And this is when you vote for a third party. IMO the mentality of “having to vote one of these two” is toxic for a democratic system.
It’s a trap and these two parties massively profit off of it.
And this is when you vote for a third party. IMO the mentality of “having to vote one of these two” is toxic for a democratic system.
So close, and yet so far.
The third party isn’t going to save you from the toxic system, nor stand a chance to fix it.
You can’t reform the system, nor fix it from within no matter how hard you participate. It must be completely eradicated from the root.
I hate that you’re not wrong. Gotta get rid of the current “winner take all” electoral system first though…
Its the fundamental death of democracy. There is only ever one “correct” choice on the ballot. No real decision except to show up and vote straight ticket or suffer guilt or derision from your peers.
This works just as well on Republicans as Democrats. You don’t see any dark horse Buchanans or Perots on the ballot anymore. Conservatives know any vote for someone other than Trump will be seen as a vote for the Democrat, just like Liberals know the opposite. And when the top of the ticket sucks (as with Hilary in 2016 or Romney in 2012), turnout sags and upsets happen.
The bitter truth Dems can’t face is that they ran bad candidates on weak platforms after disappointing terms in office. And this is what drove down turnout. Not insidious Arabs or nefarious Jill Stein voters or Russia. If they’d had a candidate as appealing to voters as Trump, running on the left side of the ticket, they could have won. Instead, they shed 15M votes chasing the Liz Cheney endorsement.
My understanding is that for third parties to become viable at the presidential they have to have first become viable in other levels of government. A third party presidential candidate should be the culmination of bottom up building, not a once every 4 years thing.
Voters: Can pick between fascism and no fascism
Voters: “Hmm I will not vote”
Lets be real. The non voters are to blame and they deserve project 2025
Yeah… not a great idea to blame the very people you needed to stop fascism.
Oh and just a reminder the choice was between:
- The ruling party
- Literal fascism
That is not a democracy at that point, just authoritarianism though the threat of worse authoritarianism (in this case fascism).
And non voters chose literal fascism. They are fascist enablers. They will not help stop fascism. They chose fascism.
Yes, and if you say that this was a “democracy” then it would be the people’s choice (terrible but hey that is how democracy works). But you are saying people killed democracy by not voting for one of two options, something that implies you can have a single option democracy work.
You can’t, this is just authoritarianism at this point. People where clearly pissed off at the lack of agency and lashed out (classic fascism move) This was a failure of a two party system and the Democratic party, unless you think people really want fascism in that case go to the start of this comment.
Pandering to their unrealistic expectations to have a perfect candidate didn’t work, so I think I will blame them now. Every day for the rest of my life. Stop telling me to act nice to them to appease them, clearly nothing will.
Exactly. I would spit down on the non voters but dont want to waste the liquid on them
The voters don’t owe the candidate a damn thing. It’s funny that you believe otherwise.
kamala was not pro corporate.
we actually had some monopoly busting action going which is now going to be in the shitter.
Monopoly busting is good for the other corporations. Just because a company does anti-consunmer behavior doesn’t mean they aren’t also get screwed by another company’s anti-consumer behaviors.
The Biden Administration did, she didn’t. She had a bunch of billionaire Tech Bros telling her to drop Lena Khan if she got elected. We know exactly where she was headed.
It’s funny because no one on here was talking about the how bad the Democrats’ strategy had been before the election, yet now suddenly everyone is an expert on what went wrong
Not only that, but they done forgot pro-corporate, “PrO-gEnOCiDe” Biden WON the previous election, running the same kind of campaign.
In 2016, Hillary received 65,853,514 votes, and Trump received 62,984,828
Harris received 68,103,050 votes. Trump received 72,757285.
It’s almost like a lot of Republicans worked hard and encouraged each other to cast their votes for Trump.
Meanwhile, all I saw on the Dem side was smug aholes trying to create voter apathy every chance they got. Either that, or there are a lot of Dem voters that will just. NOT. vote for a woman for president.
Behold this type of person, head in the sand, who will always blame the electorate.
This is just pattenly untrue.Unless you litterally live I. a corporate news echo chamber, the writing for this has been on the wall, and being discussed as such, litterally everywhere.
However, it was also being downvoted at a preposterously high ratio. So while it was present, Lemmy (and reddit too and pretty much all social media) was dutifully ignoring and abusing those saying that Kamala wasn’t winning.
Not only that, but there were bans, and significant bias in moderation behavior to support the building of that echo chamber.
So no. Only if you live in a self construct d bubble was this not obvious since the convention.
Yeah, its funny comparing online to real world discussions.
Most people I talked to seemed to never like Harris but all agreed Trump was worse. This tracks, makes sense, and the ones that did not think Trump was worse would vote for him.
Compare that to here where you had every negative thing said about Harris come with some heavy baggage (like .ml accounts) or out right dog piling.
I talked about it and got straight up bullied. I shut up about 45 days before the election because it was just harmful at that point. But you can not bully people into voting for you. You can not tell them the economy is great when they’re in pain. You can not transparently be the puppet of a foreign government. You can not tell your base to get excited about people they’ve hated for literal decades.
The list just goes on. You can not win an election by enforcing a top down attitude. The Republicans worked ground up. Yes they did a lot of lying and gaslighting. But that brought people in and they worked from that during the actual campaign period. The Democrats did nothing to educate people and then told them they were wrong during the campaign.
You can not tell them the economy is great when they’re in pain.
This is a big thing in most western nations right now. The “economy” does not mean a healthy middle class, it does not mean higher wages for people, it does not mean affordable heating/food/shelter. I can see people struggling to make ends meet, and nothing pisses them off more then being told the “economy” is great. Basically the wealth inequality at this point has mostly removed the middle class and people being told the economic equivalent of “Git Gud”
And when those people complained that they’re literally unable to make a decent living despite working hard, they were told “you don’t get to complain, you’re a white male so you live life on easy mode”.
Yeah, everyone who spoke up was told to shut up. Already white middle class liberal Americans are scrambling to blame anyone but themselves and the democratic party. Liberals are not a challenge to fascism.
Going online to gripe about DNC strategy to other online leftists accomplishes nothing but generating more apathetic non-voters. Organizing in effective ways can actually accomplish something: mass letters directly to the DNC, banding together into massive documented coalitions, mass petitions.
If the Uncommitted movement had tens of millions of registered voters come together and pledge to vote Harris if and only if she took a harder stance on Israel, that might have helped.
When you’re speaking up to the wrong audience, and thereby doing more harm than good, yes you should shut up. Toward that audience, or at least with that message. The Democratic party is a lot of unsavory things, but they aren’t totally stupid. They have a great number of analysts developing strategy based on the information they have. If you want them to change, they need actionable information that supports that change.
Complaining in already largely leftist anonymous online spaces is not actionable information.
If the Uncommitted movement had tens of millions of registered voters come together and pledge to vote Harris if and only if she took a harder stance on Israel, that might have helped.
… are you familiar with what the Uncommitted National Movement was asking for? Like, half of Lemmy is bashing the Uncommitteds for the 15m vote difference between Biden in 2020 and Harris in 2024.
Like, do you get that Listen to Michigan alone got 101k Uncommitted votes in the Michigan Dem Primary to Biden’s 618k? That they had a stated goal of “an immediate and permanent ceasefire”? That there were Uncommitted delegates to the Democratic National Convention that were denied the opportunity to speak at the convention? That the there were protests outside the DNC demanding the Uncommitted movement be allowed to speak?
Which part of this is failing at being the movement you’re saying the DNC would listen to? If the 15m gap is truly completely at the feet of the Uncommitted, then what are you saying was the reason that the DNC cut them out of their strategy?
The right won. They had more votes because many who voted democrat in 2020 voted red. How does going further left change that outcome?
If voters wanted politicians that are further left then wouldn’t they have voted for the politician that is furthest left?
I think most people just voted republican because they experienced inflation under Biden and dont understand why.
It’s not soorts teams. Going further left means reaching rural people and poor people. A lot of the working class just isn’t aware of what left and right mean. If the left let’s republican dictate who is taking those ppl’s side this is how it’s auways gonna end. Posh elitism has failed yet again
There was an election between an independent union leader and a career politician in Nebraska and the career politician won by a landslide. How do you explain that?
One example does not a rule make, and in the US electoral system money (and the party affiliations that bring it) speaks loudest of all. Maybe going further left wouldn’t work, but going further right certainly hasn’t. When Harris first emerged as the candidate she had such a swell of support, as she moved further right she lost it.
This is factually false. Trump received no more vote really than he did the last 2 times. Dem voters simply stayed home.
He hasnt been able to win outside of Vermont. Even when he lost the primaries he it was because he didn’t have enough votes.
Well he did until the DNC scuttled his momentum with spoilers like Clinton and biden
They had more votes because many who voted democrat in 2020 voted red.
Source?
That quote isn’t saying what you’re saying.
Trump kept pretty much all of his republocan support from 2020. That quote is saying 94% of Republicans voted for him, the same overall share of republican votes in 2020.
That doesn’t mean what you think it does. The fact that Harris received fewer votes from independents is because they stayed home (as evidenced by the lower turnout), not because they moved to Trump en masse.
Your conclusion also makes very little sense when you consider that Harris already conceded so much to Republicans compared to 2020, i.e. on migration, campaigning with Cheney and even proposing to appoint Republicans in the cabinet.
