Growing socialist party hosts event in Tucson to pitch Arizona’s independent, discontented voters

Leveling scathing criticisms at the country’s dominant political parties and hoping to inspire a mass grassroots movement, the vice presidential candidate of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Karina Garcia, spoke to a crowd of supporters in Tucson on Wednesday night.

Standing in a midtown church before about 100 people, Garcia made her pitch to mobilize working-class people, “the people who do everything in this country,” to stand up for their rights.

Garcia is the daughter of an immigrant father from México and grew up in both New York City and California. She is a longtime activist. For almost a decade she worked for the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice , a nonprofit fighting for “equal access to reproductive health for Latina/x communities.” Her running mate, the presidential candidate for the party, is Claudia De la Cruz .

“There’s nothing better than being with your people,” Garcia said at the beginning of her hour-long speech. “This is my mole right here, the people,” she said, referencing the chocolate-based Mexican sauce.

Feng-Feng Yeh, the founder of the community and culinary project, Chinese Chorizo , who spoke at the event before Garcia, said she was tired of having to pick between “the lesser of two evils while we struggle to get the crumbs.” Yeh lauded what she saw as a positive vision proffered by the party.

“I actually believe in the platform instead of voting for one that is less threatening,” Yeh said.

Garcia focused her speech on what she called the three existential crises facing Americans: climate change, the threat of nuclear war and job destruction.

“This is the purpose of the whole campaign, to talk about the things that actually matter,” Garcia said.

While Garcia and other candidates who are not with the Republican or Democratic parties face steep odds of winning seats in the upcoming election, Garcia’s party’s goal is to model different paths forward and to leverage discontent with the two-party system.

Socialist candidates are not on the ballot in Arizona, and are unlikely to get on the ballot, but voters can write in their names in November. Garcia also said their party is about a lot more than chalking up votes.

“We’re trying to agitate a mass movement by and for the working class to promote socialism,” said Drew Fellows, a spokesperson for the party’s Tucson chapter.

Done with “vote blue no matter who”

The Tucson chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation has been around for five years, and the party has had a presence in Arizona for 10 years, according to Fellows.

Because of security concerns born out of a long legacy of vilifying and criminalizing communist party members and sympathizers in the United States, the group does not share membership numbers, but Fellows said it was “robust.”

This year they’ve focused their organizing around the war in Gaza, but they’ve also worked to support people in greater Tucson who are facing evictions, and have been raising money and donations for asylum seekers.

They aim to get on the Arizona ballot in 2028 and, Fellows said, hope to grow enough to field a congressional candidate.

Garcia and her supporters were unconcerned with siphoning votes away from the Democrats — the party most threatened by left-leaning third parties.

“We don’t agree with the Dems in the first place,” Fellows said. “If they’re worried about losing voters, they should be better.”

Rolande Baker, 72, has been voting in presidential elections since 1972 when she cast her ballot for Democrat George McGovern, the U.S. senator from South Dakota who lost to Richard Nixon that year. Baker said she was attending the Garcia event “because this is who I’m planning on voting for.” It will be the first time she’s not voting down the Democratic ticket — that’s 14 presidential election cycles.

“Gaza is the big factor,” Baker said. “I want, expect, demand the Democratic party to insist on a permanent ceasefire.”

Jocelyn Garcia is a law student at the University of Arizona who spoke at the event before Karina Garcia.

“I used to follow the ‘vote blue no matter who,’” Joceyln said. But she said she’s had enough with the Democrats. Now, she said, “I have an opportunity to vote for candidates who want the same things I do, like a free Palestine, like an end to the war on Black America, and to save our planet from capitalist destruction.”.

“I want better,” Jocelyn said, “not to be sold promises by a better liar.” That’s what drew Jocelyn to the party that better matches her politics and ideals, she said.

The purpose of third parties

According to Influence Watch , a project of Capital Research Center — a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank — the Party for Socialism and Liberation is a socialist political party founded in 2004. It has fielded presidential candidates in every election since 2008.

Gloria La Riva, the party’s presidential nominee in 2020, received just under 85,000 votes, or less than 0.1% of all votes cast, according to Ballotpedia. The third-party candidate who received the most votes in 2020 was Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen.

While third-party supporters may not see their preferred candidates in Congress or in the White House, their votes could be decisive factors in November.

Bernard Tamas, a professor of political science at Valdosta State University in Georgia said the role of a third party is to disrupt the “status quo of normal politics and to force the two major parties to address issues that either parties may be ignoring or avoiding.”

“Since the Civil War, third parties have not won any presidential elections and barely any congressional seats, even in their heyday,” Tamas said. “However, the job of U.S. third parties is not to win. It is rather to threaten to spoil the election — but to do so with a purpose.”

Currently, the most disaffected voters on the Democratic side are left-wing progressives and young voters, especially those who oppose the war in Gaza, Tamas said.

Tamas said disaffected voters on the Republican side are the more moderate, traditional Republicans who may feel abandoned by the MAGA movement. Those latter voters may be drawn to the Libertarian Party — recently the third party that has had the strongest showing in the polls — or one-off candidacies like that of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Young voters want choices

In Arizona, it’s the youngest voters who are finding the most appeal of third parties.

A June 2024 report from Arizona State University’s Center for an Independent and Sustainable Democracy found that 80% of Gen Z voters want more third-party ballot choices.

About 18% of all registered voters in the state are part of Gen Z, people 20-30 years old.

“Arizona Gen Z voters are now distinctly independent,” according to the report. About 49% are unaffiliated, 30% Democrat and 21% Republicans.

According to ASU professor Jacqueline Salit, co-director of the center, “Independent voters nationally have chosen the last three presidents.”

Salit said that voters not aligned with either major party voted for Obama in 2008 by eight points, Trump in 2016 by four points, and Biden in 2020 by 14 points — each time being the decisive factor.

But while these independent, non-affiliated or third-party voters can influence elections , they haven’t flocked to support a viable or durable third party.

Alison Dagnes, professor of political science at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania and an expert in third parties in the United States, told Arizona Luminaria that the lack of robust third parties is due in part to the polarization of the country.

“The power and significance of the two-party system manifests itself in some big structural advantages for the two major parties,” Dagnes said, namely the ability to raise a lot of money and spend a lot of money on their candidates.

“It’s so much easier to have a pissing contest between two people,” Dagnes said. “It’s the Sharks and the Jets. It’s the Democrats and the Republicans. And boy can you raise a lot of money when you’re demonizing the other teams.”

But demonizing the socialists or the Green party, she said, doesn’t serve as a mainstream media-worthy spectacle or mobilize voters in the same way.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation agenda

“We want to end poverty, we’re not trying to make the next trillionaire,” candidate Karina Garcia said to applause on Wednesday night.

She invoked the “tiny elite that doesn’t deserve a fraction of the wealth that they control,” and pushed for the working class to mobilize and strategize from the bottom up.

“We’re taught that electoral politics is everything, but it’s not,” Garcia said. She gave examples of the civil-rights movement and the suffrage movement as grassroot campaigns that forced politicians to make changes.

While Garcia didn’t detail specific policy points during her talk, she spoke with Arizona Luminaria after the event and laid out some border and other policy priorities.

“We have to have an amnesty in this country,” Garcia said. “We have to legalize everybody who is here.”

“If we just stop sabotaging countries in Latin America and let them develop with their own resources, people wouldn’t feel compelled to leave,” Garcia added.

She also mentioned that massive investment in public transportation, including high speed rail, could create millions of jobs.

More of the party’s policy priorities, listed on their website , include seizing the country’s 100 largest corporations and turning them public, ending corporate lobbying and cutting the military budget by 90%.

At the event, Garcia also repeatedly invoked climate change as both a dire threat and a call for immediate action. It was the issue that drew Ivana and Richard Manzo to attend the event with their 4-year-old daughter who, by the end, was asleep on the cushioned church chairs.

The Manzos have been in Tucson for about a year. They moved from Florida where Hurricane Ian severely damaged their home in 2022. They were eventually forced to sell it, Richard says.

“We lost everything,” Ivana said.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation acknowledges climate change and wants to do something about it, the Manzos said.

“For them it’s more than empty promises,” Ivana said.

Richard said he’s not worried about throwing away his vote because, “at this point, both parties have done us dirty.”

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