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Let me head off at least some possible outrage from the title: when I say "evil," I mean real-world harm. This includes both from intended and unintended consequences. So if you want to argue that of course Donald Trump and the Republicans are more evil morally speaking than Kamala Harris and the Democrats, that's fine, but it's not what I'm trying to dispute here. That being noted, I'll proceed.
Every four years, there's an argument among what passes for the left in the United States: whether to vote for the Democratic nominee or not. It's one I've weighed in on previously, and that I've seen rehashed about a million times on Twitter(-Now-X). Obviously, people who actually like and are enthusiastic about the Democrats have a vested interest in saying that you should vote for them, which is fine. But there are plenty of people who don't like the Democrats, or will at least acknowledge there are reasons not to like them, and still advocate for supporting them as the "lesser evil."
This makes intuitive sense: someone is going to win the election, and it is, realistically, going to be either the Democrat or Republican. You can choose not to vote for either one, but one will still end up winning either way and you'll be forced to live with the consequences thereof. So why not choose the one that's less odious, hold your nose, and vote for them? That way, you can at least reduce the chance that the worse of the two options wins, right?
There are a number of responses to this, many of which I'll say aren't particularly convincing. For instance, a common refrain is that the lesser evil is still evil. That may be true, but they're also lesser — which seems important. If I had to choose which disease to be infected with, naturally I'd pick the one that's supposed to be milder. "They're both diseases" isn't a convincing argument against that.
There's also the argument that, by voting for the Democrats, you're thereby endorsing whatever bad things they may do while in office — and even endorsing the whole, lousy system that sticks us with the choice between two bad parties. I don't find either of these arguments very convincing, either. It makes sense to view voting on an exclusively tactical level. It's not a declaration of love or approval, it's just a way to make it marginally more likely that the candidate you're voting for wins. And given that a large portion of the electorate sits out every election, it's not like not voting has shown any success as a way to disrupt the status quo.
So, why am I skeptical of lesser-evil voting? Is it because I think the Democrats' policies are as bad as the Republicans'? No — if I were in the unfortunate situation of choosing either the Democrats or Republicans to be given permanent power over the US government, I suppose I would have to pick the Democrats. The case for preferring a more socially liberal party that favors more generous (if still fair too stingy) social programs seems pretty clear, even if there are a million things about that party that range from disappointing to genuinely indefensible.
But there's something I think usually ends up under-discussed in these debates. We don't get to choose who's going to have power forever, we get to choose who will have power for a few years. And the reality is, the knock-on effects of that choice aren't that easy to predict! Sure, we can have at least some idea of what the next four years might look like. But what about after that? Since the end of World War II, American politics has been sort of pendular: with only one exception (Reagan's two terms and George H.W. Bush's one), no party has held the White House for longer than eight consecutive years. Whichever party wins the presidency tends to lose seats in Congress two years later. The presidents who have suffered the worst first-term midterm losses have usually gone on to get reelected. Americans vote in one party, get sick of them after a while, then try the other one. Rinse and repeat.
Let's look at some concrete examples here. In 1976, Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford and the Democrats took the White House. But after four years of malaise, he lost to Ronald Reagan — a decidedly more conservative Republican than Ford. John F. Kennedy beat Richard Nixon, narrowly, in 1960. But then he got assassinated in an event that traumatized the nation, and LBJ came into office and escalated the war in Vietnam, and the New Deal coalition fractured, and in 1968 the Democrats lost the White House to... Richard Nixon. Bill Clinton beat George H.W. Bush in 1992, but his victory ended up indirectly giving us the Democratic nominees (Al Gore and Hillary Clinton) whose uninspiring campaigns would allow George W. Bush and Donald Trump to win the presidency. Barack Obama won in 2008 and 2012, but ended up playing a major role in getting Hillary Clinton the nomination in 2016 and in handing the presidency to Trump.
In any of these instances, we don't know what might have happened had things gone another way. Maybe it would have been better, maybe it would have been worse. But if that's all you can say, that's not exactly a resounding argument for voting for the Democrats! Look at where we are right now, even. Four years ago, it was the most important thing in the world to beat Donald Trump and elect Joe Biden so we could stop fascism. We did it. Now... it's the most important thing in the world to beat Donald Trump and elect Kamala Harris so we can stop fascism. What happens after that? History tells us the odds aren't good for a third Democratic term in a row. But even if they pull that off, the pendulum will swing back the other way. Who will end up being the president after Harris? An even older, more unhinged Donald Trump? One of his sons? A Nazi Twitch streamer? Or will the GOP revert to a more "respectable" conservatism, like we had before. You know, the kind that gave us the Iraq War, and Guantanamo Bay, and union-busting, and Reaganomics...
This is not go full Rust Cohle and say that time is a flat circle or whatever. I'm not arguing that it never makes sense to vote for a Democrat. If Bernie Sanders had gotten the nomination four years ago, I still think it would have made sense to vote for him. It could have completely backfired, but there was a chance he might have actually broken us out of the stasis we seem to be in. If you elect someone who really shifts the so-called Overton window — the way FDR did (for the better) and Reagan did (for the worse) — that has long-lasting effects by pushing both parties to adjust their positions. The next Republican after FDR, Eisenhower, accepted the New Deal. The next Democratic president after Reagan, Clinton, continued deregulation and gutted welfare. (Obviously, this wasn't just because FDR or Reagan won in either case. There were deeper structural forces at work in society. But the existence of those is just another argument against the importance of one party winning any particular election.)
I guess if Kamala Harris seems like a modern-day FDR or a liberal answer to Reagan, that's all the more reason to vote for her. But that's not what I'm seeing, personally. I think Biden and the Democratic Party have moved somewhat away from the neoliberalism of the Clinton and Obama presidencies (mostly out of necessity — Democrats have been bleeding support from blue collar voters, and the young voters they need are deeply disillusioned with the status quo). But there's not much to be excited for. Harris is busily scurrying away from past left-leaning positions she took, and the Democrats are clearly tacking right on immigration. They're also markedly worse on foreign policy, overall, than during the Obama years. In 2008, it might have been genuinely plausible to think Obama could be a pivotal figure in the way FDR and Reagan were. Thinking that about Kamala Harris in 2024 is just wishcasting.
Lesser-evil voting, I should note, also has a real long-term vulnerability: if one party knows they can count on your votes as long as the other one is worse, they have a pretty strong incentive to make sure the other party is worse. This hasn't gone unnoticed! In both this election cycle and the last one, Democratic groups have actually spent money to boost MAGA-aligned Republicans in their primary races, on the theory that they'll be more beatable in the general election. Not great!
I've been careful to make a general argument here, which means until now I've not brought up Gaza. But that does undeniably complicate things even more. Sorry, but "the other guy also supports it" doesn't really cut it as a justification for voting for a candidate who explicitly intends to keep enabling a genocide. I genuinely, sincerely do not know what to do with a "progressive" party that looks at the horror show in Gaza and decides the thing to do is keep sending weapons to Israel. I mean... Jesus Christ. Are we really going to send the message that that's acceptable? Israel's been lurching further and further right for years, and what it's doing in Gaza will not be the last act of mass murder it commits against the Palestinians if it's allowed to. It'd be nice to have one party that has an actual incentive to stop them from trying to exterminate entire civilian populations. If Kamala Harris wins without making some major concession to left-wing critics of Biden's Israel policy, I'm more than a little concerned that incentive won't exist. On the other hand, though, if Harris does come out in favor of an arms embargo, I would readily advocate voting for her over Trump, regardless of what other shortcomings she might have.
One of the most predictable rejoinders to any argument against voting Democrat is that the person making it is privileged, and the argument comes from a place of privilege. I personally hate privilege discourse (at this point enough forms of “privilege” have been identified that probably every person on Earth is a member of at least one “privileged” group, which doesn’t make much sense to me), but if that’s the framing you want to use, then any discussion for or against voting Democrat takes place in the context of privilege. The people most likely to be killed by American bombs get absolutely zero say in who the next president will be. Vote however you want and make whatever arguments you want, but the ability to do so makes you privileged in a way that Gazans, for instance, aren’t — and being angrier at people who won’t vote Democrat than you are at the Democrats for the way they’ve wielded power is the ultimate sign of privilege.
None of this is really intended as an argument to persuade anyone else not to vote Democratic, or an attack on anyone who chooses to do so. I sincerely don’t care how other people vote, and I dislike vote-shaming no matter which way it goes (I personally have been on the receiving end of it both from liberals who think I should vote Democratic and leftists who think I shouldn’t, in different elections). But if we have to have this discussion every four years, we might as well be honest with ourselves about it.
