[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.
24,670 notes
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
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.