a vote for stein is a vote for trump, both of which are a vote for poo-tin
But I didn’t want Clinton to win. My picks were: 1. Lessig, 2. Sanders, 3. Stein, 4. Johnson (Gary), 5. blank. Knowing only what I knew in 2016, I disliked Trump and Clinton equally, and would never have voted for either one.
(And yes, I did know that Sanders had endorsed Clinton.)
I would hope that you learned something from your error, but this comment shows clearly you haven’t. I learned it when I voted for John Anderson and in my tiny way contributed to Reagan winning: in America, you vote to keep the worst fascist out of power, and if it means voting for someone who isn’t perfect but has the numbers to do it, that’s who you vote for. The primary may be your opportunity to show support for other parties, and you can go to rallies and spread the good word to influence the discussion, but until the day your third party candidate has enough potential votes to actually win it, you help hold the wall.
Shit, I wouldn’t even discount trying to vote 3rd party when it comes to local elections or state elections. You have to chip away at the power the big parties have at the peripheries first, before trying to do big stuff like voting 3rd party in the big presidential election where they are basically guaranteed to not win.
Yeah but saying that you vote third party during local elections doesn’t rile people up. Many of these third party voters only come out of the woodwork during presidential elections just because they want to be contrarians.
John Anderson shoutout!
Man, Lemmy is awesome.
in my tiny way contributed to Reagan winning
Reagan won in a landslide
We wouldn’t have a 6-3 conservative supreme court with Clinton, along with a rash of conservative lower courts. Not only have we had extreme fallout from this already. But it will be affecting us for decades.
A bunch of our red states likely wouldn’t have swung to extremism, like my home state which went from Asa Hutchinson to Sarah Huckabee-Sanders. I don’t know if my kids will legally be allowed to learn that slavery existed in school.
Also, the 2000 Presidential election results in Florida:
the electoral votes column juxtaposed with the other columns is just documenting what should be a crime.
My brother is voting for Jill Stein to “send a message to the Democrats” that they can’t automatically rely on liberal votes. He voted for Nader in 2000 to “send a message to the Democrats” that they can’t automatically rely on liberal votes. When I mention the 24-year gap here his response is “what’s your point?”
Oh my god what a tight race. I wonder what the closest vote in US history was.
Since all ‘electoral votes’ go to the winner in the US, why do they even bother mentioning it? Its seems entirely vestigial
I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 and will never make that mistake again.
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See how that says “99.8% reporting”? If you look at the NYT, it shows the results after counting 100% of the votes, and it matches what’s in the picture.
Fair enough, you are correct. Still bullshit to think that all of those voter would automatically go to clinton, but I will delete the bad information.
I might risk voting 3rd party if this election wasn’t a choice between boring corporatists and 100% concentrated evil.
The stakes are just too damn high to risk letting Trump get back into the White House again.
Honesty is refreshing. I’m voting for Harris because I don’t want to see Trump’s orange face every week. Yes, I know what she is. Yes, I know what that makes me. I’ve made my peace with it. No, I don’t blame others who feel differently.
I’ve always critiqued the democrats but I’m so tired of trump. I will vote for a thousand boring democrats if it means removing these entitled, lying MAGA idiots from anything resembling power. They all belong in lunatic asylums, not in government.
This is the way.
The elections will always be between “boring corporatist and 100% concentrated evil”. Every election feels like it’s the most important one. You just gotta suck it up and vote third party regardless.
Except this time there is a literal fascist running. The third party argument doesn’t work when we’ve got a candidate quoting Hitler and promising that this will be the last election you’ll have to vote in.
There’s always a literal fascist running, that’s what the GOP is there for. Lately, there’s two.
No, there isn’t always a literal fascist running and to say that there is severely and dangerously downplays the threat that Donald Trump poses to both the US and the rest of the world. It’s also a disgusting way to devalue the victims of fascism. A fascist is not simply someone you disagree with; they are not just an asshole, or a bad leader, or someone who leads their country into a war for their own gain. Fascists will erode your way of life, they will take whatever they want, they will take away your rights and spit in your face while doing so (assuming they don’t simply have you arrested), they will kill you as soon as it either benefits them or if they just want to for the hell of it.
Use whatever perceived intellect and moral high ground you can trick yourself into believing you have to vote 3rd party, but just know that you are aiding in Trump’s re-election. And all because you’re too much of a dipshit to know the difference between an asshole and a fascist. Fuck you.
Lmao. Don’t lecture me on what Donald Trump is gonna do to the rest of the world when it’s been both parties robbing us in the global south. Many of Trump’s most atrocious policies have just been happily accepted as the new normal by democrats. That’s their function, one does the dirty work, the other pretends it has to stay this way now.
Any metric that doesn’t include Joe Biden – the guy directly responsible for the mass incarceration of PoC via the 90s crime bill, a segregation advocate, a guy who has increased the number of children in cages in migrant camps, who keeps shipping weapons to a state in the middle of a completely broadcasted genocide – as a fascist, is a worthless, arbitrary metric.
You’re telling me Bush, who greatly enhanced the ability of the NSA to spy on every single citizen in America, who had a torture camp in Guantanamo where they knew they were torturing innocent people, who had black sites in abu ghraib, who gave finance capital carte blanche to rob people with predatory mortgages and securities built on air, that guy isn’t a fascist?
All this tells me is that the US has a far greater tolerance for fascism than anywhere else in the world as long as you don’t use the word, and provided the fascists aren’t targeting them specifically.
That doesn’t have to be the case. I’ve never felt that we had pure evil to battle until Trump was a candidate. Historically there’s been mostly two sets of policies and I prefer one or the other
Ranked choice voting eliminates the concept of spoiler candidates/parties.
The duopoly of power won’t add ranked choice voting
People said this about weed. We literally had two states add it in like the last 10 years. Once a few more states pass RCV via initiative we’ll start seeing legislatures take it up on their own.
People said this about weed
Weed is not the good argument you think it is lmao. The fact it took decades to legalize and people are still imprisoned over it is a huge L, not a W
Well the point is that lack of 2 party support doesn’t mean it won’t happen, it just means its a slower, longer push.
Edit: I would also say there’s likely less built-in opposition for RCV - even hard conservative states like idaho are fighting ballot initiatives to expand RCV this year. 2 states are voting on it. Only 9 states have banned RCV (vs federal bans for MJ)
I voted for Harris yesterday, and I’ll be voting for Harris again tomorrow. Just kidding. Turns out the dead person whose identity I stole wasn’t registered to vote. 😞
You make jokes, but tomorrow this comment will be on FOX as proof them libs are cheating…
Well, they read it in a forum where anybody can write anything, so it must be true. They are truly the best at fair and balanced ripoartign.
Support ranked choice voting
If this were true then American politics really are terrible. Minority should hold seats. America needs to revisit representation.
It’s actually not entirely true, it only counts stein as the only 3rd party (the libertarian candidate in PA got 3x as many votes as her, I’d bet those 3rd party votes wouldn’t have gone to Clinton) AND doesn’t report factual numbers.
It’s just not true.
That said unfortunately voting for a 3rd party candidate is largely useless in the USA and the forces trying to get their opponents voters to vote 3rd party are probably more overwhelming then the forces actually compelling folks to vote 3rd party.
FPTP needs to die in the USA.
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I don’t understand why people make such a big deal out of these voters. Maybe I’m just consuming the wrong media, but it feels like third-party voters get 50x the blame nonvoters get for ruining elections with probably something like a thousandth of the population. I basically never see this discussion call out both third-party voters and nonvoters equally.
I keep seeing third-party voters maligned for thinking a candidate has hope to win a national election, I see so many arguments to address why third-party candidates can’t win. In spite of that, I have never come across any community anywhere where people collectively believe these candidates actually have a chance. People who consume crazy media can believe crazy things, that’s why MAGA is a thing, but there’s a whole Fox News etc media machine feeding those people. Is there a forum somewhere with more than ten people where there’s a consensus that a third-party candidate might actually win? None of the third party voters I have known or met irl believed this, and I would be shocked if they’re all weird exceptions.
Like, please, where are these people congregating to spread the ludicrous idea that a third-party candidate can win a national election? Looking on the recent green party posts on their subreddits, the only thing I see even close is a thread with a headline about “candidates are electable if people vote for them”, where the furthest they go in the comments is a few people talking about how big a deal it would be for the party if they got 5% nationally, and a couple other people replying to say the greens won’t even get 1% this year but the election is still very important because of some nonsense about incremental gains.
It feels like we’ve imagined a brainwashing machine that does not exist in reality, rather than admit to the existence of protest votes. Condemning protest votes means condemning protest nonvotes equally, and we’ll never have sufficient information about protest nonvoters to reasonably make a claim about how they would have voted. That would severely muddy any attempts to assign blame for election results.
If you’re trying to convince these voters to act differently, the way to do that would be to address the arguments they’re actually making, like the incremental gains nonsense. If you’re addressing arguments they haven’t been making at all, then it’s worth asking whether you’re trying to convince someone other than them.
Most elections I’m all for third party candidates in the hope that we’ll get one that can make a difference. We have had third parties on the national ballot and we’ve certainly had third parties influence the national debate even without getting a seat.
However the last few elections are different - Trump is so destructive to our democratic institutions, our national identity, any hope of caring for our own people or others. I still don’t see how he is a viable candidate or how any sane person will vote for him. But he is there and it’s a valid point that a third party can be a spoiler. In this case we have a party/candidate who is to the left of the Democrats, pulling enough votes to be a spoiler: your vote to be farther left could very well lead us into a nationalist tyranny, and assuming history repeats abuses of constitutional authority over the law, abuses of multiple scapegoated groups, historical levels of corruption, increased global warming, global chaos. None of us can afford this and while we appreciate your attempt to pull to the left, it could send us over the deep end to the far right
We have seen exactly zero indications that the republicans might start nominating better candidates anytime soon. The next candidate will probably be “Trump, but less incompetent at implementing his agenda”. It makes sense to want to stall as long as possible, but needing a democrat victory every single election from here out is not going to be a winning strategy longterm. If Trump winning is guaranteed global chaos, then there aren’t votes we can cast that will do anything other than slightly delay that.
Non-voters are idiots but ultimately they will not vote. You can’t lead a donkey to water
People who vote third party actively get up in the morning to piss away their votes. It’s like leading a donkey to water and they decide to eat sand instead.
Non-voters are idiots but ultimately they will not vote. You can’t lead a donkey to water
I don’t understand what you’re trying to suggest here. Taking it at face value doesn’t make any sense at all - in spite of massively outnumbering third-party voters, the potential impact of non-voters should be dismissed because they are all somehow incapable of being convinced that voting is worth their time? Casting a ballot is a difficult mental hurdle to clear, so it’s reasonable to write off anyone who has not yet shown that they’re capable of doing so as a hopeless case?
If the argument is that third party voters are throwing their votes away, why should we consider a protest vote to be different in any meaningful way from a protest non-vote?
A broken system gives you broken candidates.
G.R.E.E.N.
GET
REPUBLICANS
ELECTED
EVERY
NOVEMBER
Most people that vote third party wouldn’t vote otherwise. Assuming that every vote for Jill Stein would’ve gone to Hillary is quite the assumption. I always vote third party, so assuming my current vote for Jill Stein would’ve gone towards Harris instead is just dumb and wrong.
Sure when people think third party they usually mean “No, more fascist”
Is this the democracy Trump is threatening? One where you’re berated for not doing the duty of voting for a candidate you hate and next time they’ll get an even worse one? Where voting for the candidate you actually want is treated as sabotage?
The GOP gives their base the candidate they want, if the democrats don’t, thats their own goddamn problem and those who vote blue no matter who should think about the responsibility they bear in making their own party the fascist lite option.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed this about Stein voters, but they’re very unlikely to switch their vote from Stein to Harris. If anything, there would suddenly be an unexplainable surge in write-in votes for Putin.
You fundamentally misunderstand the people you speak authoritatively about. Please remember that voters and supportive posters on the internet are not the same thing. I agree that Green Party voters (actual human citizens, not bots and trolls online) are woefully misguided but they are not trumpets by any stretch. Have you talked to any of them in person?
Ok champ. 👍
Idiots exist or the grifters wouldn’t target them.
Dont let online bullies influence your vote. Each citizen gets one vote, cast it for whom you wish to support. Learn about the issues, the policies being proposed, and cast your vote for whomever you support.
REEEEEEEEE how dare you vote any other way than what I PERSONALLY WANT? Have you thought about asking me first??
*as long as you support one of the major 2 parties
The GOP and the democrats are two arms of the same corporate party. Fuck them.
Can we get a nsfw tag? That twat’s neckgina is making me sick.
Eugh thanks 😬
