Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. For example, we would be glad to see that challenger be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who will turn 35 – the minimum age for becoming president – right before the 2024 election. (We’d also be thrilled if she ran for the Senate.)

We believe young, progressive insurgents within the Democratic party, such as “the Squad” and Ro Khanna, are the future of progressive politics in America. A “protest” vote for a third party, a write-in, or not voting at all, fails to advance the prospects of these bold challengers. A vote for Biden (which both Bernie and AOC are urging) helps the future chances of young progressives aiming to take over the Democratic party.

A vote for Biden is not only, crucially, a vote against Trump. It is also a vote for the inspiring possibility of a progressive challenger in 2024, who will have a much easier time gaining traction with a centrist Democrat in power over the next four years, rather than under a president who is hell-bent on destroying the Constitution and ending democracy in America.

For all these reasons, we urge our fellow progressives in every state to join us, along with Bernie Sanders and AOC, in voting for Joe Biden.

Why in every state and not just swing states? This is the first presidential election in American history in which the popular vote is important as well as the electoral college vote. That’s because it is the first time in our history when an incumbent president has vowed to contest the results, whatever they are, unless he wins. He even rammed through a last-minute appointment of an extremist Supreme Court justice in hopes of winning his challenges in the courts, even if – by an honest and complete count – he lost.

The best hope of removing Trump from the White House is a landslide victory for Biden both in the swing states and in the nation as a whole.

Let’s make that happen.

Daniel Ellsberg is the author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers and The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.

Michael Ellsberg, Daniel’s son, is an author and activist based in Berkeley, California.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.