Jon Margolis is a political columnist for VTDigger.
The Bread and Roses Party is pragmatic and candid.
Its presidential candidate is “not running … in any of the swing states” it says, because “defeating President Donald Trump is the number one objective for November.”
But Vermont, the party’s statement noted, “is one of the very safe states for Joe Biden,” making it a state in which voters “have the opportunity to both vote against Trump AND to vote their values.”
Whatever those values may be, Vermonters will have the opportunity to vote them. The name of the Bread and Roses candidate Jerome Segal of Maryland, is on the ballot.
He has plenty of company. He is one of 19 people who are neither Joseph Biden nor Donald Trump who qualified as presidential candidates in Vermont.
It is a varied lot. Some of the campaigns and candidates are interesting, especially Segal’s. The first plank in the Bread and Roses platform supports creation of “a Beauty New Deal,” a “plan to elevate Beauty as a basic human need,” by supporting artists, creating “reparatory (sic) theatres in every mid-sized town and city … and … planting 330 million flowering trees” in American cities.
Who could oppose that?
Well, no doubt somebody. But it’s at least an intriguing and buoyant idea. Contrast that with the Alliance Party headed by Roque de la Fuente of California. Its platform argues that “our growing national debt … represents a much greater threat … than the Coronavirus,” which is both dreary and wrong.
At the other extreme is the very sad candidacy of Kanye West, a man of prodigious talent and apparently comparable travails, including bipolar disorder, according to his wife. West does not deny that the Trump campaign is using his candidacy to divert African American votes from Biden. In several states, including Vermont, Republicans helped West qualify for the ballot.
Third-, fourth- or 12th-party candidacies may never win a presidential election, but they can affect them. Four years ago, Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson got almost 4.5 million votes (3.28%). Green Party nominee Jill Stein got almost 1.5 million (1.07%). Plausible if unprovable analysis has speculated that these candidates siphoned enough support from Hillary Clinton to give Trump his Electoral College victory.
Johnson got 10,078 (3.20%) in Vermont; Stein 6,758 (2.14%). Both parties are on the Vermont ballot again this year. The Green Party nominee is Howie Hawkins of New York, and while the Greens are left of center and squarely opposed to Trump, they have also had help from Republicans, who bankrolled the Green Party’s effort to get on the ballot in Montana. This violated campaign finance laws and Hawkins and running mate Angela Walker were removed from the ballot there.
This year’s Libertarian Party candidate is Jo Jorgensen of South Carolina.
Otherwise, the candidates and their parties range from the far left (Alyson Kennedy of the Socialist Workers Party, the remnant of the Trotskyites) to the far right (former coal executive and former federal prisoner Don Blankenship of West Virginia of the Constitution Party).
A leftist party of more recent vintage is the Peace and Freedom Party, founded in 1967. Under its banner, Ralph Nader ran for president in 2008; Roseanne Barr in 2012. The party’s candidate this year, running in Vermont under the Liberty Union Party label, is Gloria La Riva of California.
Traditionalists may be pleased to learn that the Prohibition Party, which has run a presidential candidate every four years since 1872, qualified for the Vermont ballot this year. Its nominee is Phil Collins of Wisconsin.
Another candidate whose name might be familiar to Vermonters is H. Brooke Paige, the perpetual Republican candidate for statewide office. He is the presidential candidate of the Grumpy Old Patriots Party. Really.
But Paige is not the only Vermonter running for president. So is Christopher LaFontaine, who seems to live in Addison, but about whom nothing else could immediately be learned. His running mate is Michael Speed, who lives somewhere in California.
Other parties on the ballot are American Solidarity (Brian Carroll of California); Approval Voting (Blake Huber of Colorado); and Bull Moose (Keith McCormic of Texas). There are also four more independent candidates: Richard Duncan of Ohio, Kyle Kopitke of Michigan, Brock Pierce of Puerto Rico and Zachary Scalf of Georgia.
For all their differences, all these challengers share one common destiny: none will be elected president. Considering that getting elected would seem to be the purpose of running, this raises the question of why they bother.
Bread and Roses candidate Jerome Segal answered via email: “To affect public discourse through electoral politics. For third parties … elections are actually not about winning …they are about reaching people, affecting their vision, and about surfacing new policy ideas and perspectives out of the mainstream.”
That’s probably as good an answer as there is. But it isn’t very good. There are many ways to reach people and inform them about “perspectives out of the mainstream” without bollixing up a presidential campaign.
The trouble with urging people to “vote their values” is that “voting your values” means voting about you, as though voting were a personal act. It is not. It is a political act. Its purpose is to choose someone to fill an elected office. In this country, for the foreseeable future, that is in almost every case a choice between two contenders, one of whom is certain to be preferable (or at least less objectionable, which is the same thing) to every voter.
The preferable or less objectionable of those two is the candidate to choose. Want to express your inner angst? Write a poem. Then, if your candidate wins, see if you can get him to plant those 330 million flowering trees.
