The animating concept behind the Trump campaign will be chaos. This is what history shows us fascists do when given the chance to participate in democratic political campaigns: They create chaos. They do it because chaos works to their advantage. They revel in it, because they can see how profoundly chaos unnerves democratic-republicans—everyone, that is, whether liberal or conservative, who believes in the basic idea of a representative government that is built around neutral rules. Fascism exists to pulverize neutral rules.
So they campaign with explicit intention to instill a sense of chaos. And then comes the topper: They have the audacity to insist that the only solution to the chaos—that they themselves have either grossly exaggerated or in some cases created!—is to vote for them: “You see, there is nothing but chaos afoot, and only we can restore order!”
Whatever. I’m voting D no matter what, for every election, because republicans are disgusting traitor filth.
I don’t consider myself a Democrat, but in this two-horse race, I vote Democrat because, as my father was fond of saying and said as far back as at least the Reagan era, “the worst Democrat is better than the best Republican.” Sad but true. I’d rather have a senate of Bob Menendezes and lose Susan Collins in the mix. Menendez is a corrupt bastard, but at least he votes as if he gives a shit about other people. Collins tries to sound reasonable and fair and then votes in lockstep with the rest of the Republicans most of the time anyway.
Lol yeah I remember when I used to consider positions, evaluate the candidates, check historical records etc. GOP has made this very easy the last few years because “fuck women, gays, immigrants and the disabled. Science is fake, Jan 6 is fake, covid is fake, trump is a saint and the rich need more help”.
Wow what a winning platform. ☑️ D
GOP has made this very easy
I’m a Houstonian. I’ll vote straight ticket, but I can already tell you how the election will shake out.
Texas will go bright red. Houston will go bright blue. My vote at the state and national level won’t matter, because its winner-take-all. And many of my neighbors will be subject to harassment, disenfranchisement, and voter caging because they’ve got African American / Pacific surnames, which flag them as easy targets for reducing D turnout. That’s before you even get into how reliable a Jane Nelson / Ken Paxton administered election is expected to be, given how frequently we’ve had rules for mail-in ballots, voter id, and county-wide voting challenged by the current state administration.
The GOP has made the decision to vote against them easy. They have made the process to vote against them increasingly difficult.
Science is fake, Jan 6 is fake, covid is fake, trump is a saint and the rich need more help.
The same folks who say this shit are the ones expected to tally the results of the election faithfully.
As the saying goes, “Its not the votes that count but who counts the votes”. Our dogged reliance on the machinery of elections in a state with a decades long history of shady election practices is naive af.
Too many people can’t bear conscience for voting for someone actively abetting a genocide. A lot are boting 3rd party this year, so the vote’s split
Cool. Vote third party. We’ll get Trump (or one of the other authoritarian dominionist clowns in the car), who will end up pushing for a nuclear attack on Gaza while dismantling every institution we have here, meager as they are, but people still need them. Then in 2028, don’t vote at all because you will probably lose your right to do so. At least you voted with your heart<3 though, so have a nice cup of tea and give yourself a hug.
We do not have a system in place where your idealistic protest can do anything other than make things worse. Fix the goddamn system, put people in power on a local level who have a chance, and work up from there. Fuck outta here with any Jill Stein horseshit.
Cool. Vote third party. We’ll get Trump
If not voting Biden is a vote for Trump, wouldn’t not voting Trump be a vote for Biden by the same logic? The logic only works if you assume all third party voters would be voting Democrat which isn’t the case.
Cool. Vote third party. We’ll get Trump
Isn’t Trump’s victory predicated on an electoral college victory?
How does voting third party impact whether or not your state’s electors vote for Donald Trump?
We do not have a system in place where your idealistic protest can do anything other than make things worse.
Sure we do. Look at the very origins of the Republican Party. Abraham Lincoln emerged as the frontrunner against a Whig Party that was in full collapse. It was only possible thanks to Freemont’s break from the Whigs in 1856, galvenizing abolitionists into a full formal partisan block.
Or consider the Farmer-Laborer party of North Dakota, which controlled the state for several decades before merging with the Democrats under Roosevelt.
Or consider the rise of Libertarian, Socialist, and Fascist candidates within the major parties. Primary insurgency candidates will routinely build a base of non-partisan support before joining the major parties as outsiders. Sanders ran as an Indie from Vermont for 14 years, before stepping up to run for President in 2016. Donald Trump himself was a Reform Party candidate in 2000 and was a staunch Democratic mega-donor/bundler in New York well, before defecting the GOP in 2012. Senators like Mike Lee and Rand Paul built their brands outside the party system before winning primaries in their respective branches.
The split in the Dem Party in '68 gave rise to Nixon and Reagan’s Southern Strategy, which secured the Presidency for the GOP (with the exception of the narrow Carter win in '76) for the next 24 years. Great news for Dixiecrats who cared more about maintaining racial supremacy than New Deal economics and who found a way to profit handsomely from Reagan-Era giveaways to large land owners and shareholders.
Third Party campaigns have a long and proud history in the US of paving the way for more successful general election runs in subsequent election cycles. They don’t always pay off year-of, but they can have a seismic effect on politics going on decades afterwards.
Part of the problem with the Biden Administration (and Obama before him) is that it seems content to allow guys like Abbott and DeSantis to Do As Thou Wilt in their respective states. Biden could win reelection in '24 and we’d still see a genocide of border people, entirely because his administration is unwilling to pick a fight with a powerful governor in a state flush with heavily armed state border guards.
Here is why you should never vote third party in a FPTP voting system. If you are not happy with your candidate choices, then we need to increase voter turnout in local elections, mid terms, and most importantly, primary elections. Primary elections are where you actually can change the spirit of the political parties, but hardly anyone votes in primaries despite them being arguably the most important.
Here is why you should never vote third party in a FPTP voting system.
This only holds when the respective parties are roughly evenly tied with one another and the two major parties have the marginally more-popular candidates.
In a state where one party or the other is an overwhelming favorite to win, this math doesn’t matter. In a state where both parties have put up a shit candidate (say, you’re in Arizona or West Virginia and being asked to support Kristen Sinema or Joe Manchin yet again), a third party vote is the only way to clear the deck of deplorable alternatives. If you’re in Nebraska and the popular frontrunner is the indie union activist Dan Osbourn you would be foolish to vote party line as that’s effectively a vote for Deb Fischer.
I think the problem is that third parties are thinking too big. You can’t just rival the Democrats or Republicans on a national level overnight.
Let’s say hypothetically, one state becomes disillusioned with the mainstream parties and a third secessionist party starts making headway in mayoral and state elections, soon winning over the people.
If it’s a big state like Texas, that’s well over a hundred electoral college votes lost for the Republicans.
It’s funny. It’s already election year and you can’t even name a 3rd Party candidate with any sort of shot. But yes, some perfect candidate will declare in late September, right?
The Green Party was an absurd joke even decades before Stein the Russian useful idiot came along…
I hate it, but there is just no viable third party choice for progressives in this country.
Are the Democrats EVER prepared though?
“I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.” - Will Rogers, 1879-1935
“Democrats never agree on anything, that’s why they’re Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they’d be Republicans.” - Will Rogers, 1879-1935
1879-1935
TIL you guys have been stuck with the same two political parties since the 1850s. No wonder they’ve gone a bit corrupt.
To be fair, the parties themselves have changed significantly since then.
To be fair, no two-party system is a healthy democracy, and the way our elections are designed it’ll stay that way.
That’s what happens with a first past the post voting system. A ranked choice would open things up quite a bit, but that would require the people elected by the first past the post voting system to change it or mass revolution.
Someone call the French and let them know we actually do need them again.
Americans are perfectly capable of manufacturing guillotines domestically.
It must be a proportional system. No other system produces viable 3rd parties.
It’s almost like individual people have different opinions and want different things.
The Democrats are actually way more internally organized now. About 30 years ago during the 90s both parties reached almost unanimous internal ideological consensus’ and essentially all vote as a single blocks. The state we’re in now with this polarization is part of this, and an example of the increased factionalization of US politics.
It’s crazy to think how there were staunch segregationist Democrats in to the 70s even as the party as a whole had been (successfully) catering to younger urban demographics that came alongside industrialization. We can’t really imagine something like that occurring now. Even Biden was opposed to bussing and a lot of his “across the aisle” examples even today involve working with segregationist Democrats, not “across the aisle” as we interpret it now.
I actually like that about the Democrat Party. Shows how ideologically diverse it is because tolerance is a bedrock of the party ever since the two parties switched from being conservative and liberal. The GOP flipped within four years from being neocons to isolationists, and anyone who disagrees with the current identity is a RINO
This has been the Republican Party’s M.O. for decades.
“Government is corrupt and ineffective, elect us and we’ll prove it to you!”
I really wish Biden would step down. I’d love a better option from the Dems. That said, no way in hell am I voting for Trump.
There is no saving America, there’s only buying time. Democrats can’t do what’s needed to prevent fascism because actually doing something about the Republican party would risk creating actual democracy. Prepare to fight fascism now because at best you’re buying yourself another 4 years. Vote, don’t vote, vote for a third party out of protest, whatever you do organize with other people and prepare for the worst.
In the best case, I’m wrong and you’ve made new friends. But if you don’t organize now it will be too late to organize in the worst case.
