At the Democrats’ election night watch party, Sipress, a former Duluth City Council member and DSA member, said Larson would have won “if she was running against Donald Trump.” The political left, he added, is “showing a maturity they have not always shown in the past.”
He said, “They understand we need to vote for Biden.”
That’s something I heard repeatedly in Minnesota, including from progressive Democrats who had previously voted for third-party candidates or who had run as third-party candidates themselves. Some said Biden was doing more than they’d expected, especially given intransigence in Washington. Others said it was the experience of having voted for Jill Stein in 2016 or Ralph Nader in 2000. And all of them are terrified of Trump, who Martin said, “has done more to create unity in this party than anyone else except our president.”
“Ten years ago, I would have said the Democratic and Republican parties are too fused around each other in the Wall Street elite way of thinking about things, so we need to have a third-party candidate,” Andy Dawkins, a former Minnesota state lawmaker who ran unsuccessfully for state attorney general as a Green Party candidate in 2014, told me.
Dawkins said he would rather Democrats nominate someone else, but he said, “If Joe’s the Democratic nominee, there isn’t anything he’s done that I would criticize him for, or that would make me want to do anything different or go for a third-party candidate. … So, it’s going to be the same old kind of thing, where we’ve got to get behind the Democrat and say we’re third-party people at our heart and core, but we’re also realistic about moving the country forward and not backward.”
At the election night watch party in Duluth, Angel Dobrow, the membership coordinator for the local Democratic Socialists of America, told me the last time she voted for a third-party candidate was in 2000, when many Democrats blamed Nader for Al Gore’s defeat.
“I was like, shit, this is really playing with fire,” she said.
That was the general consensus of the progressives gathered at Sir Ben’s, as well.