Really you don’t need to read more than one chart:
If you vote for anyone other than Harris, you’re voting for Trump:
certain lemmy users around these parts absolutely frothing at the mouth seeing this graph
A similar article will be posted every time Monk posts one supporting a 3rd party spoiler from now on.
so you’re gonna have to find like 20 articles a day… also don’t forget to copy paste a 6 paragraph defense of “I swear I’m not Russian I just post the articles” in the comments of every post
Genuine question: why has he not been banned? To me he seems to repeatedly violate the rule about arguing in good faith, and - to be honest - his passive aggressive civility feels at times more hostile than straight up attacks.
We’ve talked about it amongst ourselves with the mods and admins and have concluded that having a shitty opinion is not infringing.
They do post legitimate sources with legitimate opinions. They’re BAD opinions, but you aren’t going to get banned for having a bad opinion.
Spoiler implies we would vote for a Democrat if there were no 3rd party options. We would not. There’s a larger chance you would vote for a republican than us voting Democrat
For you, personally, that may be true. Statistically speaking, in general, it’s very much the opposite:
https://www.thirdway.org/memo/the-data-how-third-parties-could-be-spoilers-that-elect-trump
“Similarly, Third Way’s polling has found that Biden’s voters are 13 percentage points more likely to consider voting for a third party than Trump’s voters. While Biden has a higher ceiling, with his possible vote totals well north of 50%, Trump has a stronger floor: his voters are more loyal, so third parties are less likely to draw them away.”
If you lean left, and you fail to vote for the Democratic candidate, you only help the Republican candidate.
Oh God I didn’t even realize how badly proportioned the pie charts were. They didn’t even generate new ones they just copy pasted an image and changed the percentage number. Aghhhhhhhh I hate this I hate this I hate this
I’m frothing at the mouth because it’s distorted, making an easy comparison by visuals impossible. The numbers don’t match the size of the pies
Someone fucked these up badly and there’s no way to tell from this how.
Are the numbers swapped between candidates but the sizes correct? Are the sizes swapped between candidates and the numbers correct?
As an aside, this is why serious data people don’t use pie charts. They’re terrible for lots of reasons, one being it’s very hard to compare areas instead of lengths, like a bar chart, as demonstrated by how many people didn’t notice these were so bad at first.
If you see data presented in a pie chart you should immediately be suspicious that it’s dishonest or incompetent.
None of that is to take away that voting for third parties this election is a terrible move - just saying this chart is useless.
Not really. The point has always been that the dems need pressure to change their genocidal policies. If you vote blue unconditionally then it won’t take long until the next blue candidate will be on the same level as trump. Show these graphs to the democratic party and tell them to listen to 3rd party voters.
The argument is always that “A vote for Not X is a vote for Y”, forgetting how many third party voters would simply skip the ballot line or refuse to vote at all if these options weren’t available.
Calling Jill Stein and Chase Oliver “fascist enablers” for appearing on the ballot misses the entire reason they have a vote base at all.
Eh…we call em as we see em.
When I was younger I liked stein…now that I’ve seen her just show up for the last 3 or 4 elections and not much else…the pieces all came together.
The entire reason they have a vote base at all is not dissimilar to Trump: civic illiteracy. Unfortunately she appeals greatly to these newcomers to politics or those who care not about watching the other side literally take a sledgehammer to the country but rather point to the other side for not fixing the damage quickly enough. There was a brief moment in time when I was a new voter and at a very shallow level liked the Green Party platform and Stein…
… But it didn’t take long for me to realize that was utterly self-defeatist. And if Stein actually cared about the issues she pretends to care about, then she would simply run for Congress as AOC or Sanders have done and influence change in the Democratic party. Changing the party from the inside is far easier than going against the mathematically-impossible 3rd-party vote that ultimately results in a proven Spoiler Vote. So you’re right… Some naive folks do support Stein; and those naive folks absolutely have more in common with the Democratic coalition than the Republican ones. So why would they ever want to support Republicans via Spoiler vote?
Anyways, we should all be advocating for Campaign Finance & Election Reform so we can truly vote for who we most ideally want without risk to supporting the person or party furthest from our views.
Anyways, we should all be advocating for Campaign Finance & Election Reform
You’re not going to get that with an incumbent party. How do you abolish FPTP inside an organization that won’t give DC it’s statehood?
If you were sincerely never going to vote for either I honestly don’t care. Throw your ballot in the garbage physically or technically, I do not give a shit.
But MAGA propagandists are also on here campaigning for Donald every day by trying to turn voters against the only reasonable viable candidate.
If your primary strategy for winning elections is diverting people into third parties, your election prospects are bleak.
A big part of Trump’s problem is that he’s glued to his base. He can’t say anything appealing to a general audience without pissing off the anti-government haters at his flank.
I don’t see anyone on this site trying to argue for Trump. They’re all closeted in other communities, where any criticism of the GOP is forbidden.
When your strategy clearly cannot lead to your stated goal given the circumstances, you are either not smart enough to recognize that, or you are lying about your goal.
That doesn’t change even if someone agrees with your stated goal. Ignoring the circumstances doesn’t make them go away.
If people can tolerate Trump being on the Epstein flight logs and Harris taking enormous sums from the Crypto-Bros, I don’t think Stein’s dinner with the Russians is going to phase them.
But I guess you can always default to the Libertarians. Can’t think of anything problematic about a bunch of Americans that idolize Milei.
If Americans want a third choice support ranked choice voting
There are two states where ranked choice exists apparently. Are these the states that the third parties are spending money in? They’d be the most likely places for them to win and show they are viable in any way.
I don’t know the second state, Portland has it for the first time at the local level and that’s turning into a clown car, I cannot WAIT to see how it works out in practice!
So far:
118 candidates running for 14 offices:
https://www.opb.org/article/2024/09/06/118-candidates-portland-election/?outputType=amp
One losing union support over mass traffic violations:
Multiple being investigated by the Secretary of State for trading donations to meet matching funds thresholds:
Or STAR voting. Or anything but FPTP.
Im glad you posted this, but no both-sides smoothbrain will be convinced by it, since they are either lost on the plot, a bad faith actor, or unable to engage in real world politics.
Still saving it, just to have one more post to bash them over the head with.
It’s not about convincing a both-sidser.
It’s about convincing someone who reads an article posted by a both-sidser and goes “Hmmm… maybe they’re on to something…”
They aren’t, they really, really aren’t.
Another good one here:
"Don’t Fall for the Third-Party Trick
A progressive who stays home on Election Day — or backs Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West, or No Labels — is voting for Donald Trump."
"Progressives should not make the same mistake that Ernst Thälmann made in 1932. The leader of the German Communist Party, Thälmann saw mainstream liberals as his enemies, and so the center and left never joined forces against the Nazis. Thälmann famously said that “some Nazi trees must not be allowed to overshadow a forest” of social democrats, whom he sneeringly called “social fascists.”
After Adolf Hitler gained power in 1933, Thälmann was arrested. He was shot on Hitler’s orders in Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944."
I thought Kennedy dropped out to support Trump? Maybe I’m wrong I’m not American, but thought I heard that.
But yeah I agree. It’s just splitting the vote, the same thing happens in the UK. For a long time until this most recent election we only had the Conservatives on the right, whereas on the left you had Labour, Lib Dem’s and Greens, yet the Conservatives kept getting back in because the left wing vote was split, they wouldn’t work together to step down in certain seats to let the party most likely to be beat the Conservatives stand.
Thank god, in a weird way, for Reform UK, massively splitting the right wing vote this time around. Allowing Labour to win. If Labour don’t change the voting system to proportional representation now that they’ve finally got the chance after a 15 year wait, then they are truly mugs. They won’t though I’m sure. They are hopefully supposed to be letting 16 year olds vote which should help.
But yeah, that Hitler story gave me the shivers lol. Apparently we aren’t allowed to call Trump a fascist because it pisses off Republican voters and caused that assassination attempt (even though I swear the guy was a republican voter??)
But like; he is literally a fascist. For me personally, if someone said, “we can stop Trump from ever being elected, but the price is you have to cancel the election and just say that George Bush won and let him have another term”. I’d take that deal. I genuinely think Trump is so dangerous, it shouldn’t be a republican vs democrats thing, it should be an Americans for Democracy thing.
Article is from before Kennedy dropped out, but he’s still on the ballot in key states so it still applies.
I have given up talking to these people. I really can’t with Rule 3 because I do not believe they deserve any form of civility, and since I can’t call them out directly, I’ll ignore them while destroying their points.
The targets of my takedowns of the ‘Imma Vote Jill Stein!111one!1one!!’'s articles are the undecided and wavering voters who REALLY aren’t sold on Harris/Walz, but really don’t like Donald Trump. That’s where the ‘a vote for anyone but Harris/Walz just makes it easier for Donald Trump to steal the election’ line comes in. The ‘lost the plot/bad faith actor/naive poster’ people can’t be convinced, but we don’t have to, fortunately.
I know of a couple of Lemmy users who frequently hype third party candidates, and who will not like this analysis at all, lol.
We discount this analysis because it’s self serving. Third Way as other orgs that diminish 3rd party candidates do so in an attempt to protect their own positions of power. Voters continuing to elect neo fascists from the duopoly vote against their own interests to do the bidding of the neo fascists
And your hopeless manifestation approach to breaking the two-party duopoly isn’t entirely self-serving?
It won’t accomplish anything. You will never win any election against the two-party behemoths without Democratic reform.
But you folks don’t ever advocate for that, just unqualified spoiler candidates, and never in local elections where independents have more of a chance.
Even if your heart is in the right place, you’re a liability to progress because you care more about Democrats being imperfect than you do about Republicans being fascist.
You say spoiler as if we would ever vote for your candidates. Anyway. There could be no third party candidates on the ballot and we would not vote for your appointed candidates
I see both of them as being fascist, the Democrat ratchet effect enables right-wing fascism to take hold.
The underlying fallacy, IMO, is that people think the purpose of elections is to send a message to the government, instead of choosing the government (and that all political problems can be solved by sending the right message).
The best way to approach an election is to determine the most likely scenario in which your vote would actually decide the outcome (which in practice means a choice between the two frontrunners in a FPTP system), and then consider what difference that would make in terms of actual policy (rather than symbolism).
And recognize that this alone won’t fix all the problems with government—that will require other types of involvement beyond voting.
Unfortunately, too many radicals on both sides have over-inflated senses of their own self importance. “We’re sending a message!” Yeah, no, no you aren’t. You’re actively doing nothing in order to make yourself feel good. That’s it.
On the nose. The ones screaming the loudest about Democrats supporting genocide. Or saying something stupid like blue Maga, trying to deflect from the fact that they themselves are the most maga like of any on the left. Culturally slave to Virtue signaling no matter how much it hurts them. Get an instant down vote.
If we’re going to send them a message. We should be running against them at the local level across the nation. Or better yet, coopting the party and make our candidate theirs. 3rd party presidential candidates are an exercise in pyrrhic self flagellation.
With the exception of Donald Trump, every single US President previously served as a Senator, or Governor, or a Major General, or Secretary of State, or Director of the CIA, or something. Some kind of higher office to prove their fitness in a political administrative role.
If we want a progressive president, we need progressive members of Congress and State Governors. Not only so we have an experienced candidates to put forward, but by having a significant representation people will just psychologically consider a progressive candidate to actually be viable.
And if we want progressive Governors and Congresspeople, we need progressive mayors and County Commissioners and Attorneys General to pull from. And if we want those, we need progressive City Council members and School Board members and all the other local elected offices.
These third party candidates with no real political experience shooting straight for President are so counterproductive, it’s difficult to imagine they’re anything but bad faith, intentional spoilers.
