As Socialist Workers Party candidates introduce the only working-class campaign across the country, they’re meeting many workers who say they can see no reason to vote for either the Democrats or Republicans. Pundits in the big-business press have noticed the same thing and are warning the capitalist rulers that neither of their two main parties are drawing much enthusiasm.
But that’s hardly a surprise. Under both Democratic and Republican administrations working people have lived through years of disastrous price rises, a tightening jobs market, the spread of new wars that threaten to escalate into a world conflagration and growing uncertainty about what the future holds. Neither party offers any way to prevent more of the capitalist economic crisis from falling onto workers’ backs.
Both parties “are viewed unfavorably by nearly 60% of Americans,” a survey by the Wall Street Journal reported. The paper calls these people “double haters” and admits their number has risen substantially since the 2022 midterms.
“Call it the distrust election,” Sabrina Tavernise says in the New York Times.
Put more directly, there’s a sharpening of class divisions as the capitalist crisis deepens. Since 2019 the 0.1% richest Americans have seen their wealth more than double, while the working class has faced unending and dire assaults on wages and working conditions.
Workers, who have to shell out a larger proportion of their income on transportation, are hardest hit by today’s soaring gas prices. Last year the number of people unable to afford health insurance rose to 29 million, the highest level since 2021. Fewer young people can scrape together the money to start families. It’s no wonder that more workers are repelled by the capitalist party system.
Democrats are seeking to take advantage of mounting anger toward Washington by blaming Donald Trump, claiming he’s a “fascist.” But even where Republican support is falling, there’s little eagerness for the Democrats, either the liberal or democratic socialist variety.
Trump and the Republicans claim the key thing in the midterm elections boils down to defeating the socialist wing of the imperialist Democratic Party. He takes advantage of the broad revulsion among working people toward the rabid Jew-hatred of the middle-class left, pointing out many of these layers backed Hamas’ pogrom against Jews on Oct. 7, 2023.
“Workers are sick and tired of both parties,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler had to admit Sept. 1, before announcing the union federation was backing so-called worker-first candidates. That’s her deceptive way of explaining that the AFL-CIO continues to back Democrats, despite their long record of loyalty to the employing class.
Union, working-class resistance
Facing rising boss attacks, more workers have turned to unions in recent years to fight for better wages and to push back against life-threatening speedup, multitier contracts and unlivable schedules. There’s growing opposition among foreign-born and native-born workers alike to the raids and deportation of workers without papers. These are our neighbors and co-workers, many working people say, not the “criminals” the White House claims. And there’s growing unease among workers about the march of the rulers toward more wars.
Democrats and Republicans both pledge that if elected they’ll fix everything up. But promises that rest on support for the rule of the profit-driven capitalist class are a dead end. The only realistic road out of the crisis is through union-led battles and the independent political organization of the working class.
Socialist Workers Party members are part of today’s working-class resistance. Its candidates are fighting union members who present a class-struggle road forward, promoting workers’ unity and calling for a break with the bosses’ parties.
Rulers march toward world war
Democrats blame the Trump presidency for rising worldwide instability. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries seized on Trump’s contemptible threat to wipe out Iran’s civilization, to claim that Trump is plunging “our country into World War III.”
“It’s not Trump, but the U.S. capitalist class, backed by both their parties, that is fighting to remain the world’s dominant imperialist power at the expense of its rivals,” Joanne Kuniansky, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Senate from New Jersey, explains when she talks with workers on their doorsteps. “What drives the march toward a third world war is the relentless competition between Washington and other capitalist powers for markets and resources and for labor to exploit, not the policies of any one administration.”
Both parties, she says, are gung-ho for the administration’s plans to expand the U.S. military. Both back its blockade and escalating threats against the Cuban people, and the U.S. rulers’ over 60-year-long drive to overturn the first socialist revolution in the Americas.
“Washington’s mounting aggression today is more reason to expand efforts to build the SWP, the only party that advances a road for workers and our allies to defend our class interests and to fight to take political power from the capitalist war makers and into our own hands, to run society in the needs of the toiling majority,” Kuniansky said.