When will be your “this is the last fucking time I’m voting for the ‘lesser of two evils’, then I don’t care after that, let this country burn to the ground”? For me, this is basically it. This is last election I’m going for that " lesser of two evils" bullshit. After that I’m done. It’s just pointless. Let’s hear it.
Uh, never? As an American I can easily recognize that we live in a 2-party political system in which you have 3 real options:
- Vote for the Democrats
- Vote for the Republicans
- Don’t vote / Waste your vote
American politics is a game of tug-of-war. You can spend as much time as you want lamenting that the rope isn’t exactly where you want it to be right now. But the fact is that one party is pulling the rope to the left and the other party is pulling it to the right. If you want the rope to move right you better join the people on the right, and if you want the rope to move to the left you better join the people on the left. And more to the point, if for whatever reason you don’t want to pull (maybe because it seems futile or maybe because you just don’t like the people on your team) then where can you expect it to move other than away from where you want it to be?
There is no politician on Earth who perfectly represents my politics, ideals or philosophy. If I wanted someone who perfectly represented exactly what I want I would get politically active and run for office myself. In lieu of that, what else can I hope for but to vote for the people who happen to be pulling in my direction, or at the very least pulling back against the mob of right-wing fascist criminals.
I don’t think Biden is perfect, but he’s certainly not evil. What’s more, I know exactly what we’re up against when it comes to Trump and the Republicans (who at best are spineless impotent political cowards, and at worst are fascist activists who want to strip people of rights, further rob the working class, deny climate change in the name of profit, destroy what little democracy we have, and weaponize the government against political enemies).
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again for all takers, name any politician who you think would be making more progress on important issues (healthcare, climate, education, transportation, lgbtq rights, women’s rights, the economy, etc.) than Biden right now and I’ll give you at least 3 reasons why they wouldn’t. (Hint: the House, the Senate, the courts, state legislatures, inflation, unstable geopolitics, post-pandemic economic change, etc.) Bernie or Warren could be sitting in the Oval Office today, and we still wouldn’t have universal healthcare (because of Congress), we still wouldn’t have been able to wipe out student debt (because of the courts), we still would have to deal with wars and terrorism overseas (because of aggression from countries like Russia and Iran), and we still would be feeling the effects of inflation (because of decades of low interest rates coupled with pandemic supply chain fuckery).
So yeah, I’m not gonna stop voting for the better candidate of the two, because what the fuck else would any reasonable person do? Pull the rope towards where you want it to go. It’s not hard.
BTW: If you regret that we live within a political reality where we have limited choices and the risks of wasting your vote are high, then you should join the movement to implement more democratic voting systems like Ranked-Choice (aka Instant Runoff) or STAR, as well as reforms to political dark money.
Even still, many of these changes are more likely to happen at a state/local level before anything can happen federally. But that’s just one more good reason to be interested and involved in regional politics also.
I don’t think Biden is perfect, but he’s certainly not evil.
Your man is a genocider. He’s automatically a no-go; try again, settler.
I think you’re confusing Biden for Hamas or Netanyahu, both of which have advocated for genocide of the other.
Biden’s stance on Israel has been no different than Bernie’s. And that’s probably because the situation in the Levant is more nuanced than you understand.
And that’s probably because the situation in the Levant is more nuanced than you understand.
How I know you’re a settler unfit for dialogue on this topic. It’s not ‘nuanced’; it’s been a genocide since 1948-- and the only people with an investment in portraying it any other way are colonizers. Biden has sent the colonizers material aid, has sent them money and care packages, hasn’t disavowed them, and has made no real inroads to a ceasefire. He is complicit. So are you for trying to cape for it.
What if one person pulls to the right and the other actively gives out more and more rope, telling bystanders he’s trying to “work with the other side to find a common middle ground”?
If you don’t pull you’re actively giving up more rope than anyone. That’s exactly the point.
Voting a third party is not throwing your vote away. It’s actually often the best way to make your vote matter.
Third parties in the US tend to run on smaller platforms pushing their key issues. Typically, these issues attract voters on one side of the spectrum more than the others: in other words, some third parties attract liberal voters while others attract conservative voters. This means that they compete with one of the major parties more strongly than the other for votes.
Votes for a major party typically do not have a huge effect on the presidential race unless you’re in a swing state. For example, the last time my state voted Republican was 35 years ago, and since then a Democrat has one by more than 10 percentage points. A million Biden voters could have switched their votes to a third party last election and he would have still won my state.
But a million votes for a third party would have been noticed by the Democrats, especially if similar numbers were posted across the US. The Democrats would have had to figure out why they were losing votes, and amend their platform in the future to win those lost voters back.
For example, major work reforms in the early 20th Century (including ending child labor, the 8 hour workday, and the 40 hour workweek) and the focus on the federal budget in the last 30 years have both been due to third parties pushing their pet issues into prominence and forcing the major parties into taking stances on them. A vote for a third party is a warning sign to the major parties that they need to amend their platforms in the future to avoid losing more votes, and that pushes change way faster than blindly voting a single party’s status quo.
Voting a third party is not throwing your vote away. It’s actually often the best way to make your vote matter.
I strongly disagree with this.
Elections are simply a case of math. If you abstain from voting, write in some random name, or otherwise vote for a candidate who is statistically incapable of winning, then there are only still only two outcomes for your vote:
- In the best case scenario, like you’re describing, your vote has no effect on the outcome and your 2nd place candidate happens to win anyway.
- In the worst case scenario, however, vote splitting leads to the well-documented phenomenon known as the spoiler effect. In which case the 3rd most popular candidate, who may not represent anything close to the will of the democratic plurality, will win.
Personally I always plan around the worst case scenario when making important decisions, and so I don’t believe in the concept of the “protest vote”. Especially since so little concrete information can be derived from “reading the tea leaves” of 3rd party votes. (A big part of your premise revolves around the idea that someone out there will somehow get whatever message you’re trying to send by voting for a 3rd party candidate. And that’s obviously a very indirect and abstract form of protest even in the best case scenario. )
Also I think it’s a strech to attribute easily 20th century work reforms to 3rd parties as they exist today considering two points: (1) there was a radical shift in political power, generally towards progressivism, at that time and (2) it can be argued that many of these reforms could be attributed more to labor unions in general than any one political party.
Vote how you want, or not at all, but we can’t escape math in the end. Statistically speaking, a protest vote is at best a benign waste of a vote and at worst the cause of undemocratic election outcomes via the spoiler effect. So I’ll continue to recommend against it, and recommend for more democratic voting systems that are less prone to manipulation and spoilage.
The simple math is that a +/- 500,000 votes for Joe Biden in 2020, who got 81,283,501 total, would have barely noticeable. However, +/- 500,000 votes for Jo Jorgenson, who got 1,865,535, or Howie Hawkins, who got 407,068, would have been much more noteworthy.
Your vote simply has a bigger impact when you’re voting for a smaller candidate.
And yes, third parties do pressure major parties to alter their platforms, and this is well documented. The clearest example is Ross Perot getting 19% of the vote in 1992 and pushing his pet issue (the federal budget) into every election since then, still persisting today over 30 years later.
I really feel sorry for people in the USA.
The worst thing that happened to your country since WW2 was fighting and winning the cold war. The outright rejection of anything even slightly left of centre as communism!!! has destroyed your democracy.
Add in non compulsory voting and I have no idea how you change it.
Being real, it wasn’t the cold war that fucked us. Jim Crow fucked us. Hundreds of years of slavery and racism ruined us. Everything post cold war you’re thinking of goes back to the divide that wants to keep black people down. The side that wants that also wants to keep the gays and women in their place too, but they want the blacks back in their fucking cotton fields first.
When the racists had a setback during the civil rights era, they hid. Everyone else thought they would die off and that was that. But then the southern strategy was enacted, and the fuckers started undoing things slow enough that it didn’t look as bad as it was. Between the racists hiding, and the oligarchs buying anyone they could off, we got to where we are now. In danger of civil war, and with no will on one side to fight it.
This is exactly what fucked us. You breathe next to some idiots and you’re a “communist”. What’s sad is that they don’t even know how to fucking define “communism” or whatever they call you. You ask for fair wages for workers? You’re a communist/socialist. You ask for free/affordable healthcare college? Fuck you you fucking communist. And so on. They just throw it around.
when the greater evil doesn’t want me dead just for existing and isn’t trying to destroy democracy
Never. Just vote. Be a grain of sand on the scales that keeps things from going to absolute shit. It costs you almost nothing, just a tiny amount of time.
I vote third party every time. I don’t care if they’re more likely to lose, the whole point of a democracy is that we vote honestly and that every voice actually serves as a voice which goes against the herd mentality. So I’ve never voted for the “lesser of two evils”, I’ve been voting for actual good people every time because they friggin’ earned it, not the people who have leveraged into victory based on the fact they have victory in the first place.
This would be perfectly fine with ranked choice voting.
Unfortunately, the US doesn’t have that so that’s the same as an empty vote. You get to take the “moral high ground” while still actively voting to let the country go to the dumps. Great job.
How is it voting to let the country go to the dumps when in the same logic it’s supposedly throwing said vote away? It’s neither; I didn’t vote for the country to go to the dumps, I voted for the third party candidate, in contrast to people who voted for one of the two main candidates based on peer pressure and more literally voted for the country to go to the dumps. That, I argue, is wasting your vote, because at that point it’s not even your own vote. The point of voting is that all votes are holons of the result, not drops in a nebulous mass.
Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.
… your vote has power… inaction allows, or using your vote in a way that will never change an outcome is complicity
, the whole point of a democracy is that we vote honestly
LOL, who told you that?
The dictionary. Democracy is, by definition, where every voice can be itself.
okay but that’s just screaming into the void… they gain nothing from your vote, you gain nothing from your vote… it doesn’t matter how worthy they are, it’s exactly the same in literally every way as not voting
They gain a vote from my vote (a vote like any other, and it’s not like one of the leading parties doesn’t someday naturally lose as well), and I gain the license to say I acted like a person in this democracy, not the kind of person who “just follows orders” just because the outcome of those who do is the most likely to succeed. I could always “not vote” but I might as well try. To try and fail is better to never try. And I will always vote based on my own genuine thoughts and nobody else’s, naturally this means not voting for the two candidates who are the embodiment of taking things for granted. Plus it’s not like nobody is tuning in.
okay but a vote doesn’t actually benefit anyone, and neither does being able to say you “acted like a person”
a vote is worthless on its own. a vote is only worthwhile when it has a chance of producing an outcome, and a vote for 3rd party has no chance of producing any outcome
you get to take some moral high ground, which is great that you can do that and risk very little… meanwhile, people’s lives are actually at risk
its a shit situation: nobody is denying that at all (well i’m sure some people are, but i sure ain’t!)… but realistically, the only way to make any difference is (as someone further up thread put it) to tug the tug of war rope on the direction you prefer, while working to change the game
I gain the license to say I acted like a person in this democracy,
In other words, you get to indulge your vanity.
