By Chris Satullo

From the supermarket to the TV remote to the car lot to the Starbucks menu, most Americans are awash in choices. Younger Americans – having never lived in a world of three main TV channels, a mere Big 3 automakers or “The Phone Company” – seem particularly inclined to view bounteous choice as a birthright, not a privilege.

So I guess it’s no surprise they have a hard time dealing with binary choices – the occasions where it really is either/or, with no substitutions allowed, no realistic option C, D or E. At times, some Americans will go to great lengths to pretend that what’s really a binary choice is somehow a cornucopia of alternatives.

Welcome to the U.S. 2024 presidential election.

In this week’s Wisconsin primary, the political media got very excited that more than 44,000 Democratic voters chose to mark their ballots “uninstructed delegation” in lieu of expressing any support for the Democratic nominee, President Joe Biden. This was a protest over Biden’s response to the on-going horrors in Gaza.  As protest organizers crowed afterward to any reporter they could find, that total is more than twice Biden’s 2020 victory margin in the Land of the Cheeseheads, a state vital to his triumph back then.

Meanwhile, in New York, the protest campaign took the form of people marching to the polls, only to turn in an empty ballot, since there was no printed option for expressing frustration with Biden. Previous efforts, particularly in Michigan, a state with a big cohort of Arab-American voters, saw similarly large percentages of protest votes from Democrats.

Fair enough. It’s an entirely legitimate use of your primary vote to register concerns about your own party’s performance, to issue a springtime warning about potential November disaster. It’s what you do next that matters more.

Accordingly, I have a few questions for the progressives who are feverishly organizing and supporting these protests. More than a few, actually.

But first, some affirmations: The scale of what has been and continues to be done to the people of Gaza by the Netanyahu regime in Israel is unforgivable; war crimes have been committed. Biden’s efforts to get Netanyahu to desist have not yet been effective (although now Biden has reportedly put him on probation). Netanyahu is a brute, an egomaniac and a would-be autocrat. He should be in jail in Israel right now, not leading a democratic ally of ours.   

But now for my questions:

Angry, heart-broken progressives, do you not see that what Hamas did on Oct. 7 was also an unforgivable war crime? There are no good guys here, only two opposing sets of violent ideologues, with many innocents caught in between.  

Did you really expect a nation that endured such bloody anguish to foreswear any retaliation, to take no steps to secure its border? The issue here is the scale and duration of Netanyahu’s retaliation, not the initial fact of it.

U.S. policy inside this maelstrom obviously hasn’t been flawless, but why do you expect the impossible out of Biden? You demand that he just order up a mutual ceasefire that includes the release of hostages taken by the terrorists of Hamas. Do you think Biden has a magic wand sitting in the Oval Office that he somehow refuses to wave to make this horror end? 

Israel is a sovereign nation. Hamas is a terrorist regime propped up by billions in outside dollars. Neither set of leaders is required or in any way inclined to do what Biden wants them to do. (Nor, by the way, to do anything that Bernie Sanders might say were he the man behind the Resolute Desk.)

It’s fair to argue that Biden should turn off the flow of arms to Israel until its government comes to its senses. But to deride him for failing to push Israel and Hamas around like simple checkers on a board is naive and unfair.

Now I come to my main questions, which have to do with the future of the country over which Biden really does exert some control: ours.

May I ask all you uncommitted, “uninstructed” or blank-ballot Democratic primary voters: What are you planning to do come November? Do you plan to go on punishing Joe Biden by either staying home or throwing your vote away on a third-party or independent candidate, or a write-in of your favorite socialist or pop star? Do you not understand that, in our system, every presidential election is a stark, consequential binary choice, and that this time, despite that oft-mouthed cliche, the choice is not merely between the lesser of two evils?

No, the coming choice, without hyperbole, is between Evil and Not Evil. It is the choice between continuing to have some semblance of the democracy we’d like to have – or the possible end of democracy, the separation of powers, and a huge chunk of the Bill of Rights.

Again, not hyperbole. Please visit Donald Trump’s campaign website and read what is written there. He is not hiding what he hopes to do. It is all vengeance upon his enemies and eradication of constitutional safeguards and liberties. It is an incoherent, violent white nationalist screed.

So, please, do not waste your precious vote on some performative expression of distaste for this binary choice. If you do, please recognize that you will be every bit as responsible as any cultic MAGA voter for Donald Trump’s frightful return to the White House and whatever horrors ensue. As they shall.

However much you weep for Gaza, however frosted you are at Biden’s tentative diplomacy, do you really imagine Trump would in any way restrain Netanyahu, his authoritarian, egomaniacal doppelganger? 

Trump would cheer the bastard on. However bad things are now, they’d get desperately worse. (Did you see Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, daydreaming out loud about what a development bonanza Gaza’s waterfront could prove to be, if only those pesky Gazans could be sent somewhere else – whether in this world or the next?)

This election is not a time for indulging the narcissism of small differences, that old habit of the Democratic left, with its penchant for naive hissy fits and self-destructive symbolic protests. This is a binary choice, with no practical option C. And, no, it’s not some close call between two equally doddering codgers, no matter how much it pleases the New York Times political desk to pretend that.

It’s a painfully stark choice: Vengeance vs. empathy. Pettiness vs. maturity. Lawlessness vs. constitutional governance. Flagrant corruption vs. the rule of law. Megalomania vs. patriotism. Autocracy vs. democracy. A broiling planet vs. a possibly livable one. 

Here’s a bold prediction: Joe Biden in the end will get more votes than Donald Trump. But it might not matter. Thanks to that grievous anachronism, the Electoral College, Trump doesn’t have to win the popular vote. He just needs to edge out Biden in enough of the six battleground states that forged Biden’s 2020 victory margin: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin and my own Pennsylvania.

Just as Trump did vs. Hillary Clinton in 2016. He lost the popular vote by 3 million, but earned razor-thin victories in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, gaining the 46 electoral votes that cemented his win.

You know how that happened? Each of those states is well-endowed with choice-addicted progressives. Far too many of them chose to demonstrate their finicky differences with Clinton by throwing their votes away on Green Party candidate Jill Stein. In each of those three states, Stein’s vote total was substantially larger than Trump’s margin of victory.   (Click on the three states on the Times’ election map to see full results from 2016. You’ll notice that I don’t even have to include the many other votes wasted on other no-hopers and write-ins to make this case.)

Every person who voted for Stein in 2020 might as well have pulled the lever for Trump – a man whom they most likely abhorred. Their fussy decisions at the polls elected him just as surely as if they’d worn a red MAGA hat into the booth.

These voters will tell you – and have told me repeatedly since – and that it’s their vote and no one has a right to tell them how to use it. And that is true. But we can warn them when they plan to use it unwisely.

Because I’m a nice guy, I’ll grant that the consoling mid-October 2016 polls might have given those Stein voters false assurance that the Republic was safe from a Trump victory. That gave them leeway to perform a futile gesture meant to demonstrate their superior discernment.

This year’s popular vote, however, is now a dead heat and will likely remain one, with Trump advantaged by the Electoral College.

So, one last question for those who sit a bit to the left of me:

This time, if any of you repeats the mistake of pretending this isn’t a life-or-death binary choice – and thus help Trump win anew – will you at least have the guts and the decency to own your huge share of blame for the catastrophes to come?

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia