A “Dating Site to Defeat Fascism”
By Micah L. Sifry
I remain worried that the third-party protest vote for Jill Stein will cost Harris enough votes to lose a key state like Michigan. But there’s some good news on this front: a new initiative called SwapYourVote, which aims to make it easy for progressive voters to act strategically: if you live in a swing state you can find a person in a safe blue (or red) state who will promise to vote for the Green Party (or Cornel West) in exchange for you voting for Harris.
SwapYourVote is the brainchild of two longtime progressive organizers, Rae Abileah and Andrew Boyd (co-author of Beautiful Trouble and other fine books like I Want a Better Catastrophe). Andrew is also an old friend of mine and we talked last night about the project. SwapYourVote, he said, is like “a dating site to defeat fascism.” The app on the site is linked to an Airtable database, which a team of volunteer “yentas” (a Yiddish word for matchmaker) are monitoring an Airtable database, and as soon as a swing voter signs up, a yenta immediately makes a match. Then, he says, “There’s trust building that has to happen across regional and ideological divides. It’s intimate coalition-building.”
Obviously, SwapYourVote has a very political goal—to elect Harris, defeat Trump while providing voters a way to pressure Harris on issues like America’s support for Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza and the climate emergency. Rae Abileah, its co-creator, says, “As a Jewish-American I was raised with a vigilance against rising fascism, and I can’t just stand by as I witness the ongoing starvation and death of children in Gaza.” She adds, “I know we must defeat Trump (and Netanyahu) but it’s also so hard to bring ourselves to vote for a Democratic party that continues to send weapons to Israel. I wanted to find a middle path that would be both strategic and connective.”
Here's her key argument: “Our communities are embroiled in a bitter fight over this election, and we want to help unite progressives toward a winning strategy. Voting is not a love letter, it’s choosing our opponent, and Harris would be far more receptive to pressure from the Left than Trump would be.”
I’d only add: it’s very clear that if Trump somehow takes power, he will impose some very severe pressure on progressives—he’s promised to deport pro-Palestinian protestors on campuses and as recently as Sunday, his VP candidate J.D. Vance was defending Trump’s promise to use the US military on “far-left” protestors.
Right now, usage of SwapYourVote is doubling every day, Andrew says. Since would-be swappers from safe states outnumber swing staters by about three to one, the site is nudging people to make a two-to-one match. That means for each would-be Stein vote in a swing state switched to Harris, two safe state voters are promising to vote third-party where they live. (All of this is completely legal, by the way, and there are precedents going back to the 2000 election.) Below you can watch an Instagram video of two voters, one from Maine and one from North Carolina, who got matched via SwapYourVote and decided to trust each other.
Billy Wimsatt, the founder of the Movement Voter Project, is giving SwapYourVote his strong endorsement. And not only has he personally swapped with a progressive voter in Ypsilanti, Michigan, now the two of them are trying to get their communities to act like sister cities to get more voters engaged. Read his take: “Why I Love Swap Your Vote (And Not Just Because It Could Tip the Election.”
If you need some help making the argument for this very pragmatic choice, I highly recommend this statement from a group of Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, progressive Democrats and community leaders in Arizona. Here are some select quotes:
We know that many in our communities are resistant to vote for Kamala Harris because of the Biden administration’s complicity in the genocide. We understand this sentiment. Many of us have felt that way ourselves, even until very recently. Some of us have lost many family members in Gaza and Lebanon. We respect those who feel they simply can’t vote for a member of the administration that sent the bombs that may have killed their loved ones….
In our view, it is crystal clear that allowing the fascist Donald Trump to become President again would be the worst possible outcome for the Palestinian people. A Trump win would be an extreme danger to Muslims in our country, all immigrants, and the American pro-Palestine movement. It would be an existential threat to our democracy and our whole planet….
Trump must be defeated. The only way to defeat him is to elect Kamala Harris. Voting for Harris is not a personal endorsement of her or of the policy decisions of the administration in which she served. It’s an assessment of the best possible option to continue fighting for an end to the genocide, a free Palestine, and all else that we hold dear.
Read the whole thing. Notably, Rep. Ruwa Romman, the Palestinian state legislator from Georgia who had sought to speak at the Democratic National Convention and was rebuffed, has endorsed the Arizona statement.
—Related: This essay by Eddie Glaude Jr., who teaches African-American studies at Princeton, is powerful testimony. He admits he didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016 because he had hoped to push the Democratic party to the left, and now he wonders if two close friends would still be alive if we had had a president who had told the public the truth about Covid-19.
