I just want to join in to remind everyone that multiple things can be true at the same time.
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The DNC/Biden can and should be doing better.
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We only have 2 options for president. It will be one of the two main candidates because that is how the system works. Don’t pretend it doesn’t. You either vote for one of those two or you are ok with either.
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We should be pressuring Biden to do more about both Ukraine and Gaza. Ending both conflicts and getting aid to people.
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Choosing to vote for a 3rd party to protest Biden’s response to Gaza/Israel is only going to help Trump in the short term. Yes, long term Biden and DNC may notice their total votes going down, but in the short term it will put Trump in the Whitehouse and now what? What did you accomplish if the DNC realizes they fucked up, but can’t do anything about it because Trump is now a dictator?
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Politics is a slow moving thing. Too many people expect some perfect ideal candidate or policy and won’t compromise on anything. That isn’t how it works, you have to compromise and slowly pull things the way you want. It doesn’t happen in one election cycle.
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We should have been and should be campaigning and pushing for changes to our system so that we can have better options in the future. We need to push for Ranked Choice Voting (or anything better than FPTP). And voting in local level elections to make small changes across the country. Term limits. Campaign finance reforms. Etc etc. because until we get a new system we effectively can’t just vote for who we want or it doesn’t do anything more than a fart in a hurricane.
I see a lot of people who are saying they will not vote for Biden because the Gaza/Israel issue. Which I completely understand. But the two truths you have to accept in doing so is that you will not be complicit in the genocide. But you will be complicit if Trump wins. Both can be true. You decide which one you would rather see. If you don’t want Trump then the only option is a vote for Biden. And until we reform our voting system we don’t have viable 3rd parties and pretending we do is just delusional. Look at every election for the last hundred years and you will see enough proof. It’s not ideal, but it is reality. **Accept it **so we can change it together.
I would add that there ARE things you can do to help stop the genocide, that are not refusing to vote. I absolutely believe that the demonstrations, protest votes, calls to congresspeople, and so on, are part of what’s behind the changes to the US’s Israel policy recently (sanctions on settlers, pause in the weapons shipments, stuff like that - that’s nowhere near enough and no excuse for Biden’s support for Israel during the “war” and before it, but also, nothing ANYWHERE near that has happened in 75 years of consistently war-criminal support by the US for Israel).
All that stuff makes a difference and can help stop the genocide. Refusing to vote does nothing to stop the genocide and risks putting someone in office who is much much worse (actively wants to kill more Palestinians.)
You will be ok voting for genocide. Gotcha
Not voting lets Trump do the genocide instead.
Voting is literally the least effective form of civil engagement.
But at least voting for Biden you’re maybe not going to see project 2025 come to pass.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=op0yk50uMlQ
This is their plan if they win, it’s in the open, and it’s the end of Democracy in the United States.
Do you want to not vote? If you don’t vote you might not ever vote again.
Even if you aren’t lgbtq it’s highly unlikely that you don’t know someone who isn’t. They will suffer first.
Know any women? They’ll lose control over their bodies, thier periods monitored by the state
You like having sex? Don’t like getter her pregnant though? Hope that you like pilling out because say goodbye to condoms. Actually that’s a sin to spill your seed so you’re going to jail for that too.
Say that you actually want to have a baby? Maybe you waited to do it, but now you’re having trouble? Say goodbye to invitro fertilization. That’s not God’s way. If he wanted you to have a baby he would have made it happen. Clearly something is wrong with you. You’re defective and must be bad.
Oh, you call God by a different name or don’t believe? Sucks, you’re going to need some corrective education. You Heathen!
It’s literally good to be A Handmaid’s Tale.
But stand by your principles. Maybe it won’t happen here.
But what if it does?
When God Emperor Trump jails his enemies. Suspends the constitution. “Leader for life, I like the sound of that.”
We only have 2 options for president.
This kind of thinking is how you end up with only two options.
A third option emerges when enough people say “I am not voting for either of those two”.
You either vote for one of those two or you are ok with either.
Or, it means you’re not okay with either.
We need to push for Ranked Choice Voting (or anything better than FPTP).
Canada has FPTP voting and still manages to have four federal political parties.
Australia has ranked ballots and effectively has a two-party system that hasn’t changed in 80 years (though they do sometimes manage to get some independents elected to parliament)*.
I’m not saying the voting system is irrelevant. But the true obstacle to multi-party democracy is the fact that voters think in a polarized two-party way (that you are currently reinforcing).
* This is a description of Australia’s House of Representives. Their Senate uses proportional representation, and does have more than two parties. And technically Australia has three political parties in the House of Representives, but two of them have been in a permanent coalition since 1946 and are often treated as a single entity, with the result that Australians consider themselves to have a two-party system.
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Heaven forbid we try running charismatic candidates like Obama and Bill…
Like, it’s insane to me that everyone seems to be aware of what wins elections, but the people running the Dem party just keep insisting we need to shut up and vote for someone very few people actually want.
Like, we can’t do this without the voters, they’re the irreplaceable part.
We can get different people to run the party, or just coalesce around another.
Democrats need to fall in love. Republicans just need to fall in line.
It’s like you read the meme and went yep, totally their fault. I’m ok with my life gets shittier until I fall in love with a politician. It’s not my fault. I am owed this.
Is there a term for the political version of an incel?
Yes. It’s called a political agitator.
This user canvases lemmy threads with anti Biden and anti Dem strawman arguments completely out of context of the thread. Every thread calling out Republicans for bullshit, this user is there never acknowledging how terrible the GOP is, and going straight into anti dem whataboutism.
Just look at the sheer number of comments this user posts daily. And search the mod logs for deleted comments on this user.
If they’re not being paid to disenfranchise progressive voters into abstaining from this election, they should look for a sponsor because they’re working for free.
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Your car has a blown head gasket. It still turns over, but the check engine light is always an on the oil looks like peanut-butter.
You need to drive 100 miles to get to the airport tomorrow. All the indications you have suggest your car isn’t going to make it. Every piece of reliable data you have says its not going to work. Historically, people have tried to use cars like this to get to the air port, it doesn’t work. You have friends and family members with cars would happily drive you to the airport. You could even just borrow their car. Technically you haven’t decided what car to drive to the airport yet; this actually doesn’t happen till you and your family have a group call tonight. You have alternatives.
Biden is the car. Literally any generic Democrat is the car of your friends or family. The group call is the convention.
You are insisting on a strategy that is going to hand Trump the election. When it does, we’ll be pointing to these posts of yours.
Insisting we run Biden when we haven’t had a convention and literally every Democratic governor polls higher is you insisting we lose this one.
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You are the one not taking it seriously. I watched Kerry fail to Bush. I watched Clinton fail to Trump.
Biden won in 2020 in spite of being Biden. It’s 4 years later and he’s become a worse candidate. This candidate can’t win.
You need to take this shit seriously instead of insisting on a strategy that guarantees us Trump.
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Like. lets talk about what happened.
it’s reasonable to claim that Gore actually won in 2000. There were sixty one thousand votes that had not been machine-counted because of rampant, clearly partisan, bullshit reasons (among them “hanging chad”,). the Florida Supreme Court ordered a manual count of those ballots with SCOTUS, lead by Scalia, decided to stay because the recount would give Bush a veneer of “illegitimacy”. (gee. wonder why, ya fucking partisan hack.) To be perfectly clear, Gore lost Florida (and the electoral college) by 570 votes. The decision in Bush V. Gore to stay the manual recount basically handed Bush the win. (and, I might add, cast doubt on the legitimacy of bush’s win. it was handed by a court that had no business ordering that stay. But did anyway, because they’re partisan hacks. I’m not angry, honest.)
Kerry flip-flopped more than a fish out of water, making it hard for independents and centrists to know what his positions actually were. 2 years prior to the election he was, for example, staunchly against gay marriage (and lets be honest, the US was very hostile to gay marriage then. There’s been a massive sea change in that, but it hadn’t happened yet.), but in 2004 signed a letter urging Massachusetts to not outlaw gay marriage. Further, he had the personality of a cold fish. and his running mate was an empty suit with nothing to back it up- who couldn’t even deliver his home State of North Carolina… In short, you had a couple warm bodies running. At the time, Bush was still riding high off 9/11 and the Iraq war and americans were still angry at that; the war wasn’t unpopular yet. Katrina hadn’t happened yet, and Bush was still reasonably popular. So, of fucking course Kerry lost.
Hillary. Where do we begin? her emails? lets start there.
Sure, “HeR EmAiLs” and “LoCk HeR uP” is an idiotic rallying cry of MAGA morons everywhere. But, even so, she conducted official Sec of State business on a personal email routinely. It’s such a great rallying cry because it actually has some teeth. it should be scandalous. Even if she was perfectly not-at-all-corrupt, it looks that way. I- and most everyone else- would be legitimately fired for conducting that level of business off a personal email. it should be 100% unacceptable. Not saying she should have been locked up or grilled the way she was. But seriously. It looked bad. and it played in the news.
Then we got Benghazi. an American ambassador died in a terrorist attack. There’s some things that hindsight says they could have done differently. Republicans latched onto it for political theater, with 10 different investigations and multiple sessions of grilling Clinton, who even then was the presumptive nominee to replace Obama. there was some funding that her office denied, she might not even have been aware that “she” denied it. Hindsight’s a bitch. Anyhow… the republican shenanigans played well in the media.
Oh. “Super Criminals”. Hillary was very unpopular with minority voters- particularly Black and Latinos. sound clips calling for law-and-order tough-on-crime calling black people “super criminals” didn’t help. there was a lot there, especially with her attitude, but in the end they simply didn’t show up for her. Even if you look at women voters, she under-performed compared to Obamma. (i mean, he looks mighty fine in a tan suit… sorry, sorry. couldn’t resist.) Like, how unpopular do you have to be as a woman, to lose women voters from Obama’s election, when you’re running against Donald- “grab them by the pussy”, “When you’re that rich they let you do it”, “Octopus-Arms” -Trump.
Lets also talk about how she boosted trump specifically because he was “a clown” or whatever. She gave us trump and then proceededly arrogantly not campaign in key states.
oh, and there’s more that I just don’t have time to get into… but we got Whitewater, Travelgate, filegate; and shit rolls down hill so lets toss in Paula Jones and Monika Lewinsky scandals. Like there’s a lot of smoke there, and there might be a couple fires, or maybe they’re just really not that corrupt as people and it’s all a big missunderstanding. but again, that plays in the media, and it looks bad. Hilary was the definition of The Establishment™️ running against an anti-establismhent candidate. Of fucking course she’s gonna lose, and she really didn’t help matters by fucking around with not campaigning in key swing states because, “naw, it’s fucking trump”.
Yup. so aside from Gore, there’s really rather good reasons to have not liked them, and the DNC idiots thought they new better and ran them anyhow… and we got fucked because of it. blaming voters for your own stupid blunders seems to be a DNC favorite. And they’re doing it again.
What the fuck is this shit? Motherfucker, I lived through these elections, and this is some boomer revisionist bull shit.
Al Gore lost because he couldn’t differentiate himself from god-damned George W Bush. He was too centrist to encourage the left base to show up for him.
Kerry lost because he couldn’t articulate his better vision for America, and was too centrist to encourage the left base to show up for him.
Hillary lost because she didn’t even try to reach out to the left base. She was too centrist to beat Donald Fucking Trump.
Three ostensibly intelligent leaders who lost their elections to fucking morons because they thought that they didn’t need to try very hard to reach out to progressive voters.
Any one of them would have been a better President than what we got, but the fact that they all lost means they did something wrong. It isn’t the fault of the voters demanding better, it’s the fault of the party failing to meet the demand.
I think this election is a little different in that we have a known threat that is significantly worse than the alternative. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Trump is a threat to democracy and to anyone that doesn’t want to live under religious law as interpreted by the Republicans.
The other candidate is harm reduction presidentially personified. That is the best choice we actually have, and the consequences for disincentivizing left leaning or undecided voters is much worse than Bush, and that’s saying something.
Vote against Christ flavored dictatorship, and encourage others to do the same. And not some impossible 3rd party bullshit.
If either third party gets even 5% this election, they qualify for federal funding and could have a greater influence in the future. Third party votes are ESSENTIAL when the establishment wins any other way.
There’s been a flood of these type of memes lately trying to voter shame.
Not saying you shouldn’t do the right thing when the choice is limited, but how about the DNC stops putting its finger on the scale for unpopular establishment candidates?
It’s clear that the ‘safe’ choice can still lose, so why not go for the person the base actually likes instead of another centrist wet napkin who appeals to no one?
The DNC is bought by big money donors just like the RNC is. Those big money donors would rather see a fascist in charge than a socialist.
History repeats itself once again.
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Hilary lost to Obama in 2008 because she would not shut up about how Aktuly Very Correct she was in her endorsement of the invasion of Iraq. She would not shut up about how international trade deals are cool and deindustrialization of the Midwest was an improvement. She kept getting caught in very stupid conferences with two dozen billionaires saying how we’re going to fuck the middle class raw.
And eight years later she decided to run the exact same campaign while secretly funneling money to Trump as a straw candidate she could easily beat in the general.
And then what happened?
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Also worth noting that the majority of white women voted for Donald Trump in 2016.
Even Hilary’s Girlboss base couldn’t say no to another round of GOP tax cuts
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I agree the DNC primary is bullshit, but if you’re bitching about this year, then shut the fuck up. Nobody is going to win a primary against an incumbent President. There aren’t any Democrats who could beat Biden heads up, much less Trump.
If you want to talk about the primaries in 2020 and 2016, then yes I agree.
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I don’t think a primary would have weakened Biden, but I also don’t think a viable candidate could have challenged Biden. Sitting presidents don’t face legitimate primary challengers.
The New Hampshire thing is a stupid DNC machination. They don’t want New Hampshire to be first anymore, and New Hampshire still wants to be first. That’s not Biden rigging the election, that’s just oligarchs playing chicken with human rights.
I’d love to see a barnstorming Biden go fifty states with a message of hope and progress. Biden ain’t that guy, and he wasn’t that guy when he was 20.years younger, he either. But he is the incumbent, and no serious Democrat is going to risk the ire of the party by challenging the person who is ostensibly the party leader. They won’t raise money, they won’t have volunteers, and they won’t get any pork or committee assignments. It’s just bad politics.
I agree with you, I think an actual primary would be good. But I’m no longer naive enough to think it might happen.
Quit putting up shit candidates assholes!
AOC for President with Biden as VP. It would destroy the Republicans… they’d have strokes within a few days. With Biden as VP all the boomers that actually like Biden will be onboard.
Yeah I never understood wanting to vote for the “guy I want to have a beer with” thing.
The guys I have beers with are nice enough and funny at times, but I sure as hell wouldn’t want them running the country.
I want a boring as fuck, never misses any details, workaholic kind or person running the country. Someone I wouldn’t want to have a beer with because all they ever talk about is their job.
Bernie Sanders over here, consistently battling for the working man, despite both parties doing everything in their power to ignore him.
ignore him
Not true, they shifted focus to him for a while so they could do everything in their power to kneecap and malign him when he had a plausible shot at giving them the presidency in 2016, and grabbing them support from a generation of young voters who were for the only time in their lives actually wholly excited to vote for somebody, anybody, who seemed like he might care about them and want to do great things with the awesome power of the American presidency.
He was the most popular politician in America for YEARS after they decided he wasn’t their guy, and is still more popular today than either Biden or Trump.
I want to put a sad emoji here, but I can’t actually find one that is sufficient to convey what I want to express about it
Yeah, it’s totally our fault the Dems have to see how far right they can possibly get away with. And they just “aren’t for us” completely diminishes our issues. This is a problem created by the DNC, it is not created by the voters.
Donald Trump was the DNCs fault for running a centrist, dirty candidate. Not ours for not falling in love with her. Your fucking guilting us into voting for a turd sandwitch is bullshit. Stop sucking.
I have and will vote against Donald Trump, but I am not donating and making calls like I did for Bernie. Biden is a big pile of literally not Donald Trump, that’s all he is.
The fact that you need grassroots help to win an election when you can easily represent a large majority of the voters by just representing the voters is your fault.
You may have been taught in school that democracy is an ideal system. But when you become an adult you learn the truth about it. It’s not actually about getting the perfect person that everyone agrees with in power. Because that’s impossible, people don’t agree on anything.
Democracy is really about preventing the worst people from having power. You will never be voting for someone that you 100% agree with because that’s impossible, no one agrees on everything. But it’s your duty as a citizen to determine who is are the worst people on the ballot and determine which way to vote to either remove those people from power or prevent them from getting it. That’s what democracy really is. Welcome to adulthood.
Democracy isn’t about filtering candidates through one of only two viable parties that are both completely controlled by rich donors.
I miss when Lemmy was a socialist platform. It’s full of “vote blue no matter who” people now
I mean, voting blue no matter who is still in my best interest.
I hate it and it sucks, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
This enables Democrats to do anything they want, like genocide.
We can’t force Biden to stop because he believes you will vote blue no matter who.
It is 100% your fault that the protests and uncommitted vote have limited to no effect.
In a two party first past the post system, not voting (or throwing away your vote on a candidate who will not win) benefits the candidate you least want because it effectively gives half your vote to each side
In the general elections, voting blue no matter who is harm reduction, the time for activism was back in the primaries
Okay? The point I’m making, which you have totally ignored, is that votes are the only leverage that we have. By throwing my vote away the Democrats can’t have it, and if enough people do that they lose. Supposedly they want to win, so they need to convince me to note vote for Aaron Bushnell this November. By deciding to enslave yourself to the Democrats and slavishly give them your support no matter what they have no reason to not get even worse. By next year they’ll have moved even farther to the right and it will be your fault because you refused to use the only leverage you have to move them to the left.
Every election cycle the Democrats just become the Republicans from the last election cycle. Biden is doing genocide, violating international law by limiting asylum seekers, and marching us towards WW3. How much worse will they get if they aren’t stopped?
Don’t forget that he’s also made more progress on building the southern border wall and killing the asylum process than trump did in his 4 years. But he wears a blue tie (Good Guys) and that’s all that really matters.
Also blowing up the Nordstream pipeline and putting sanctions on China’s green transition.
the time for activism was back in the primaries
you are only allowed to do activism once every eight years
There’s primaries for federal elections every 2 years in the US, if you want to change the makeup of the party, vote for different candidates in them
and if enough people do that they lose
and then things get even worse for everyone, including Palestinians
There might not be Palestinians by November.
And not voting for a major party will fix that how?
Even if a significant portion of the population goes third party (and assuming they all agree on the same party), splitting the vote has only ever helped the opposition.
And if Democrats are just Republicans from the last election cycle, which is an absolutely unhinged notion but I’ll humor you anyway, voting for Democrats is still in my best interest since Republicans are even further right
You’ve legitimately lost your mind in a purity test if you can’t see that.
The point that you are making is that you are a fascist little Untermensch.
Fascism is when you don’t vote for genocide. 🇺🇸
Hey russian troll monkeys, get your heads out of your asses for four months!! That’s it!! Then you can jam ‘em right back up there. Promise.
Fucking sick of you GeNoSiDe JoE bullshit fuckheads. God fucking dammit you want trump so goddamned bad. Idiots! And claiming to be left! The stupidest possible take is the one you won’t shut up about. Almost like . . like you know it’s only going to divide people and suppress turnout. Fuck you.
I want the genocide to end and the only way for Biden to win is if he stops doing genocide.
Why doesn’t Biden want to win?
“Boring” “Unlikeable” “Stiff”
“Can sit down and have a beer with him” “Tells it like it is” “I like him ‘cause he’s not a politician”
I wouldn’t be too hard on the electorate, although I 100% agree with the problem description and that counter-educating them out of being duped by these framings is important. But they didn’t come up with the framings. There’s a whole ass science of how to resonate with people emotionally and produce behaviors you want, and professionals have been studying it for over a century now to sell toothpaste and beer and deodorant, and it works. It’s actually one of the primary focuses of hard scientific study in our society, much much more so than addressing climate change. And so, when they turned that whole machine in favor of particular candidates and against other candidates, it’s not surprising that it worked on a whole fuck of a lot of people.
Now let’s start to talk about how “I could NEVER vote for a genocide” and “Here comes the biggest election of our lifetime, just like every other one before that 🙄” fits into that framework…
I mean, idk if it’s really necessary to educate the voters out of being able to recognize demons wearing human skin.
Why not just run good candidates?
What constitutes a “good” candidate? As someone pragmatically anarchist/communist, pretty sure were gonna have very different concepts.
I mean, my ass is out here trying to get .world to vote psl, but for the democrats a good candidate looks like someone who doesn’t wander off when meeting with the g7, can give a coherent interview without literally asking for their handler, doesn’t have a storied history of creating all the problems the American people experience on a daily basis, is capable of holding their own in a debate with trump (not easy!) and just basically isn’t a fucking McKenzie pod person.
They don’t a bench that covers those positions, but that would be good for them.
You’re seriously referencing a cropped video from Fox that removed the skydiver Biden walked over and gave a thumbs up to as wandering off. Stop acting like you give a fuck about the country you are so intentionally trying to undermine with your ignorant bullshit.
No, DNC, you’re not out of touch. It’s the voters who are wrong.
Who’s the DNC? We need names. Also the voters, i guess?
That is really the best way to put my frustrations. IT IS NOT MY FAULT YOU DON’T LIKE ME, ITS YOURS. It is literally a popularity contest and you are worried about losing to a criminal. But sure, we are the crazies, not you. This country has never needed another party so bad.
Democrats should try changing their strategy since it’s obviously not working.
