Look, here’s the deal: Joe Biden wasn’t my first or second choice in the Democratic primary. But unless we want to validate every lie, every act of craven corruption, every policy disaster and the permanent damage to America’s institutions from the Supreme Court to the Postal Service, Donald Trump must be defeated this November.
At this point, Joe Biden is the nominee of the Democratic Party and the only candidate on the ballot who can end Donald Trump’s malignant four years in the White House. Biden will be getting my vote this November. I hope every other voter who is fed up with Trump gives Biden the chance to earn theirs, too.
Many Democratic primary voters are, like me, upset that their first choice won’t be the one to take on Trump this November. Despite Biden’s impressive run from South Carolina through the vast majority of Super Tuesday states and nearly every primary election thereafter, plenty of progressives aren’t sold on voting for him. I get that, however, American politics are binary, at least for the moment, and the Democratic nominee for president is the only person who can boot Donald Trump and his two-bit mafia from the White House and prevent the next four years from being even worse than the last four for so many.
Without scolding, lecturing, or guilt tripping, I will try to share what convinced me to vote for Biden after my top choices, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, ended their campaigns and endorsed the former vice president.
If every vote weren’t valuable, Republicans wouldn’t be trying so hard to take them away. Voter suppression — especially against young people, people of color, and other key components of the progressive coalition — has been an intentional political strategy of the right for decades. As we speak, Russian trolls and Trump supporters are pushing a narrative that progressives should write-in someone else or not vote for Joe Biden because they will do anything and everything to reelect Donald Trump. There’s an old saying in chess, “never make the move your opponent wants you to make.” This applies to democracy, too.
Why is Joe Biden almost certainly the Democratic nominee? To answer with one word: voters. Joe Biden won no news cycles. He did not win Twitter. He did not win three of the four early states. He entered late. Others raised way more money. And yet to stage this comeback and go on the sort of winning streak he did means anyone who claims to respect the will of the voters should stop and rethink a few things. Biden ran ahead in the national polls for most of 2019, won an overwhelming majority of Democratic primary votes, and now is poised to unseat Donald Trump.
If progressives don’t want to vote for Joe Biden, they should vote for the people he will surround himself with who share their values much more than those in the current administration.
I’m voting for an EPA director that believes in climate change and who won’t use a global pandemic as an excuse to let polluters have free reign over every molecule of air and water in the country. I’m voting for a secretary of the interior who doesn’t believe in selling off our public lands to the same oil companies he once lobbied for. I’m voting for the first woman vice president in American history, who Biden has promised to nominate. I’m voting to allow Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer to retire so we can put two progressive justices on the bench to protect abortion rights, worker’s rights, LGBTQ rights, and have a snowball’s chance in reforming campaign finance laws. I’m voting for reversing the disastrous Trump tax cuts for the wealthy. I’m voting to stop the transfer of wealth from American taxpayers to The Trump Organization.
I’m voting for all the things I care about by making sure Donald Trump doesn’t get another four years to take our country back several decades. I hope the vast majority of like-minded Americans join me so we can close the book on this embarrassing period in history and not give Trump another four years to rob us blind and divide us even further.
I’m voting to return to the imperfect America we had before Trump, which was slowly moving toward a more perfect union but whose journey was derailed in 2016. All of these votes will appear on the ballot this November under the name Joe Biden.
Ian Silverii is the executive director of ProgressNow Colorado, the state’s largest progressive advocacy group.
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