• averyminya@beehaw.org
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    30 days ago

    To quote a friend,

    "Jabari Brisport. He ran as a Green Party candidate in 2017 with the backing of New York City Democratic Socialists of America. He lost 70-30 when he did that (that was a “respectable performance” for a Green Party candidate) and the Greens reaped exactly nothing from him running besides a “moral victory” that they haven’t improved on or built off of since.

    When Jabari again as a Democrat in 2020, he actually won. He’s a big reason we got the Build Public Renewables Act passed–and a reason why bills such as the Clean Futures Act and the All-Electric Building Act get introduced and debated at all (because he helps introduce them and fight for them on behalf of the chapter). Thanks to him, there are now material, working class victories that socialists can point to for why people should elect us over moderate Democrats who don’t care about any of this. If he just kept running as a Green, we probably wouldn’t have been able to do any of that. running as a Green was a quixotic strategy that accomplished nothing for the working class, and he’d be the first to admit that."

    It’s wild, but running as a democratic candidate makes it so that we are able to accomplish more. So to throw that away to “show the Dems what they deserve” is completely contradictory to what we need to be doing to actually accomplish meaningful changes in our government.