"Progressives should not make the same mistake that Ernst Thälmann made in 1932. The leader of the German Communist Party, Thälmann saw mainstream liberals as his enemies, and so the center and left never joined forces against the Nazis. Thälmann famously said that ‘some Nazi trees must not be allowed to overshadow a forest’ of social democrats, whom he sneeringly called ‘social fascists.’
After Adolf Hitler gained power in 1933, Thälmann was arrested. He was shot on Hitler’s orders in Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944."
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One, I don’t know any progressive that is planning on voting for RFK.
Two, can we stop this lie? Only a vote for Trump is a vote for Trump.
I mean unless you are intentionally being obtuse I feel like you know damn well what people mean when they say “A vote for X is a vote for Trump”. It’s not a coincidence that so many Republican allies and organizations are promoting and pumping up 3rd party candidates to run in various swing states and pull votes away from Harris, this isn’t a new tactic and historically has absolutely changed elections.
I do know what they are saying and I do not approve of the message. It shifts the blame onto people who voted for what they wanted instead voting against what they don’t want, which is what people should be doing in a democracy - instead of blaming the people who actually voted for Trump. Those people are the people that elect him, not the people who didn’t vote for him.
You see, your first mistake here was assuming that America was a functioning democracy.
It’s not.
Play the game right or you’re gonna have the game taken away from you before you have a chance to fix it. FPTP is a zero sum game.
Well I’m sorry if that’s how you interpret reality, honestly I don’t care about “the message”, I care about the goal of TRUMP NOT FUCKING UP THIS COUNTRY MORE THAN HE ALREADY HAS.
What you should be voting for is the vote that’s going to help the country head in the best direction among the choices you have. Sometimes that’s not what you want. It’s not what I want. I think Harris is too far right on many issues (though she’s def not worse than Trump on genocide) - but I realize that voting for what I want would be selfish because what I want has no chance of winning, but not quite what I want does have a chance. That chance diminishes if I vote for what I want, while increasing the chance of what I definitely DO NOT want winning.
I get what you are saying. I voted for Nader in 2000, still get shit for it today. No one has the right to tell you who to vote for, or to shame you for voting your conscience. But let’s not pretend there’s any third party siphoning off R votes like there are siphoning off D votes.
Vote your conscience, sure, but don’t try to pretend doing so doesn’t tip the scales of the actual outcome in a particular direction - it does, and you clearly realize it. That doesn’t mean you can’t make the selfish choice, but at least own it.
I was young and dumb and oblivious to that reality, and didn’t even know I was in a battleground state. If I had, I might (or might not) have voted differently.
A vote for third party is a vote for Harris. You have to hold your nose and vote Trump!
But seriously, Libertarians are the largest third party by quite a margin. So third parties actually help Democrats. It is just the Democrats mentality that they are owed votes for not being Republicans, rather than a candidate’s or party’s job to try to appeal to voters that this narrative is pushed forward.
A vote not for Harris is one less vote for her too. Not voting for anyone and then waking up getting the person you didn’t want winning should not get a Pikachu face. That single vote won’t matter statistically, but it’s the mindset that if lots of people think the same way, and they do, then it will matter.
It’s okay to vote thinking, ugh, fine…I’ll vote Democrat even though I hate the choices. If everyone thinking that way votes, we’ll have a left wing sweep. That would be a refreshing change of pace…then we can put pressure on those reps who listen to people to make the hard changes that right now always get opposed because of party.
To be clear, I did not advocate for not voting. I actually believe voting should be compulsory.
You do advocate for throwing your vote away and enabling the worst possible candidate though.
I don’t think you need laws to force voting if you can keep the public informed and interact with them. It won’t be 100%, but anything has to be better than the low amounts the US has, caused by apathy and oppression.
I’m glad you didn’t mean to not vote, however that’s almost the default behavior these days because of the above mentioned. A change in the voting system would be another huge help, bringing in third party voters who would get a better chance to have their voice heard and their parties grow with that, as well as having more votes for the main parties with the alternate vote that would come with such voting. But to get that requires a change now with the existing one.
Voting absolutely should be compulsory, it would be such a moderating force on US politics if you couldn’t get more votes just by stirring up your base.
Unfortunately, that’s not true. The Trump base is not as fractured as the Democratic base is. Voting 3rd party, statistically, ONLY helps Trump.
A 3rd party will not, cannot win a Presidential election, so Progressives who would otherwise vote for Harris, but instead back a loser like Stein or West are removing their vote from Harris, which has the exact same effect as +1 for Trump.
See here:
"Just 44,000 votes out of more than 10m cast in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin – less than half of 1% – were the difference between the Biden presidency and a tie in the electoral college that would have thrown the election to the House of Representatives, and hence to Trump.
If candidates from No Labels, the Green party and the People’s party peel off just 15% of the anti-Trump vote from Biden, and Trump’s base stays with him, Trump would win all five swing states comfortably and return to the Oval Office."
“Not true”? What part are you refuting? Are you saying that they count non-Trump votes as Trump votes?
Would you agree with me that if no one voted for Trump, he would not win?
You’re living in a fantasy. In real life where the rest of us are, a lot of people will be voting for Trump. And yes, any misguided third party vote is a vote for Trump.
Did you even read what this post is?
I’m saying the candidate isn’t “Not Trump”.
If Trump has 47% of the vote, and you allow the “Not Trump” majority to be divided among 3 or 4 people, Trump wins.
Only one person can beat Trump, the Democratic candidate. Voting for anyone else only helps Trump.
We don’t have an Presidential election that goes “Well, OK, nobody got 50%+1 so knock out everyone but the top two and do it again…”
Let’s say Trump has 47% support… his theoretical maximum.
That means “Not Trump” is at 53%.
The problem is “Not Trump” is divided among Harris, Stein, and West. Stein and West draw from the Harris camp, not the Trump camp.
So instead of 47% Trump, 53% Harris, you get 45% Harris, 5% Stein, 3% West, Trump wins.
Do that in a few key states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Trump gets a 2nd term, actively making things worse for all those people who voted for Stein and West.
I believe ravhall agrees with you, they were saying what IAmTheTot says doesn’t make sense.
I learned about spoiler candidates in 8th grade civics.
Spoiler about spoilers: spoilers can spoil actively, or passively. It doesn’t really matter after the fact, the point is how their words and existence as a candidate influence the success chances for the 2 leading candidates.
Plus we keep using this outdated first-past-the-post voting system in the 21st century.
That’s why one should always vote for Democrats who support voting system reform.
Are we talking about the same Democrats that sued to keep ranked choice boating off the DC ballot this year? or the Democrats that chose to keep ranked choice voting that had already been passed by voters off the Alexandria VA ballot?
We need the presidency first. We need a majority in both houses first. We need a supermajority in the senate first. We need a 2/3 majority in the senate first. We need to completely overhaul the voting system first.
There’s always something we need to do first. It’s right there on the timetable. Timetable subject to change. Offer void in red states.
Lemmy users be like “bUt I cAnT VoTe FoR gEnOcIdE”
Sadly, Israel’s genocide is not on the ballot given that both candidates support “Israel’s right to defend itself” (read that with seething sarcasm). What is on the ballot is the prevention of genocide (or at least a flood of atrocities) in Ukraine, the invasion of multiple former Soviet republics, Women’s rights, minority rights, queer rights, voting rights…basically rights and the rule of law in general.
A Trump presidency would accelerate the genocide in Gaza, and bring genocide home for millions of Latinos.
What is on the ballot is the prevention of genocide (or at least a flood of atrocities) in Ukraine, the invasion of multiple former Soviet republics,
The idea that the US can stop a war between two countries in the opposite side of the world already highlight something scummy going on. How exactly is voting red or blue going to change anything in the russian/ukrainian borders?
We desperately need more real third-party participation in politics, but voting for third parties in presidential elections doesn’t make that happen—the US voting system isn’t a business that adapts its products to meet consumer demand.
in presidential elections
Or in House of Representative, or Senate. The real power is in Congress.
Local elections is where most of the current people in power got started. Anyone voting for third party in the presidential race missed the boat.
That… is the exact opposite of what the article is arguing. If one side of the political spectrum (inevitably right-wing) unites, they immediately run over the side that is split up into different fragments that are arguing over just how much of a school lunch should be subsidized by the government.
And we have seen this in the modern day as well. A couple months back basically the entire Left/Center-Left of France had to unite to try and prevent fascists from taking power and… it is unclear if they actually succeeded.
Its fun to parrot the exact same text every single time a topic comes up. But shit like this is a lot more important than meming about Subway and it is well worth understanding what efforts do and don’t address and think through those problems. Otherwise we just leave ourselves more and more vulnerable to hate.
The point though is that ranked choice allows you all the benefits of 3rd parties without the downsides.
One can just as easily argue that that is the point of primaries in the US and other countries. You get a wide range of left and right leaning candidates and you downselect based on who the majority wants as well as general election theory to handle moderates.
And… the end result is that people get incredibly pissy when their candidate doesn’t win and disenfranchise themselves. Theoretically, a very strict ranked choice model that requires ALL candidates to be ranked could help with that but you still get into the realm of “protest votes”. See: People who refused to vote for Biden because he had shit stances on genocide and who would have given trump, who is openly genocidal, the win.
The reality is that we need to actually educate people on how governments work to undo decades of “haw haw, douche or a turd sandwich” levels of narrative. But we also need the politicians to actually unite against common threats. The fascists already understand that. But the Left continues to infight at every opportunity.
voting for third parties in presidential elections doesn’t make that happen
In a winner-take-all system, the marginal votes on the winning and losing side don’t matter. Third parties are an extrapolation of this principle. But when you’re voting in a state that is 60/40 for a given party, any individual vote for a given party is equally meaningful.
The only real benefit to valuing a Big Two party over a Third Party is if you’re in a swing state, where the odds of your vote being the tipping point are reasonably high. And even then, the powers invested in the partisan state secretary and county election’s commissioner offices render that decision relatively meaningless.
People losing their shit at Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan in 2000 seem to have completely overlooked the impact of the mass voter disenfranchisement under Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris, the Butterfly Ballot design that confused voters into voting Buchanan over Gore, as well as the transformative impact of the Brooks Brother’s Riot and the subsequent SCOTUS decision to halt the vote count in Dem leaning districts.
At some level, Americans must stop treating their elections process as free and fair, and then deflecting blame of defeat onto anyone who doesn’t vote for your favorite candidate.
Don’t feed up on the propaganda all it takes is a bunch of celebrities endorsing third parties and then they become popular enough to make a change. The moment the red and blue start to lose votes and their grip on power they have to go in damage control mode and change their politics to please people and get votes back.
