By Rae Abileah and Andrew Boyd
For those angsting over how to cast their vote, consider these insights on the role elections play in building long-term power.
The election will be over in less than two weeks, but there are still many who are angsting over who to vote for at the top of the ticket. Might a better understanding of the role elections play in people-powered social change help us make our decision?
Distilling hard-earned lessons from election dilemmas faced by earlier social movements, here are five key insights to consider.
1. Vote today for the candidate you want to pressure tomorrow.
As generations of grassroots organizers have said: Elections are just one small part of larger movements for social change, so “vote for the candidate you want to organize against!”
Lincoln doesn’t deserve credit for ending slavery any more than FDR deserves credit for the massive labor movement of the 1930s, or LBJ for the accomplishments of the civil rights movement. These huge historic victories were won by the hard and dedicated work of social movements — millions of everyday people taking concerted action.
At the same time, each of these presidents were an important part of the equation, inasmuch as they were responsive to the pressure exerted by people’s movements. Who sits at the top matters for our chances at big progressive wins.
As Aurora Levins Morales says, “We are choosing an opponent, not a leader.” Or in the words of Rebecca Solnit, “Voting is not a love letter; it’s a chess move.” It’s choosing a bus, so choose the one that can get you closer to where you want to go.
2. Who are you taking into the polling booth with you?
When you go into the voting booth on Nov. 5, you are not just voting for yourself. Think of all the people you are in solidarity with — often the most marginalized and vulnerable people: 11 million undocumented immigrants; women who have lost the right to make decisions over their own bodies; Palestinians whose lives are being brutalized; Ukrainians suffering under Putin’s war; transgender students who have lost critical state-level protections; working people who continue to lose out; not to mention a climate in peril affecting all life on Earth. This is who will be impacted by your vote. In other words, follow the lead of those most impacted.
3. Think how will you feel the morning after
Pause for a moment. Imagine it’s Wednesday morning, Nov. 6, and you’re waking up to election results. How do you feel? Take that gut-check feeling to the polls with you.
Now/Then imagine it’s the morning after the inauguration of the 47th president. What strategies will you employ to meet the demands of your campaigns and liberation movements? What kinds of protest tactics will be possible?
It’s evident to anyone on the left that the United States should take concrete action to halt the Israeli assault on Gaza, including an arms embargo, immediate humanitarian aid delivery and an end to settler violence. How will the next administration help or hinder your capacity to achieve these goals?
Regardless of who is in the Oval Office in 2025, we’re in for a very rough climate future. How might who is in office help determine whether we get a “better catastrophe”? How will the climate movement escalate strategically toward tangible wins?
For a more in-depth version of this imagining, we might do well to engage a SWOT analysis to game out how the external opportunities and threats presented by this election’s results, in conjunction with rising authoritarianism — from Netanyahu to Modi — worsening climactic events and the widening wealth disparity. What does our movement’s vision for 2025 and beyond look like and how will we get there? Voting is of course just one tactic in a larger story of building people power toward upending the system.
4. Things getting worse won’t get us closer to things getting better.
If you’re considering staying home in November because “maybe things have to get worse before people wake up,” this notion is unsupported by historical evidence. Worsening conditions are not correlated to larger-scale progressive mobilization. Indeed, the opposite is more true.
What does put wind in progressive sails is seeing people’s movements win, and the belief in the possibility that things could change for the better — what social movement scholars call “raised expectations.” From Black Lives Matter to Medicare for All to the Green New Deal, we have been on a trajectory of raising expectations for over a decade now.
Think about it: Are four more years of having to take defensive actions really going to help your cause?
What will help movements is a partial victory now that’ll also put us on more fertile political terrain for more victories to come. This election is not about our own personal expression. It’s about mitigating pain and suffering.
5. Voting your conscience means voting strategically.
Too often it feels like we’re made to choose between two bad options. But isn’t that the capitalist logic of our era tricking us into thinking that voting is primarily an individual choice, an act of personal expression?
A truly discerning conscience considers the broader context and the collective consequences of our actions, not just how we might feel in the moment. Much like how we can’t maintain a laundry list of all the products to boycott, it’s not about staying “pure”; it’s not about keeping our hands clean — it’s about building and wielding collective power and putting ourselves on a trajectory to win structural change. It’s not about “me”; it’s about “us.” Voting is a strategic (and collective) act of harm reduction.
And, reality check: We are voting in a broken two-party system in which corporations are people and a handful of states get to call the election due to an outdated Electoral College. Our massive national election could come down to a few thousand votes in seven key swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin).
So dithering over who to vote for at the top of the ticket in California is somewhat of a waste of time. Better to phone a friend in Pennsylvania and see if they have a plan to vote. If you live in a state that is securely blue or red, but want to have a bigger impact, there’s a time tested way to vote with both our head and heart: Vote swapping. Voters across the country are teaming up to strategically leverage their power and outwit the Electoral College (and you can join them).
It really is up to us.
We’re living through an epoch that is defined by crisis. Decades of neoliberal policies — passed under both Republican and Democratic administrations — have culminated in crisis after crisis, where millions of Americans have been harmed, and no one has been held accountable.
Somewhere along the way we started waking up to the fact that the people who broke America aren’t going to fix it; and that it’s up to us to win an America that works for the many, not just the few.
However, we do not yet have enough people power to win the changes we want — to defang Big Oil or stop weapons shipments to Israel — but progressive forces have more momentum than we’ve had in decades. To continue to gain ground, we need to keep building our movements and elect more people’s candidates.
So, right now, we have the immediate tasks of this election and securing the best path forward for movements. Voting is just one tool in a larger landscape of struggle that we engage in together, and we can use this election to build long-term power.
Rather than volunteering for a specific candidate, we can volunteer for grassroots people’s organizations like Working Families Party and Seed the Vote, and donate through Movement Voter Project, which funds long-term progressive grassroots organizations who do voter mobilization cycle after cycle. All these efforts are also working to elect people’s champions in down-ballot races.
Then, after the election is decided, we’ve got to get ourselves ready to pressure whoever wins on Day One — because no one is going to do that for us either.
So let’s power through this election, and in January 2025 unite to advance a non-fascist, as-progressive-as-we-can-make-it agenda. Another world is possible — if we build it.
Rae Abileah is a Jewish clergy person, social change strategist, author and editor for collective liberation. She is a trainer at Beautiful Trouble, and co-creator of the global Climate Ribbon art ritual. She was the co-director of CODEPINK, consulted on digital strategy for social justice at ThoughtWorks, and now runs her own consultancy, CreateWell, and facilitates design workshops for The Nature Conservancy. Rae is a contributing author to books including Beyond Tribal Loyalties: Personal Stories of Jewish Peace Activists. Rae graduated from Barnard College at Columbia University, and received ordination by the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute.
Andrew Boyd is a co-founder of Beautiful Trouble and Climate Clock and the author of I Want a Better Catastrophe.
This article was published on October 25,2024 at wagingnonviolence. A longer version of this story was first published on Common Dreams. Some language was incorporated with permission from the 2020 project NOT HIM, US, written by Jonathan Matthew Smucker and Andrew Boyd.