The chief political problem of the class of all primarily working people, is that is <i>division</i>. This division was purposefully baked in to the Constitution of the United States, and has been augmented in various means by the ruling class from the beginning.
While the authors of the Constitution claimed to abhor parties, it seems what they actually abhorred were the other guy's parties. Political parties arose almost immediately.
The construction of the republic virtually enssures that there will not be one but two competitive parties at the federal level and state constitutions typically do that for states as well. The most obvious ways to enable multiple electorially viable parties is to have a Parliamentary Democracy and also one of many systems that provides for Proportional Representation. Such techniques are now used in some state and local elections, with mixed designs and mixed results.
But the electoral realities have led some left of center factions, nowadays including DSA and CPUSA, to endorse the "Vote for Democrats to defeat the Fascist Right" point of view, even though at one time both the major socialist group of the time and the Communist Party ran their own candidates. The Communist Party only quit running candidates after 1988, partly driven by their loss of funding from the Comintern. But it also shows the flexibility of Marxism-Leninism.
Other groups, such as the Green Party and PSL, often disparage the Democratic Party completely, sometimes making very unrealistic claims about the electoral viability of their candidates.
What's worse, groups even identify with their currently chosen position that they disparage the other one far more than those who all would agree are even worse, Republicans and far right.
After having studied the realities of electoral politics during the last election cycle, including theoretical analyses of voting impact, I've come to the conclusion that the best thing to do is Vote However You Damned Please.
This stems from both cynicism and optimism. Cynically, the chance that your vote in any federal election is astronomically small, smaller than one over half the total number of voters, according to a very sophisticated probabilistic analysis by some economists a few decades ago. When I pondered their analysis, but added the effect of pre-existing tendencies, they would only make the number much smaller. So the probability of my vote changing a state-wide election would be not just one over millions but one over trillions or quadrillions. Which is, more or less, the way it seems. The result is pretty well baked in already. Texas is a solid Republican state under present day rules that Republicans control.
Why give up the opportunity to speak with your real true voice, as loud and clear as you can, to enter such a game you are virtually certain to lose (as in fail to have an effect on the result)? It's optimistic to believe that making your voice heard in such a way will change anyone's mind on anything, but it could.
(And nowadays, I always have the perfect argument post-facto for a "3rd-party" vote. Just look at the totals, and my one vote for a lesser evil would still leave the lesser evil millions away from victory, so don't blame me.)
Voting for a candidate who truly represents your values would get noticed, if enough people had the courage to cast that sort of vote.
Now the very rational Noam Chomsky recommended long ago that you vote for the best person in a Presidential election, unless you live in a swing state. In that case, he recommended voting for the lesser evil, most likely a Democrat.
That's a decent argument, but for me personally it would mean the same thing as what I just said, because I do not live in a swing state, nor do most people for that matter. But I go farther out in my argument than Chomsky does here.
But I've finally come to the conclusion that squabbles over electoral politics simply aren't worth arguments among and between left groups. As long as none of us votes for the greater evil, we're all cool. We can still denounce it just the same as those who voted for the lesser evil.
What we always need to get across is our ideas, not necessarily our candidates today.
I myself would probably vote for a progressive Democrat also to make the point that's who Democrats should be running. I felt no angst in not voting for Holocaust Harris, who promised to keep up the genocide on Palestinians that Biden had been engaged in. But I might well have voted for Bernie Sanders, even though I realize now how compromised he is too.
And then once you get past the "who will actually be elected" arguments, there's what happens in that the vast majority of popular ideas will be suppressed and elite ideas amplified, no matter who gets elected. So whatever astronomically small chance your vote has in changing election, the odds that it will change any policy outcome is much smaller still.
Meanwhile, if true parties of the working class begin to get enough votes to be competitive, everyone will notice. Eventually, they could replace one of the other two major parties.
So, Vote for whoever you damned please.
And don't waste any time trying to persuade working class voters with a different defined political tendency to change their minds. It's not worth the effort, and only leads to more division. And tamp down such arguments when they are presented to you. Concentrate on the shared concerns which create the broadest popular fronts for organizing and the dissemination of information.
The truth is, it's barely worth voting at all. And the truth is damned important, maybe even more important than "who wins." If enough people know the truth, the fire can be brought to any ruler's feet.
