In the U.S. Senate race against California’s incumbent, octogenarian one-percenter, I’m voting for Alison Hartson.
I’m voting for Hartson because voting is easy: first, find the candidate whose platform most closely aligns with your own, and then vote for that candidate.
Hartson is a former public school teacher and a volunteer with Wolf-PAC, Cenk Uygur’s grassroots project to overturn Citizen’s United via Constitutional Convention. Hartson does not accept corporate donations, and she’s backed by the Justice Democrats. She supports a single-payer Medicare-For-All healthcare system, a $15/hr minimum wage and an end to our corporate welfare tax system, as well as 100% renewable energy, and she opposes charter schools.
These are positions that I agree with, and I vote for the person whose positions I agree with. Done.
And I am done with “strategic” voting. Looking at the crowded field of registered Democrats running to replace Feinstein, it’s tempting to watch the polls and try to guess who has the best chance of making it into the top two. Some will even try to scare you with the idea that if we split the Democrat vote too much, we could end up with a choice between Feinstein and one of the Republicans in November. But whenever you’re tempted to think this way, remember the strategic geniuses who ran Clinton’s campaign, and remember the political class within the DCCC, who pick the worst possible candidate and then try to muscle progressives out of the race. And then they fucking lose anyway.
Sure, our top-two primary system in California is stupid, but 1) that’s not my fault; 2) it’s a separate issue that needs to be addressed through organization and electoral work. Meanwhile, small-dollar donations continue to pour in to Hartson’s campaign, so it’s clear she has the people of this state behind her.
Electoral politics is only one area in which we at KNOCK and GroundGameLA work, and in my opinion not the most effective route for social justice. But when it comes to elections, I vote for my values and I think you should, too.
The views expressed are the author’s own, and do not constitute an official endorsement by the KNOCK editorial board.
