With This Election, We’re Not Choosing Saviors, We’re Choosing the Terrain We Need to Win

Never in the history of politics has there ever been a perfect political candidate and yet, right now, we have the power to pick the political terrain for the next four years and more. This election will determine the difference between whether we can continue to organize, build power and advance our goals, or if our very lives, the lives of our loved ones, and our collective freedoms will be stripped away.

In the presidential race in November, our endorsement is for the conditions that best position us to keep fighting for the future we want and deserve, not a return to the past. UWDA endorses Kamala Harris for President and Tim Walz for Vice President.

How We Got Here:

After deep reflection with our community, we made an assessment grounded in our deep love for our people and our commitment to continue pushing for a better future. To make this decision, we asked ourselves some of the guiding questions that led us to our decision to endorse, like:

• What did it feel like to live under Trump’s administration last time? What would a second Trump term mean for our communities? Can our rights, freedoms, and loved ones make it through that again?
• How can we use a Harris-Walz terrain to our advantage to build more independent power and create the pressure needed to deliver for young people, working-class communities, and people of color?
• What are the ways we must advance our fight to expand protections for immigrants over the next four years? Which administration best enables that?

This is What our Endorsement Means (and Doesn’t):

We’ll start with what our endorsement doesn’t mean.

It doesn’t mean Harris and Walz are superheroes coming to save our communities. It is not a profession of our love or unwavering support for them.

It’s a strategy play.

Our endorsement is a tool that can get us better conditions to organize and fight for our future over the next four years.

• We don’t ride for any one politician. We ride for our people, our community. This moment is not about Harris and Walz — it’s about using our block and build strategy, it’s about choosing to use our power and our decades of wisdom to set the political conditions that we will be organizing under for the next four years and beyond.

Our endorsement is a reiteration of OUR progressive vision and our dedication to making that vision a reality.

• This election is going to come down to the margins — it will be extremely close. It will come down to getting communities out to vote and to do so with the issues that matter most to us in mind. That means winning unbreakable protections for our immigrant communities, protections to abortion access support for a Green New Deal, a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, and an arms embargo for Israel.

Our endorsement is a recognition that politicians aren’t our saviors. They’re our targets. Since the beginning of our youth-led movement, we have had to push politicians in office to hold them accountable to the solutions and protections our communities have called for.

• When it comes to the candidates on the ticket this year, Harris and Walz are far from perfect, but they are more moveable than Trump and Vance will ever be when it comes to the issue areas that affect young and working-class people of color.

Our endorsement is a chance to be crystal clear with voters about how to block Trump, MAGA politicians, and policies this November.

• There’s TOO much at stake this election cycle with the existing harm being done to our communities and the threat of Trump implementing his white supremacist agenda. This agenda isn’t new, we’ve seen it before during the Trump administration: the Muslim ban, the attacks against DACA recipients, and the inhumane separation of children from their parents in immigration detention. We’re not going back!

Our Fight for our Collective Liberation Starts Now!

We have and will continue to sharpen our plans to push Harris to govern boldly and answer to the demands of our generation who would be key to electing them to office. We will not be silent about any efforts from her — now or in the future — that attack our communities, aim to gut asylum or use us as political pawns. This includes our continuous efforts to organize against violent policies like the Senate Border Act that Harris and other Democrats alike have talked about as a solution. We know what these policies mean for our lives and the lives of the people we love. And we will do everything in our power to stop them.

With this endorsement, we call on Harris and Walz to meet with immigrant youth and our loved ones to learn more about the ways right-wing, anti-immigration policy hurts the country and to hear our solutions for a future where immigrants can live and thrive without fear of detention and deportation.

This endorsement is our roadmap to our destination. This is where we dig our heels in and get ready to continue doing the hard work of propelling our vision forward and pushing those in office. If you are with us, we NEED you to fight along with us to turn our vision into reality.

If you are ready to win immigrant justice, Palestinian justice, climate justice, reproductive justice, LGBTQIA+ justice, and our collective freedom, then become a changemaker with us: Text SQUAD to 78757

Paid for by United We Dream Action, https://unitedwedreamaction.org/. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.