EDITORIAL
Republican Voters ‘Fleeing,’ Democratic Voters ‘Angry’
—OK … but the Working Class Needs Its Own Party!

August 8, 2026

Last week there was a big election, a five-state primary, with Democrats running against Democrats, Republicans running against Republicans. This week, there are five more primaries, and three more the week after that. With these three sets, the primary election campaign is drawing to a close.

Supposedly, the Republicans had a bit of a problem motivating their voters, convincing them to make the effort to vote. In Michigan for example, for every three Democratic voters, only two Republicans showed up.

Apparently, the Democrats had a scare, facing a small “insurgency” in their own ranks. A few radical-sounding candidates beat candidates preferred by the official Democratic Party.

A video discussion organized by the New York Times on August 2 described the situation as “unsettled”: “The working class is fleeing Trump,” while “the voters are so much angrier than establishment Democrats realized.”

Since 1856, these two parties, and only these two parties, have run the country. So it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if the political arena got unsettled! For 170 years, the two parties presided over the concentration of the nation’s wealth in just a few hands. Today, the capitalist class is being enriched beyond all comprehension. A tiny handful of people, less than one percent, only one-tenth of one percent—this tiny handful, just a few dozen families, owns more wealth than 80% of the whole population. The gap between the ultra wealthy and the rest of us is bigger than it’s ever been.

And not only that. For 170 years, the two parties took turns leading the country into war. Starting with wars against the indigenous peoples who had occupied the Western Hemisphere for 25,000 years before anyone else showed up, running all the way up to the current U.S. war against Iran, the U.S. has always had its own military forces in other people’s territory. It has always been at war. Against Spain, Cuba and the Philippines; against Mexico and Colombia; against Germany, Turkey, Austria and Hungary; against the Soviet Union; against Haiti; against Italy, Germany and Japan; against Korea, China, Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia; against the Dominican Republic; against Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria; against the different peoples of Africa.

This long, sorry record belongs to both parties.

If there are disagreements going on in either party today, it’s over which candidate can win the next election. In other words, how to keep illusions going about this creaky political system.

The fact is, the working class needs its own political party. That party does not exist today. And it will not be built inside either of these two parties, no matter how many “insurgencies” pop up.

For 180 years, these two parties took turns pretending to speak for the working classes.

But the working class needs to speak for itself. It needs its own party.

The party the working class needs must be a fighting party, not one whose main goal is to find just another way to win an election.

The working class cannot solve its problems through elections, not in a society where the capitalist class controls all the levels of power, including military force, the court system, the legislature and the executive—not to forget its taxing power.

The working class, simply to defend itself, will have to organize to fight. Its party can use elections to express its views, to mobilize its forces around a fighting perspective.

But the overriding goal of a working class party has to be to prepare the working class for the struggle only it can make: a struggle to throw out the capitalist class and both of its worn-out parties.

The party the working class needs will be built by the working class itself. Or it won’t be built.