The libs will have nobody to blame but themselves
I sure wish more of these people that are all hung up on an issue would vote in the primaries. You know, where you have at least a slim chance of changing things.
When you shit inside the skulls of your enemies, but they use that shit to form shitty opinions about life and politics :(
Every four fucking years of my entire voting lifetime is an influx of liberals that are so horny for voting between the lesser of two evil establishment shits that I want to jump off a cliff in Skyrim every time I have to read this type of divisive rhetoric that literally alienates real people with real concerns who would never support Trump. I wish Harris was as leftist as Trump makes her out to be but noooo “sMaLL bUsinEsEs” and “most LETHAL military” and “the bOrdER bill” and “Isntreal has a right to” suck my fucking glock.
I want to go live with the fucking socialist Linux penguins in Antarctica.
And every four fucking years of my entire voting lifetime is an influx of ignorant pseudo-intellectual blowhard nonsense about third parties that- similar to their devoted followers…. don’t do jack shit between elections.
I want to go live with the fucking socialist Linux penguins in Antarctica.
Please do.
Ok fascist blue MAGA 👍
If you’re feeling disturbed by this rhetoric but you don’t want to vote for the greens, consider party for socialism and liberation. They’re running de la Cruz on a platform of Palestinian statehood and an end to arms shipments to Israel.
And what are their chances to win currently?
Can’t wait for Blue MAGA to win so they can go to brunch and not do any form of direct action or mutual aid for 4 years while the genocides continue, then shit on leftists for not voting hard enough at the next election.
Right. Because we have all been so lucky to be in the receiving end of all the generous policies and the overwhelming selfless charity from those third party candidates!
I for one am overflowing with love and blissful ass-kissery for all the work those candidates have done for everyone- every year in between the elections!!!
Let me list all the things they’ve done for us all:
- ……
Yaaaaaaaay!
Not sure what you expect them to do about the Chinese genocide against the Uyghers, or the ongoing Darfur genocide. That said, it would be nice if they did would at least try something.
I am a libertarian minarchist. Look it up before you form ideas.
I don’t like Harris but I’d much rather have her over Trump. And that’s how I’ll vote.
I strongly recommend everyone should research your local elections and vote for candidates that best represent your views and mindsets on a local level. The FPtP system makes third parties mostly unviable in influencing national policy.
I too will vote Harris, but I think it’s important to understand that voting out of fear is not going to fix our extremely broken two party system. Voting third party is not a vote for Trump, I think it’s often a vote born of a broken two party system.
Despite knowing that I can’t bring myself to vote third party out of fear that I may not get another chance to vote if Trump takes power.
It literally exactly is a vote for trump. We have shown you morons the math a million times by now, you’re just being willfully resistant to acknowledging what you’re doing to endanger the republic.
That is the system though. Democracy isn’t really about getting what you want. That’s impossible under any system other than a dictatorship where you are the dictator. Parasocial psychology has lead a lot of people thinking that Trump getting what he wants is what they want. But that won’t work out well for anyone.
Democracy is really about removing the worst people from power and preventing them from getting power in the first place. Over many years in something akin to natural selection you can have progress. But like evolution, it goes slowly.
Voting third party isn’t a brave choice, it’s just a fantasy. Even in a proportional representation system, it’s still a fantasy, just you’d see maybe a few powerless people sitting in a legislature complaining on C-Span (which nobody will watch) instead of on social media.
Politics is about power and compromise. Vote for a representative that has a reasonable chance of winning, and write to them to encourage them to compromise closer to your position on things. That’s actually effective, people that go on about a fantasy world where they just tick a box and whatever they want will happen are just being silly.
I’ve written to many of my state and federal legislators over the span of 20+ years. it’s not effective. We need campaign finance before, we need to overturn citizens United, and we need to change our two party system.
I understand your perspective but I disagree on some points.
The only way things change is if more people are informed and active. Do what you can to help implement ranked choice voting.
The state of Florida outlawed rank choice voting
Much respect.
This is exactly why we need ranked choice voting.
Winner takes all essentially demoralizes and alienates voters and drives people who agree with each other to fight because they’re trapped in a broken system.
So instead of fighting the system, it’s easier to just blame other people and alienate more of them against your cause, shooting yourself in the foot with ignorance. It’s kind of disgusting.
How would we get ranked choice passed using the current two party system though? I can’t imagine politicians voting to give up power in that way.
Maine has, and Alaska too. Although Alaska is trying to repeal it this election cycle.
I’d settle for getting rid of the electoral college at this point. We could’ve had at least 4 years of Al Gore setting us on the right path to avoiding the worst of climate change yet here we are having to put up with a potentially third popular vote upset in recent history.
Ranked choice is more plausible than removing the EC. Ranked choice already exists in some places and the Dems have a proposal (but are lacking the votes) to implement it for Congress.
Removing the EC would require a constitutional amendment so 3/4 for the House and Senate and ratified by 3/4 of the states. Or maybe it’s 2/3 for some of those, but either way it needs bipartisan support and why would the GOP remove a system that got their guy elected twice this century?
There is some kind of interstate compact thing to get around it, but making a huge change to elections via sneaky shenanigans won’t go over well at a time when a lot of doubts about election integrity have been widely promoted. Wrongly promoted, but still, doing sneaky things about elections is a real no-go right now.
Why is it so common to blame the third party vote for democrats losing in 2016? It sounds like if the democrats would take an anti-war stance like the green party does, they would have won most of those votes too?
Seems more appropriate to expect the party to reflect the population rather than the other way around.
To convince Greens or Carlins (people who don’t vote because the Democrats are still too evil from their point-of-view) to vote for Democrats, you need to understand yourself and them. Once you do that, you’ll be able to offer more convincing arguments to support your position.
If you’re voting for Democrats, you possibly agree with the following scale of evilness:
- 10 Hitler
- 9 Stalin
- 8.5 Trump
- 8 Republicans and people who vote for them
- 7
- 6
- ~5-3 elected Democratic party members
- 2
- 1 you
- 0 Jesus
The thing is that Greens and Carlins see the world very differently:
- 10 people making the biosphere unlivable thru overpopulation
- 9 factory farmers and commercial fishing companies
- 8
- 7 Hitler, Stalin
- 6
- 5 George W. Bush, Putin
- 4 Trump, Republicans, and people who vote for them
- 3 Gore, Obama, Democrats, and people who vote for them
- 2
- 1 Sanders
- 0
- -1
- -2
- -3
- -4
- -5
- -6
- -7 them
- -8
- -9
- -10
The Greens’ and Carlins’ priorities are very different. They may think that choosing to make the biosphere unlivable is the worst thing you can do, because without a biosphere that supports life, nothing else matters.
They may think that torturing trillions of fish to death every year, and enslaving hundreds of billions of animals in torturous conditions every year, is worse than all genocides and wars in all of history combined. They think that supporting even a single genocide is bad.
They may think that given the choice between popular Hitler, popular Stalin, and unpopular Gandhi; they’d rather vote for Gandhi than the popular lesser evil, because that specific evil is omnicidally evil. It’s better to vote for good and fail, than it is to vote for evil and succeed.
For me its even simpler though. All of these logical shenanigans are the circular energy that fuels the myth around the unchangeable two party system. If people simply voted for the candidate based on their values and policy, literally everyone to a T, it would shatter the two party system into fragments, and we would have to do something to accommodate them.
Thats at least my theory, although I still voted Harris because in my case my vote is in a place that matters. I would say I’m about half and half happy and upset about it but thats the best I could manage with the circumstances.
I do think momentum is building though if we can continue it through the coming years.
No it wouldn’t, the two largest parties from that first vote would eventually consume everything else and then we’d be right back where we started.
Unless you intend to abolish FPTP, arguing your intention to vote third party is mathematically the same as arguing your intention to vote for the 2 party candidate who is least like you.
Your theory has been proven wrong every single time it’s ever been put to the test.
Example of when it was tested?
Yeah. Every election in the US. Everybody can vote for whoever they want. And when people vote for someone that isn’t one of the majority parties we get George W Bush instead of Al Gore.
If just 1% of Nader’s voters had voted for Gore instead imagine how much better our would would be.
This is the most horrible way to convince people to vote with you. I, personally, would tell you to go fuck yourself if I weren’t already voting for Harris. Please stop that. You need to convince people why they should vote for your candidate by showing them the difference, not this “or else” bullshit. and if they are not convinced, you let it go. People are free with their damn votes.
Trump’s track record and intentions for his next term are crystal clear. They are clearly and demonstrably worse than harris’plans or Biden/harris’ previous term.
That info is widely available. To ignore it now, and claim to need “convincing” is madness at best, or bad faith at worst.
“Or else” isn’t bullshit when it comes from the perspective of anyone who actually has something to lose if Trump wins.
Everyone who is on the fence or doesn’t feel like they need to vote are just speaking from positions of privilege because they don’t personally have as much on the line. I just find it hard to sympathize with that perspective.
But the same thing can be said for the people ignoring the faults of Kamala…
Especially when they’re just begging for an end of genocide, or fracking destroying their communities, or any other of multitude issues where Kamala and Trump have the same policies even though the majority of the Dem voting base disagrees with them.
It seems odd to act like the “high road” is the one where genocide is ok, when we could just have someone who was anti-genocide…
There’s fall less people willing to hold their noses to vote for genocide and fracking than the other way around. And very few people who are only voting for Kamala because her border, genocide, and fracking policies are the same as Trump’s.
The people that want that are still voting trump, if they told you that it would change your mind…
I hate to break it to you, but they lie about this shit all the time so even if they lose they win.
I’m sorry, how does Trump improve any of the issues you describe?
He doesn’t, neither does Kamala…
So why get mad at someone who’s line isnt the same place as yours?
You can tell at them to throw their morals out the window, or unite with them and demand just a little more than the bare minimum you would accept
Why is no one allowed to ask for anything more than your bare minimum? And why would you risk trump to not help get more?
I don’t logically understand your position, I understand what it is, just not why it’s your position.
Can you elaborate on how this:
just speaking from positions of privilege because they don’t personally have as much on the line. I just find it hard to sympathize with that perspective.
Isn’t applicable to you wanting people to ignore genocide? In some cases where it’s literally their close family over there as the victims?
He doesn’t, neither does Kamala…
Then why even have this argument?
How about we swing this double edged sword the other way? Why try to alienate women who lost their rights with the overturning of Roe v. Wade because of Trump’s supreme court appointments? Or what about every LGBTQ+ person in the US who is trapped at the edge of their seats because members of the supreme court have stated they’d like to revisit Obergefell v. Hodges, too?
How about all of the kids who are shot to death at school because of unchecked gun proliferation that Trump’s party has blocked attempts to regulate? Or people who are drowning to death in medical and student debt that Trump blocked attempts to solve, while he just has a “concept of a plan” that no one is able to describe?
Or maybe we can look at his previous presidency, when his hateful rhetoric caused sharp rises in hate speech and crimes committed against people of color and the socially vulnerable? The rise in white supremacist/domestic terrorist groups? The election denialism that resulted in January 6? The complete and utter failure to properly manage the Covid-19 pandemic that led to the preventable deaths of millions?
The threat of fascism literally looming over our heads and being told none of that matters because Kamala is no different from Trump in my specific hand-picked list of issues, that’s what I take issue with.
If someone is not willing to do the bare minimum to keep him out of power because they don’t see a reason to vote for Kamala, I have a long list of less-kind words I’d love to say if I didn’t believe in trying to maintain civility online.
Then why even have this argument?
Because if instead of spending time and effort trying to convince voters to lower their morals…
We’d be better off uniting to hold Kamala to a higher standard, because then we’d stop trump, and get more of what we want.
I’m not sure what’s confusing about this.
Goodness you are a speed reader, replying within 2 minutes and acknowledging the very first sentence I wrote.
I am literally holding Kamala to a higher standard. Everything I wrote is the standard that anyone with half a braincell and respect for their fellow man should understand. Anyone who does not is not worth being pandered to.
Posters like this always assume that their candidate is the other option if the person doesn’t abstain or vote 3rd party.
People need to be sharing this video about first past the post more, because if you haven’t heard this very specific voting information then any intelligent person would think this was just stupid tribalism:
Cgp would make an amazing president
deleted by creator
Abstaining or voting 3rd party to “make Dems listen” doesn’t work. If anyone thinks they can play Mexican Standoff, you can’t because the Dems have an out: the center voter. Every time they lose, they go to the center to find voters.
And remember they need all 3 of presidency, house of representatives, and senate to pass pretty much anything. If they don’t have all 3 they will go to the center to find voters. Some people call this rachet effect, but really they’re looking for voters. Want them to stop ‘racheting’? Then give them consistent and overwhelming victories.
I live in a red state, and the Democratic Party cannot even get enough warm bodies to ruin for every office here. The Libertarians do better with their candidates than the Democrats.
I’ve thought about that recently.
In Germany, the 2 historically biggest parties were SPD (used to be liberal-democrat) and CDU (conservative) and they often were the ones tugging it out while the smaller parties were filling in as coalition partners for one or the other.
Over time, the SPD splintered into several semi-big offshoot parties (Linke, for example) while the CDU stayed as a whole. As a result, CDU is now commonly a favorite for getting most votes in an election.
Is that consistent with politics across the globe? And if, why do liberal or center parties tend to split up more than conservatives?
Counterexample: The European Parliament. IMHO, it looks like 4 right-wing groups, 2 left-wing ones and 2 centrist ones. While the exact positioning could be argued over, the right wing is quite certainly more fragmented than the left is.
Because conservatives gravitate towards authority, and progressives are looking to break the status quo.
So conservatives value order, authority, and it causes them to fall in line.
Progressives are looking to break that order, believing that things can be better than they are right now. That causes them to infight more often.
I commonly hear the left is a loose coalition of factions (which can split apart), while the right fall in line. I think there are fewer factions on the right, or the factions are not as far apart, so coming together is easier. They also unite in absolute hatred of the left, so will fall in line to slay that beast.
So vote for them regardless and then they will listen?
Dems need all 3 (presidency, house of reps, Senate) to do pretty much anything. They’ve had that for [drumroll please] 4 out of the last 24 years. Or 6 of the last 32 years. Or 6 of the last 44 fucking years.
They’ve had that for [drumroll please] 4 out of the last 24 years
It was significantly shorter than that when you consider Senate control to be 60, which is what’s needed to bypass the fillibuster.
Supermajority was 4 months, out of the last 44 years. But whenever I mention that people think I’m fixated on that for some reason.
*Oh downvoted already. Some people really don’t like hearing this.
You shouldn’t cry about fake internet points
This is an incorrect framing of the situation. You aren’t being asked for a Yes/No vote on Democrats. You are being asked if you prefer Democrats or Republicans. Or for this election, if you prefer Democracy or Fascism. If you vote “no preference”, that does not communicate “I prefer the Democrats, but want them to move further left”, either logically or politically.
There are lots of ways to communicate desired policy changes: letter-writing, primaries (including campaigning/funding for candidates), protests, marches, press, social-media, etc. Voting against your interest is not one of them.
The more elections the far right loses, the more the overton window shifts to the left.
Democrats move further right to get votes from the center but when they win it’ll go left trust me bro
This, but unironically.
They go to the center when they lose. If they don’t lose, they don’t need to go to the center to find voters. You can see my other comment, they’ve only had all 3 houses for 4 out of the last 24 years.
It’s the left’s fault for not feeling motivated to vote for a center-right party, they’ll become even more right if we don’t vote for them. Progressive candidates are dumb and unpopular.
So stay home/throw away your vote, I’m sure they’ll realize their mistake and go to the left any decade now to chase those reliable voters.
they don’t have to, let the whole thing collapse. Fascism never lasts long
I honestly don’t know what point you’re trying to get at. In any case, if the left wants to be effective, they have to vote for Dems. Because, again, when they lose they go to the center to find voters.
seems like if the left wants to be effective at this point it has to go far beyond voting
And remember they need all 3 of presidency, house of representatives, and senate to pass pretty much anything
The odds of Democrats keeping the Senate seem dismal. So it sounds like we’re giving the party license to do nothing for another two years
I like how you twist that to “party license”. If the
peoplevoters vote that way, that is the will of thepeoplevoters. Don’t like it? Vote. For Dems. (Though the GOP bear some responsibility being obstructionist pos.)If the
peoplevoters vote that way, that is the will of thepeoplevoters.Sorry 50M Californians, but 40k West Virginians decided to go a different way. Guess this means no civil rights for another two years.
So give up? Yea, it fucking sucks and is unfair as hell but voting is too easy to claim a lack motivation. It’s not a sustained effort, it’s something happens incredibly rarely and you can definitely handle. You can even mail that shit in in most places.
If you vote then it will be hard for the democrats to win and start shifting your countries policies to leftward(even if it’s an inch at a time). If you don’t vote then it will be impossible to do it.
So give up?
If your full effort begins and ends with election season, you’ve already given up.
Who said that? Oh right, nobody. Fuck, bro, get it together.
This is aimed at those people that think not voting or voting 3rd party is effective to “make Dems listen”. It is not. Voters have a say.
And in their trips to the centre they keep seeming to forget that they keep shifting further and further right
Centrists are a curse here
They. Are. Looking. For. Voters.
If the
peoplevoters want more right, then that’s the will of thepeoplevoters. Thus the message: If you, as a leftist, want them to go left then you have to vote for Dems.See you have this backwards, they are supposed to change and then they are rewarded with votes.
If you vote them in before they change, they have no reason to change.
