“My experience is that most of the people who get really upset about the current leadership of our nations tend to be folks who haven’t spent much time either as an activist or as someone working for a candidate. What happens instead is they immerse themselves in on-line news and commentary.”
Actually, write-ins are a thing, so you literally can vote for anyone else than him and Trump.
This rhetoric that a vote for someone who represents you is a waste if they do not have a realistic chance to win, would equally apply to an unequal match-up of Dem vs Rep, but it’s never deployed that way; it’s only used to argue against smaller candidates. You never see people arguing that Democrats should have voted for a Reagan because a vote for Mondale, who had a 0% chance to win (he only won one state- his home state of Minnesota), was “a waste”.
Voting has to be about political representation, otherwise Democracy is just a veneer for selecting a plutocrat or oligarch to be the new figurehead for a while. Half of Trump’s appeal was his (fake) rhetoric that he wasn’t that, which Republican voters actually acknowledged they’d been selecting for years. Too many Democrats have yet to admit this to themselves about our party-preferred candidates. Obama won with record numbers, both terms, because he wasn’t this.
Obama was one of those ‘0% chance’ candidates early in the primaries according to political pundits in 2008, too.
No one has a chance to win until people actually vote for them.
Get involved at the state level to implement ranked choice voting. It is the first and most important political change.
https://fairvote.org/
I prefer Approval Voting, but no voting system by itself will solve the two party system. We need to move to proportional representation. Something like 5 member districts using Sequential Proportional Approval Voting would be ideal.
But really, anything is leagues ahead of single-winner “choose one.”
Yes to everything you just said.
I have one counter example against proportional representation vs districts that worries me. Harvey Milk won his city supervisor post after San Francisco moved from proportional to district. This was because a lot of gay people lived in his neighborhood. I don’t think he would have won in a proportional election. Will similar minorities now be oppressed by the majority if we move to proportional?
It would depend on how you set up your proportional system. There’s a million ways to do it. Under my favorite system, 5-member proportional districts, yes, Harvey would have been elected. The legislator is cut into districts, each district has five members, who are elected using some proportional or semi-proportional method (again, I like harmonic approval). Harvey likely would have won one of the seats in his local district.
I’d have to look up the previous method San Francisco used in order to understand how the council used to work. The proportional method might have been pretty terrible.
The problem is that this specific election is an election that will decide if we become a Hungrian illiberal democracy or continue being able to vote. If you don’t vote for Biden, and yes this is true, Trump will win because anyone slightly in his direction will vote for him. There will be no write in campaign for Romney. You can’t have change in a system that has had Project 2025 fully implemented.
That was also the rationale last time. It’s still going to be the argument next election. And the one after that. It’s not specific to this election at all. After Trump, there’s always going to be a DeSantis or Ramaswamy waiting in the wings, because we’re not doing anything about the root cause, which is Republican voters. Trump didn’t make Republicans racist religious nutjobs, he just showed them that they can choose their candidates over the RNC, and the DNC is terrified we’ll figure that out too.
Republicans being a threat to democracy is the new eternal argument that the DNC will make in order to goad you into only voting for their candidates, because they have the money to ensure that their candidates will always have the biggest campaign warchests, the most name recognition, and the most impressive political resumes, and thus will always be “the best candidates to defeat [insert name](R)”.
On paper, Obama had no chance in hell (and DNC lapdog pundits made a point of saying as much, loudly, when he started his campaign). In reality, he got more votes than any Democrat president before him (and more than Hillary, after him).
Just because something is true for a long time doesn’t make it false. Just because you see a train moving doesn’t mean it’s going to stop if you just stand on the tracks
Did I ever suggest that Republicans aren’t destroying democracy? The problem is that the DNC is intentionally setting themselves up as the only alternative choice, which is also destroying democracy.
Democracy is the ability of the voters to direct the government, and they are intentionally quashing that in favor of their political picks.
“Vote for us, or we let them hurt you (while we work to make sure you can’t vote for anyone else)” isn’t a political pitch in a democracy, it’s racketeering.
If Democrat politicians actually believed that the US was going to turn into a dictatorship under Trump, they would be doing much more than just hyping up Biden, because if Trump became a dictator, they would all be first against the wall.
But they’re literally doing nothing other than telling people to vote for them. Why? Because they don’t actually believe it, they just know that you do, and they’re more than happy to have you come on here and try to browbeat others into giving them another term of paychecks.
That’s why they were more concerned with winning the primary than actually putting up a strong candidate against Trump; actual progressives are a threat to their gravy train, while Republicans just want to ride it with them.
I think you misunderstood the author. You can literally vote for anyone, but the winner of the next US presidential election is only going to be Biden or Trump (barring a crazy twist, e.g. death or criminal conviction). I think the author’s point is that, in any given election, you should probably vote strategically, but getting better options takes a lot of work for a long time to make it happen, so get working if you can.
I understand that’s what the author thinks, but they’re wrong. We literally could collectively elect anyone else.
It’s only going to be Biden or Trump, because everyone is going to think, “well, the winner of the next US presidential election is only going to be Biden or Trump (barring a crazy twist, e.g. death or criminal conviction)”, and vote one of them into power.
Well, right, you’re dealing with statistics. It’s not impossible that Trump will quantum-teleport into the sun, physics allows for that possibility. It’s just incredibly unlikely. And the odds of some other person getting elected with no actual effort to make it happen before now is similarly basically zero. Theoretically possible is all very well, but we live in the real world.
Obviously, which is why my real problem is the DNC, who actively quashes any attempt to run other candidates in primaries against their preordained candidates. They lost us 2016. This time 'round they actively pressured other candidates not to run against Biden. Pray that hasn’t already lost us 2024.
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Who is this ‘we’ you speak of? I live in New York, and most of the people I talk to about politics consider Obama to be a Left candidate. Biden got 10 million more primary votes than Bernie, and he had four years to mobilize people.
This is America, and there are plenty of Union people voting for Trump and the GOP
The “we” I’m speaking of is every eligible voter, Left, Right, and Center. Voters do not actually have to constrain themselves to the names that the ruling class puts on the ballot.
So, you have no candidate who has an actual chance of beating Trump in the upcoming election. No political party, no ideology, no way of getting your message out, nothing but some nebulous ‘pie in the sky.’
You’re pretty much exactly what the article warns us about, an ill informed voter with no idea of how they system is set up.
It’s not an article, it’s some guy’s blog post. And where on earth did you get “no political party, no ideology” from? I’ve been very open about my politics on here. But my personal politics are completely irrelevant to a discussion about the ability of voters to not be led around by the nose by the DNC and RNC.
You’re a perfect ambassador of the DNC’s “shut up and vote for who we tell you to, you’re just idiots if you disagree with us” messaging that worked out so great in 2016! Truly changing hearts and minds.
So name the candidate you’re backing who has a great shot of winning in November.
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There are few people I’d rather have agree with me. ❤️
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