[Transcription]
tinymoves
to be honest it would make me a lot more comfortable if you guys would show a little concern about trump running for president again. Do not inbox me and say you don’t like joe biden omg i already know. but can we show a little concern. about donald trump. being the republican candidate for president. for the third election in a row.
parentheticalaside
Also maybe you can focus a little more on how Trump won’t stop fucking running and a little less on the incumbent president running for reelection once, which is the natural path that is not at all weird. Like, the fact that it’s these same two guys again is Trump’s fault, not Biden’s. What Biden
is doing is normal. What Trump is doing is very much not.
theroguefeminist
Going to come out here and say this: if you do not vote for Biden, you are voting for Trump. | literally do not care what horde of leftists with the memory span of a goldfish come for me for saying this. A third party vote is no vote. No vote is a vote for Trump. If you care at all about saving democracy in this country long enough to elect someone better than Biden, vote for Biden. Not voting for Biden is a vote for a dictator and a vote for the end of democracy. As bad as things are, we saw they can get so much worse. And | do not want to hear the same people saying not to vote for Biden crying when shit hits the fan if Trump wins.
If you care about trans people’s rights. If you care about abortion rights. If you care about immigrants’ rights. If you care about global warming. Literally any issue under the sun, will be made worse by Trump in every conceivable way imaginable.
| have a hard time fathoming how people are
still saying Trump and Biden are the same after everything that has happened. A quick Google
on Biden’s policies on every progressive issue vs Trump will tell you the opposite. Yeah, Biden is a shitty moderate liberal who supports Israel. So
is literally every single other US president that has ever fucking existed. Voting for a third party candidate will not help Palestine. It will literally only escalate things and make them even worse if Trump wins. In every conceivable way imaginable.
If you aren’t going to vote, then at least have the decency to stop pretending like what you are doing has any remotely positive impact. It does not. There is nothing virtuous or admirable about abstaining (and a third party vote is abstaining). We went through this in 2016. | thought people would have learned by now. But here we are again in 2024. If Trump wins, blood is on your hands and you didn’t do even the one easiest thing you could do to stop it from happening.
synnefa-kyria
The DNC was never going to nominate another primary candidate over the incumbent, the sitting president, who is in charge of the entire Democratic party.
| don’t think the sun shines out of Biden’s ass, guys, but please look at the bigger picture here.
Our presidential election is not ranked choice and is not won by a majority of over 50%. It is a two party system that is won by plurality; whoever gets the biggest slice of votes, even if it’s under 50%, is the winner and they take all. First the district, then the state, then the Electoral College. This is why third parties have little influence. This is why voting for them or not at all benefits the opposition. This is why Trump won in 2016.
A 2024 Trump victory is an not something we as a nation can bear - it’s bad for us, and it is unseeakabl bad for Palestine because Trump’s a far-right lunatic lacking morals and human compassion.
Not voting for Biden, third party or abstaining, will split the vote and cause a spoiler in favor
of Trump. See the 2000 Georee W Bush vs Al Gore election for reference. Take a long look at those razor thin mareins. Al Gore lost Florida
by 0.009%. Hell, walk down memory lane to the 2016 election. States where Trump won by a margin of 3% or less - Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin - would have won Hillary the Electoral College, 316 to 224,
We cannot fore et Russia’s war on Ukraine either. Do you honestly think Trump will want to continue US aid to Ukraine? Really? The
guy who’s all buddy-buddy with Putin and has Russia-supporting followers? He’s been vocal about his lack of enthusiasm for supporting Ukraine, and has threatened to hamstring NATO - Ukraine’s principal ally - should the situation escalate further.
Russia is angling towards a return of the Soviet Union’s former territory - look at Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia (the country). Appeasement is not an option - that’s a proven failure. A possible return to the Cold War status quo is horrifying, and there’s every reason to believe they won’t stop there, setting off a multitude of geopolitical tinder boxes. God above forbid any one of the parties involved sets off a nuclear bomb, tactical or ICBM.
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I don’t understand this political strategy in the long-run. If the left always unflinchingly votes for the leftmost candidate then the optimal strategy for the DNC is always to choose someone just 1% to the left of whoever the Republicans are running.
The trumpers aren’t strong because they always vote. They’re strong because everyone knows that, if Trump isn’t on the ballot, they won’t turn out to vote nearly as strongly.
Combine this with the fact that basically every business interest wants right-wing politics and you get the perpetual rightwards slide of the Democratic Party.
I don’t understand this political strategy
Because way too many voters have no concept of game theory
I’ve had some luck explaining it by asking folks why multiple gas stations are at the same intersection, or asking why Lowes and Home Depot are always right next to each other.
I’m afraid you’ve lost me
It’s traditionally explained with two lemonade stands on a long beach. If their product is generally indistinguishable and both want to maximize their number of customers, they will eventually settle on halfway mark of the beach. One gets all the foot traffic from the left, the other from the right, splitting it 50/50.
The same applies to businesses on a map, not just a one dimensional beach. Most consumers don’t really care if it’s a Home Depot or Lowes, or a BP or Exxon. If one of them discovers a gap in the market and places something there, someone else can come along and grab half the market. It’s something Walmart has done in a lot of small towns. They’ll come in and split market 50/50 with a small, local shop knowing that there’s not enough money to turn a profit with splitting the market in half. But they know they the can run a loss for a year or two, the competition will close, and then they’ll have 100% of the market.
It’s a really topical thing in politics. There are more centrist voters than at either extreme end, so politicians tend to fall more in the middle. Politicians like Trump change the landscape though. While an extreme candidate, the Republican party had already been shifting more right for a while, so he only marginally pulled the voter base right, but pulled most Republican politicians right, or pushed them out. Democrats moved to match. It essentially means that far right Republicans have a short stroll to the nearest lemonade stand, but far left Democrats have to trudge a couple miles in the hot summer sun, and they’re deciding it’s not worth it.
I’ve said a lot of the same for years. You don’t get a progressive president by voting for them first. You vote in television unsexy stuff, city council races, congressional primaries, county commissioners. Those people learn the system and move up. Bug surprise, like progressive ideas, you build up fom the bottom.
Someday I’d like to hear a rational explanation about why the worse the Republican is, the more conservative and uncharismatic the Dem has to be.
Like, if all that matters is stopping Republicans…
Why aren’t we running someone that people like?
A Bill Clinton or Barack Obama type that actively went after the youth vote, opened a dialog with voters, and took feedback to make their campaigns more appealing?
Historically speaking, that’s a slam dunk.
We can keep trying to berate the youth into voting, but the thing about 18 year olds is, there’s always 18 year olds. Convince this batch to hold their nose, and we got to convince the next one again. Plus re-convirnce the old batch again. Someone that’s 30 right now has spent almost half their life being told that they have no say in who they vote for, they just have to vote against trump.
How are people surprised they feel disenfranchised?
Why can’t we try listening to the youth, and trust that as the future party moves further to the left, they stay with the party?
Are we now to the point where we’re deifying Clinton? He had sex with a subordinate (likely more than one). His policies resulted in incarceration of minorities, and a decline in life standards for people at the bottom of the income distribution. You are NOT the first person who had to hold his nose while voting for the lesser evil, and frankly in his day the GOP candidate looked much better than it does now.
Where do you think ‘the party’ comes from, the people who make these bad decisions? Are you active in local politics? Do you educate yourself and vote in local elections? Most people act like the only election there is, is the presidential election, and wonder why they feel disconnected from the choices. Well there are a million small choices going into who that pool of bad choices is winnowed from, and who is making backroom decisions playing into it, and most people are clueless how any of it works, uninterested to learn, and completely checked out. Well that’s how we end up here.
Where do you think ‘the party’ comes from, the people who make these bad decisions?
Well, the current leader of the DNC was appointed by Joe Biden in 2021…
The selection of Mr. Harrison, on the heels of Mr. Biden’s victories in Arizona and Georgia in November, reflects the president-elect’s longstanding determination for Democrats to compete in once-red states, a recognition that the party will never sustain an enduring congressional majority without making inroads across the Sun Belt.
Mr. Biden’s top advisers are also planning to appoint a small group of elected Democrats as vice chairs to reward their support in the campaign and offer them the opportunity to be high-profile surrogates. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, Representative Filemon Vela of Texas and Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta will serve in the roles.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/us/politics/jaime-harrison-dnc-chairman.html
Technically the DNC could vote against the president, but they didn’t even do that to Obama. For details in who the ~477 people are and how it happens:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/23/13703720/dnc-chair-election-rules-members
From the rest of you comment, I think that link would be beneficial.
Especially this part:
Up to 75 slots are appointed by the DNC chair
You seem to think it’s a lot more democratic than it really is.
Not at all, nor am I saying it’s a good system. But the realities of how individuals shape the system and determine who is making discisions starts at the local level, and happens over time, and it does come to reflect the interests of those who choose to participate, and not those who don’t. This is just the reality of how power operates.
So why did you ask
Where do you think ‘the party’ comes from, the people who make these bad decisions?
Like you disagreed with me, but now you’re saying basically “of course it’s like what you first said”?
The DNC is “the party” and the DNC is not governed by democracy.
That’s the key issue. It’s unelected nepotism and the people being placed in power have no idea how to win elections.
The president appoints people to the DNC, and the DNC is not shy about saying they have full control over who the next presidential candidate is.
This isn’t a new problem, and because the only people who can change it benefit from it, they’re not kicking themselves out of power.even if it means trump wins.
No one despises the Democrats more than those of us who saw Bernie get steamrolled by them when he stated drawing crowds and winning primaries. But many of us older millennials also see the writing on the wall: We can’t change a fucking thing about the current system voting GOP, green, or abstaining.
Being progressive, to me, means voting for the candidate that moves the needle toward the world I want to see. We cannot ever change the voting method and fundamental structure of our capitalistic hellscape by holding out for the perfect candidate. They do not exist.
They want us fighting like this, convincing others to not vote, or attacking a system that cannot and will not change by choice. We cannot effect change from a prison cell. Anything other than a vote for Biden will end all other hopeful prospects any progressive voter would have. The GOP literally has a manifesto, like a fucking school shooter would plan out, to turn the US into a Christian Iran.
The path to abolishing the electoral college and going to anything else will only happen when enough states push for the change at the local level. It’s why there’s such strong attacks at the state level to ban the use of ranked-choice voting. It’s why the GOP is ignoring successful, or outright restricting, ballot initiatives to prevent the people from pushing for their own change.
Bottom line, Congress will never change the voting method in this country because those with the power to change it stand to lose the most by doing so. It’s only by voting in the best candidates available at the time, within the confines of the system as it stands, that we can hope to enact any meaningful change.
Normally, I’d never tell someone how to vote, but after 4 years of both men, we know how they govern. Now, moreso than in 2016, is not the time to protest vote or refuse to vote on a single issue. We cannot afford, as a country or world, to let the orange menace have another term.
Bernie got steamrolled because he had no support within the DNC. Of course they would band together to stop an outsider from winning.
Fortunately Bernie figured that out, he started focusing on getting progressives elected as Democrats to start changing the party from within
What?
He’s been building the movement longer than either of us have probably been alive.
He never expected to do as well as he did in the presidential run, let alone think he could win
It was to draw attention on national level to the progressive movement and to pull the party left in an attempt to save it.
My state has voted Republican every election since 1968, with a true majority all but twice. So I can actually vote for whoever I like and it won’t make a lick of difference.
Isn’t the electoral college great?
Cold war with a guy who can’t control his emotions and goes online to let the world know about it no matter the time of the day…
Do you know how many times I’ve heard about your president tweeting this or that, in the last four years? Never. Not a single time. What a blessing that was.
yeah i hear you and all, but i still don’t like that Biden isn’t leftist so I’m willing to give straight up fascism another go
Climate change is the single overriding issue for me. We are beyond out of time to avert damaging levels of warming, and even Biden’s climate policies – by far the most sweeping in the history of the country – are barely adequate to begin steering us away from the absolute worst. If Trump gets in, and eviscerates federal climate policy, and stacks the EPA with oil lobbyists (again), and fills federal courts with science-denying assholes, and sabotages state and local efforts to decarbonize, and destroys all chance of global cooperation on this issue, and (most importantly) dismantles democracy so that it is effectively impossible to vote for a progressive ever again absent a second civil war, then we will be consigning the entire planet to “nightmare hellscape” levels of climate change with no viable pathway out. A second Trump term would add four billion tons of carbon emissions over the next six years. It would “negate – twice over – all of the savings from deploying wind, solar and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years”. And that analysis doesn’t account for increased emissions from Trump policies, just a reversal of what Biden has accomplished. Allowing Trump to win again would not just be national, but global suicide.
So you’re saying that a vote for Trump is a vote to destroy Israel, because the entire middle east would become uninhabitable to human life.
First by war, then by water/lack of it.
dismantles democracy so that it is effectively impossible to vote for a progressive ever again absent a second civil war, then we will be consigning the entire planet to “nightmare hellscape” levels of climate change with no viable pathway out.
Silly friend, you just mentioned the viable pathway out.
(I agree with everything you said.)
Watch out for the propaganda. The red and blue party will always try to stay in power and push the narrative that not voting for them is a wasted vote. If you actually want anything to change at all stop supporting them.
The system isn’t fair but the only way yo change that is through the system. If you want to have a say go vote in a primary.
If you want to support Palestine and fight the establishment (aipac, Hillary, …) support Jamaal Bowman.The system isn’t fair but the only way yo change that is through the system.
Point one time in history where a change through the system actually worked. But yea, you can try to vote red and blue out that will do something for sure.
The one issue where Biden is an asshole would be identical under The Idiot, because Netanyahu has already demonstrated he can get anything he wants out of The Idiot.
Vote for less evil. The alternative is more evil. Why the fuck would you want more evil?
The thing that is annoying is there is NO nuance to this. First primary isn’t over. So I can vote something to pull Biden more left. Second I live in a state with no chance of Biden losing. Remember this isn’t a one person one vote thing this is who wins the popular vote in each state for president gets all that states votes unless you are in Nebraska or Maine. So if I live in Delaware then voting 3rd party won’t hurt Biden he will win but maybe a movement will realize he doesn’t have as much support so maybe he will court progressive independents versus Republicans.
It won’t hurt. That being said do vote blue down ballot and primary all the people who are fake Democrats or shitty ones. Maybe if you find a hole and find you have massive support get a green party in but you would know if that race is close if you are local.
These posts are annoying to tell people to fall in line and I agree the other posts of I hate Biden is trying to divide the line in closer races.
I live in a state with no chance of <candidate> losing
A lot of people make that assumption up until their candidate actually loses.
Well then the candidate should have done better if they lost that many people in a protest vote or an apathy no vote.
Remember they should earn people’s vote not we should vote for someone because we have to.
Wind dat same shit I always post in these threads back selecta!
If you’re reading this and you don’t want to vote for biden or trump, consider party for socialism and liberation. They’re running Claudia de la Cruz for president this year on a platform of Palestinian statehood and ending arms shipments to Israel.
It’s okay to not want to vote for Biden or trump.
It’s okay to not want to vote for Biden or trump but the principled stance if you do that is accelerationism.
Minor correction - Trump didn’t win CO in 2016. Not overly important in the grand scheme of things, I’m just from there and I’d have been ashamed if he had.
The rest of it still stands. I’m involved in local politics and I consistently vote for more progressive candidates, and we’ve had some victories. In a recent example, a homophobic asshat of a city council member gave up his seat to run for mayor. Not only did he lose that race, the woman who won his former seat is a progressive lesbian.
But you know who I almost never see at council meetings or at events for state level positions? The kind of terminally online leftists who constantly complain about the Democrats being too conservative. Apparently it’s more important to put other people’s rights and lives at risk to make some kind of stand than it is to try to make any real difference in the ways we can. Maybe someday we’ll have an electoral system that allows for more than 2 parties, but we sure as shit won’t if people can’t be bothered to pay attention to anything but the presidential race.
But you know who I almost never see at council meetings or at events for state level positions? The kind of terminally online leftists who constantly complain about the Democrats being too conservative.
Oh, I’m there, but it’s nice to know I’m masking well
Just continue coping about your awful fucking candidate. I’ll be over here.
Ten years of chuckling at trolley problem jokes and y’all still don’t get it.
2 Choices in 2024 #1 The man who is killing student debt, building infrastructure, going after medical debt, and so many more thing to help average Americans. #2 The man who advised us to consume bleach and shine a light inside our bodies to KILL covid, which he said was not not coming here because China shut it down. Also convicted for business fraud, and many other things.
There’s more than 2 choices: you can vote for anyone that isn’t red or blue or you can stop delegating your vote to a corrupted system entirely.
Both the red and blue party have blood on their hands and are in bed with evil corporations.
In a system, where there is only one winner, everyone else are losers. Systems like that always tend to strongly favor a two party system like the us has and unless you can realistically bet on being able to mobilise more than half of the voters, your best bet will always be voting for one of the established parties, if you want your vote to count towards anything. For smaller party votes to count you need a system more akin to those of many European countries, where the government is split proportionally by the amount of votes per party. Then voting for smaller parties can actually have a significant impact.
Stop feeding on propaganda, you can vote for anyone you want and everyone has the same chances of winning. Stop supporting evil.
Realistically, no. Because it’s not a game of chance. Theoretically anyone could. Practically you live in a system where voting for small parties is punished by the lower of two evils losing votes and the greater of two evils not.
Following scenario: let’s imagine the Mildly Evil™ Party and the Very Evil™ Party had a votes split of 55:45. Mildly Evil™ would win. Now we introduce party C, that is neither. The party can either appeal primarily to Mildly Evil™ voters or Very Evil™ voters. Very Evil™ voters are currently, overall, not unhappy with their party/candidate, since they like how evil their party is, while Mildly Evil™ voters don’t like that their party is as evil as it currently is, so it’s safe to assume, it’s gonna be the Not Evil™ Party. Now, Very Evil™ voters are not significantly going to vote for the Not Evil™ Party. Maybe a little less than a tenth of them will. And maybe a little less than half of Mildly Evil™ voters might vote something else, thus the Not Evil™ Party. The result would be Not Evil™ with 30%, Mildly Evil™ with 30% and Very Evil™ with 40%. Very Evil™ wins, the rest lose. Only the one with the most votes can have power. Your votes for Not Evil™ made Very Evil™ gain that power. And that’s including the unrealistic notion, that you could get half of all Mildly Evil™ voters to vote for a new and unproven party at all.
Now, let’s take a better scenario based on different set of rules (aka the rules most other democratic countries live by, where parties need an absolute majority to govern): let’s take those three parties again and the same results, Not Evil™ with 30%, Mildly Evil™ with 30% and Very Evil™ with 40%. Now, Very Evil™ have the most votes but they don’t have the absolute majority, so they cannot rule alone. They’d have to find a partner. However both Mildly Evil™ and Not Evil™ would never work with them, because they are too evil for either. However, Mildly Evil™ is just about not evil enough, that Not Evil™ would consider working with them. Together they have 60% of votes and thus the absolute majority, forming the Almost Not Evil™ coalition for that term, building a foundation for Not Evil™ to grow until the next election.
This is the only way how voting for a small party can realistically work. Of course, usually there are more than three parties. Here in Germany, for example, there are more than a dozen, most of them too small to matter, thus there being a 5% hurdle for small parties, so the government is not so split it couldn’t function (that’s part of what killed the Weimar Republic and helped the Nazi Party to gain power in the 1930s). There are usually between 5-7 parties large enough enter the government and there are usually two to three parties in a governing coalition. It’s not a perfect solution but it gives smaller parties a fighting chance. In a system like the US, where a party just about needs to have a simple majority to win, not an absolute majority, smaller, independent parties almost never even have a chance.
Realistically, no. Because it’s not a game of chance. Theoretically anyone could. Practically you live in a system where voting for small parties is punished by the lower of two evils losing votes and the greater of two evils not.
It’s the same thing practically.
Here’s the current scenario: everyone is getting poor as fuck and a bunch of madmen are ruling the world and cycling in power. Nobody is happy with red or blue either
Did you read the post at all
“if you do not vote for biden, you are voting for trump”
This is illogical and false.
Look around what’s happening: this strategy is being used all over the world to keep a bunch of elites in power, see recent eu elections, see france.
I think a lot of posts saying they are equal or call Biden Genocide Joe are Russian trolls aiming to influence the election. And if they’re not, they might as well be.
