NBC News recently projected that Hillary Clinton has surpassed the 270 electoral college votes she needs to be elected president. Based on polls, which have been surprisingly accurate this year, Politico reports that if you include states where Clinton leads by 5%, she has 302 electoral college votes. There may be no swing states in 2016. Indeed, no one with her lead at this stage of the campaign has lost the popular vote in 16 elections, since modern polling began.  Thomas Frank wrote in the Guardian that with Clinton certain to win, she will ignore populist movements and govern to the right. Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report writes that Clinton is stuffing the entire US ruling class into her campaign: neocons and neoliberals, Wall Street and big business, military and intelligence – they are all there, with progressives, blacks and Latinos pushed to the side.  Though two establishment big business parties are the tradition in the United States, history shows people’s voices have still impacted the direction of the country. The formula has been: mass movement + independent electoral party = transformational change.  By forcing their issues onto the political agenda, people have broken up banking and energy monopolies, won the right to form unions and an eight-hour work day, ended child labor and won the vote for women. The entire New Deal came from the Progressive and Socialist parties. All of these changes occurred without a third party winning the presidency. They won their issues by showing enough political support to impact the outcome of an election, which the two parties call “spoiling”. This forced one of the two parties to adopt the issue of the era, or become the Whigs and disappear.  There is one example of a third party winning a presidential election. The first political party, the Democrats, was a party of slave plantation owners. The second long-lasting political grouping was the Whig party, northern industrialists who profited from slavery. By the mid-1800s slavery was more valuable than manufacturing, banking and railroads combined. There had been an abolition movement since before the founding of the nation, but it was stalled, even going backward. Abolitionists decided to force their issue onto the agenda by running for office. They lost repeatedly, but over nearly two decades they weakened the Whigs and divided the Democrats. Abraham Lincoln, a former Whig, won a four-way race in 1860 for the Republicans with less than 40% of the vote.  The abolitionist spoilers were hated because they were blamed for the Mexican war by giving the greater-evil Democrats the presidency. But, we should be eternally grateful to those who voted in those losing elections to end slavery. They were democracy heroes, using the tools available to force an end to slavery.  We face a similar issue today when the issue is corporate power, especially the power of Wall Street and transnational corporations controlling government. Two parties take hundreds of millions from big business and do their bidding.  Independent challengers have no chance in these manipulated presidential elections. The hubris of two parties allows them to create a corporation, call it a commission and keep challengers out of the debates. They use fear to manipulate voters. For example, they push the Nader myth – despite Gore losing 308,000 Democratic votes and 191,000 liberal votes in Florida to Bush, and Nader only winning about 30,000 of each. They trump up Trump fear despite the reality that he cannot win.  Establishment parties nominated two very unpopular candidates. Since we know who will win, why throw away your vote on either? Use your vote to challenge corporate power.  Only the Greens, Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka, are challenging corporate power. The movement, already planning “#NoHoneymoon for Hillary” protests, has been growing rapidly since 2011, getting stronger and winning battles. Every vote for Stein makes the movement stronger by forcing Clinton to look over her left shoulder, worried that the Greens will have enough votes to impact her re-election.  To end corporate power, we must vote against it. Just as the US needed democracy heroes to end slavery, we need democracy heroes to end plutocracy.
A vote for the Republicans or Democrats is a vote for the status quo. Pressure from the radical left could be the beginning of a transformational change