If the polling is this wacky, why bother publishing it at all?
Over the weekend, ABC and the Washington Post published the results of a poll that made both operations look like its results were the product of a month-long exercise with a Magic 8-Ball. The way you know it was an embarrassment is the Post story about the poll began by telling us all we should probably ignore it completely.
The Post-ABC poll shows Biden trailing Trump by 10 percentage points at this early stage in the election cycle, although the sizable margin of Trump’s lead in this survey is significantly at odds with other public polls that show the general election contest a virtual dead heat. The difference between this poll and others, as well as the unusual makeup of Trump’s and Biden’s coalitions in this survey, suggest it is probably an outlier.
Specifically you need to vote for Biden to avoid a Trump presidency. If you don’t give a shit about who is president, then I don’t know what to tell you. The realistic choice though is Trump or Biden and no one else is going to come close to having enough votes to get the Presidency, they’ll only play spoiler at this point and split the vote one way or the other.
Commenting to emphasize this for the people who weren’t paying attention in 2016. If you vote for an alternative to what would normally be your candidate, it’s pretty much the same as voting for their competitor. That is, if you vote for a third party alternative to Biden, you’re basically voting for Trump (and if you vote for a third party alternative to Trump, assuming he wins the primary, it’s like voting for Biden).
If there are no candidates running who you are happy with, but there is a candidate that you think would be especially destructive, you should vote for that candidates main competitor. Otherwise you’re contributing to the destructive candidate winning.
I voted for Bernie, and I love him, but I would probably vote for a cunt that I hate in hindsight to avoid Trump if I could go back. Not because I think it’s the right thing to do, I just know that so many people won’t do the right thing, that my doing the right thing actually becomes an overall negative. Ranked voting is the ultimate choice and would make this whole fucked up system so much better, but since the pieces of shit we call representation will never make that a reality here, the best option is to go with the lesser of two devils that you know the most idiots are going to gravitate to. Bernie should have won, but I know now that was never even possible and wish it had been Clinton.
Yep, I think you’re 100 percent right. Counting wasn’t my choice in the primary - I wanted someone more progressive and felt she had some other flaws - but I sure as hell voted for her in the general.
It’s theoretically possible for a third party or independent candidate to win, but it’s so colossally unlikely, we’ve never really come that close. From the Wikipedia article:
Only once has one of the two major parties finished third in a presidential election, when not the result of a realignment: in 1912, the Progressive Party, with former president Theodore Roosevelt as their presidential candidate obtained 88 electoral votes and surpassed the Republicans.[1] In fact, Roosevelt ran one of the most successful third-party candidacies in history but was defeated by the Democrat (Woodrow Wilson) and the Progressive party quickly disappeared while the Republicans re-gained their major party status. The last third-party candidate to win states was George Wallace of the American Independent Party in 1968, while the most recent third-party candidate to win more than 5.0% of the vote was Ross Perot, who ran as an independent and as the standard-bearer of the Reform Party in 1992 and 1996, respectively.
It’s really a two party system, so the effort needs to be on getting the right candidate to win the primary. So many people stayed home rather than vote for Clinton that we ended up with Trump.
That sounds like a Biden problem, DNC runs a weak shit candidate that no one wants to run, if he loses they are to blame.
Before I launch into a diatribe, I have a simple question that often works to separate rational arguments from articles of faith: What could someone say, what evidence could they give, to convince you that your assumption of the left as the problem in American electoral outcomes, is incorrect? Is there anything?
I live in NY. We’re unlikely to go red, and if we do, by some awful magic, there are bigger problems than my vote. I’m going to vote my conscience. And if I lived in a swing state, I’d vote for Biden. Though I will say, it’s getting harder to take people seriously when they keep blaming the left for their losses and not actually paying attention to their policy preferences. (I hope you realize Dem partisans have used this argument in every election of my lifetime…I’m 38.)
No party is owed one’s vote. It has to be earned with policies. The Dems couldn’t protect women (and other people with uteruses); I had to get my tubes removed to sleep at night when I visit family in the shittier states. When a mutual-defense pact fails to protect one of its largest and most powerful constituent groups, it naturally starts a slow collapse. Imagine where NATO would be if Russia bombed a German city and NATO “allies” did nothing. I used to make arguments like yours; I was a left-leaning Dem until my mid-20s. But in addition to the Dems’ repeated disappointments (repeatedly bringing policy papers to gunfights), climate change has made clear that there are times where selecting better or worse doesn’t matter, because both are inadequate.
I agree with you in that “we have to vote for Biden to avoid armageddon” is ridiculous. After all, we should aim higher than plainly “avoiding armageddon” because we see the Dems as an escape from the whatever the right see as this week’s Boogeyman. The Dems don’t care for social issues AT ALL, while still giving the rich and big corporations handouts.
What could someone say, what evidence could they give, to convince you that your assumption of the left as the problem in American electoral outcomes, is incorrect?
You could have read their comment before asking a BS leading question about something they never said in the first place. Why would you expect anyone to engage with your bad faith assumptions?
In any first past the post election anything more than 2 candidates means there is a spoiler.
