Two Parties And Not A Party More!

This month the Democratic Party has successfully removed the Green Party from ballots in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The article by the WSWS (World Socialist Website) clarifies that

while the World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party—which is running its own candidates Joseph Kishore for US President and Norissa Santa Cruz for US Vice President—have fundamental class and political differences with the Green Party, we defend their right to participate in the 2020 elections. We denounce the Democratic Party for its repeated and blatant abuse of ballot access procedural rules and the courts to have Hawkins and Walker kicked off the November ballot.

The WSWS recognizes, with obvious disapproval, that “the political purpose of the Pennsylvania ruling is to keep the Green Party from providing an alternative for voters who might otherwise cast ballots for Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,” and that this was also the motive behind removing the Green Party from the ballot in Wisconsin. Further, the Socialist Equality Party was denied access to being on the ballot in Michigan.

The reason Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin became particular targets of the Democrats, the WSWS says,

In the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump by 11,000 votes in Michigan, 23,000 in Wisconsin, and 44,000 in Pennsylvania. In each state, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein received more votes than Clinton’s margin of defeat.

This led the Democrats, and their media apologists, to blame the Greens for a defeat which Clinton brought on herself by running a right-wing, anti-working-class campaign…

WSWS adds that “one conclusion drawn by the Democrats from the experience of 2016 was that the basic democratic right of third parties to ballot access and of the public to vote for a candidate of their choosing must not be allowed to disrupt the two-party system.”

In essence, here, the Democratic Party has decided any threats to the votes that the Party hopes to accumulate must mean that the other Party threatening the votes should not be on the ballot at all.

The Democratic Party has long been comfortable with the relationship it has with the Republican Party where once simply “reaches across the isle” in an effort of bipartisanship. Any threat to that relationship – especially one where a third party, who could “take votes away” from the Democratic Party – would simply change the nature of bipartisanship.

There’s a an important point to make here about kicking a candidate off the ballot. That naturally implies that the candidate actually qualified to make the ballot – which is what Howie Hawkins and his running mate successfully did. They submitted more than the required amount of signatures required to make the ballot, and submitted all the necessary forms. They were simply removed over a technicality.

The Democratic Party has become exclusionary and set in their ways to the point of reactionary and repressive polices when the threat of the status quo is threatened.