UNION CITY, N.J. — The Socialist Workers Party campaign will kick off a statewide effort April 1 to put the party’s presidential candidate Rachele Fruit on the New Jersey ballot, along with her running mate, vice presidential candidate Margaret Trowe. The SWP campaign is the working-class alternative to Biden and Trump in the 2024 elections. The goal is to get over 1,700 signatures, more than double the 800 required to be on the ballot.
They will also be signing up a similar number of working people to get the SWP’s candidate for U.S. Senate, Joanne Kuniansky, on the ballot.
Campaigners will travel to cities, small towns and rural areas, including to Hammonton, Bridgeton and Vineland, where large numbers of agricultural workers live.
They will present the SWP’s working-class program on workers’ doorsteps, at plant gates and truck stops, and elsewhere. They will join in actions and debates against Jew-hatred, protests against Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, and union strike picket lines and rallies to express their support and introduce the SWP’s program.
“Like workers all across the country, workers in New Jersey face a profit-driven offensive against us by the bosses, their political parties and their government,” Kuniansky said March 25. “We’re increasingly using the unions to fight back, to defend ourselves. We need to do the same thing in the political arena — to break with the Democrats and Republicans and set up our own party, a labor party, based on the unions.
“Such a party can chart a course toward taking political power into our own hands,” she said, “and join hands with workers worldwide to do away with the capitalist rulers’ wars, exploitation and oppression.”
While petitioning to get Fruit and Kuniansky on the ballot, campaign supporters will also expand the circulation of the Militant, the socialist newsweekly that is the voice of the SWP campaign, and discuss and sell books by party leaders and other revolutionaries.
The goal is to get the required signatures in a concerted three-week period from April 1-21, including a full-time team April 1-7. If you are interested in joining the campaign, email njswpcampaign@gmail.com.
Lea Sherman is the SWP candidate for U.S. Congress from New Jersey.