Good thing the party learn d their lesson and stopped running uncharismatic elderly moderates with terrible approval ratings…
Right?
The only people who dont vote for the least bad option are the people who have the luxary not to.
Edit: blaming others for not showing up to your uninterested non beneficial vote when no one is a hedgemony least of all voters. And refusing to try different tactics cause what if effort has to be applied and it feels pointless or you lose despite trying.
What a nice excuse for losing.
If your want people to vote for you give them someone they can stomach. Clinton is a piece of shit and Biden is a zionist with dementia.
If somebody prefers the same genocide under Trump over Biden, there is nothing anybody can to say to them that will change their mind.
If somebody prefers a genocide against trans people in America, and the imprisonment and forced labor of poor people in America, over Biden, that is between them and their God.
But please, keep pretending you are fighting for Palestine when you aren’t even fighting for your own home.
We gotta get us some Approval Voting so people can vote for their true favorite without worrying if it’ll accidentally give them a worse election result.
I agree, until that happens though, all of us are required to choose the least bad option.
Is this ever gonna happen, though? I see it like guaranteed under every single social media post that complains about how we don’t have a functional system and while I agree that fptp as a system is bad and horrible, it almost feels like a red herring at this point because it has such a low chance of ever being changed as each party in power, and any party that theoretically ever able to take power, would not stand to benefit from alternative voting. It’s like prison reform or free healthcare or making weed legal or any number of other things that has high levels of voter approval but conveniently never happen because it’s not in the best interest of the party, except this one is possibly more niche and easier to spread misinformation about.
Like I dunno, what’s the M.O. on getting this done? Get it approved in a couple local elections and then just hope it bubbles up from there? I know in oregon there’s supposed to be some referendum on it, but I kind of doubt it’s going to pass even though I’m gonna vote for it. I seriously don’t see it happening, at least on a federal level, without some extremely serious reform that basically completely reworks how the government currently functions.
They didn’t, they TRIED to run Hillary in 2008. Obama was the party outsider who won by a tiny margin.
I’m proud I didn’t vote Blue in 2016 and 2020. I’m not from the USA so it would be a voter fraud if I did.
That being said, dems are completely incompetent when it comes to elections, deliberately picking such terrible candidates like Hillary and Biden. I don’t believe there are actual people that voted Blue because of seeded candidate and not despite it.
Not to excuse the Democratic Party, but I would argue that it’s inevitable that they choose shit candidates for the presidency when we consider how much indoctrination Americans get over their capitalism/corporatism and how they justify and normalize the shit America did and the status quo, while omitting a lot of the important progressive historical events or (in the case of figures like MLK and Gandhi, or context behind Iran/Latin America/Israel&Palestine) don’t tell the full story. Like most Americans aren’t going to learn that the US denied millions of Jews, Roma, and other groups being displaced entry into the country right before the holocaust, leading to the deaths of millions. You also won’t learn that the US installed multiple fascist dictators, monarchs, etc. in countries after overthrowing democratic governments to serve corporate intrests or over their fear of leftist leaders. At best you might briefly touch on the wars with Iraq in government class or something.
Then you’re basically indoctrinated by history classes and society that anything left of American corporatism is communism. To the point that modern conservatives genuinely think FDR policies are extreme socialist/communist policies.
With our current voting system, an actually social democratic president would not get elected. FDR, Truman, Johnson, and Carter were the closest we could get in that regard, but those days are long gone.
That being said, I do think a lot of people genuinely voted for Hillary because of her and not solely because of Trump. Especially women and LGBTQ who wanted like… more gender equality. I think more accurately would be that there are very few white guys who voted for Hillary for any reason other than Trump being worse.
I agree with most of your points except with one about socialists being unelectable - I believe that Bernie would have moped the floor with Trump in 2016, and even more so in 2020. First woman president had a nice ring to it, but Hillary performed terribly, and with her being basicially an aristocrat of the establishment, lots of people hated her from the get go. They shanked Bernie so their corporate overlord donors wouldn’t get pissy, and voters treated that as betrayal. After very solid 8 years of Obama it get like Dems had this victory in their pocket regardless of what they do, and they commited to proving that hunch wrong. That’s at least the vibes I got from watching the elections from Europe, I did hear that Obama wasn’t as popular as he seemed to be.
Republicans haven’t won a popular vote in over 30 years or so. We all know its bullshit, democrats just have a vested interest in keeping up the illusion.
This is a fatal flaw of forgetting that your vote affects state politics which, arguably, is more impactful on your day to day matters than federal issues.
Also if you push your state more to the left, the greater odds of the NPVIC being triggered which automatically enables a national popular vote.
Republicans haven’t won a popular vote in over 30 years or so.
George W. Bush won the popular vote in 2004.
The rest of the world has it figured out that when the USA talks about democracy, it’s fucking lying. Americans still have yet to figure that out.
Hillary was and remains terrible. They should have given me someone who wasn’t repellant. I voted Dem in every election up until that one and then I stayed home. I will not apologize for them fucking up.
How many of those registered Democrats were in a state that was +10% for either of the candidates?
Local and state races are also important and you should vote in them even if your state is a lock, but if you know for a fact your vote for president won’t matter why cast it? To give the Democrats an even greater sense of smugness at winning the popular vote despite losing the election?
https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/results/president
The difference in the 2020 election was about 7 million votes. Even with the electoral college, another 40 million votes not impacting the 2024 election would be statistically improbable. Biden would win in an unprecedented landslide.
We know what states have been swing states before. We don’t know which states will be swing states in 2024 with 100% accuracy. If enough people didn’t vote, any state would become a swing state. If everyone who has said “your vote for president won’t matter” or equivalent voted we would see radically different results in US elections.
If all those votes were in already blue states it wouldn’t have changed anything.
But I’m making the mistake of assuming voters are acting rationally and understand the rules of the game, which they don’t. They’re not going to, like I did, not vote for the presidential candidate because I keep an eye on the polls and know that it’s going 2:1 to someone but continue to vote down ballot. They’re just not voting because reasons.
We’d all be well-served to stop thinking of voters as rational people.
If all those votes were in already blue states it wouldn’t have changed anything.
That’s ridiculously unlikely. Also, what’s a blue state now may be a swing state on election day.
They’re not going to, like I did, not vote for the presidential candidate because I keep an eye on the polls and know that it’s going 2:1 to someone but continue to vote down ballot.
Polls gauge approval, which is only an approximation for who people are going to vote for. The polls aren’t supposed to be a guide for who to vote for. Vote for democracy and against fascism.
We’d all be well-served to stop thinking of voters as rational people.
It’s better to think of people as self-interested. Being self-interested does not imply a person will necessarily act or even know how to act in their own self-interest. If life was a game of perfect of information the vast majority of people would make decisions that were actually in their own self-interest. As opposed to real life where global temperatures and fascism are on the rise. It’s not for a lack of rationality that people are sleep walking into fascism. It’s a lack of knowledge and critical thinking skills. edit: typo
I mean ignoring the fact that you already mentioned about local and state races being immensely important, unbelievably important, there is something to be said of the notion of a president’s winning an election despite an overwhelming majority voting against him. That’s not nothing. If only for the moral message to the people of what a corrupt system we have. But also the Practical effects of it. The pressure that puts on politicians the pressure that puts on the parties the pressure that puts on legislation, the pressure that puts on future campaigning and financing, it all matters. In politics everything is connected.
If only for the moral message to the people of what a corrupt system we have.
I would think that would make people even less likely to vote, since they think it doesn’t do anything.
The pressure that puts on politicians the pressure that puts on the parties the pressure that puts on legislation, the pressure that puts on future campaigning and financing, it all matters.
I don’t believe this. Both Bush II and Trump acted like they had some kind of massive mandate despite losing the popular vote. Maybe if the shoe was on the other foot and it was Democrats winning without getting the most votes they’d be introspective enough to change tactics, but Republicans don’t give a fuck.
