Schumer already did a kind of shy endorsement of Mamdani, after that the others politicians don’t have much room to stab the party in the back. The problem here are the donors; oligarchs are pissed.
My current bet would be that Cuomo will leave his name in the ballot out of spite but not really campaign, and lots of right wing Democrats will stay silent, while the oligarchs will try to resurrect Adams’ political career by throwing money at it (may all their donations burn into a pile of useless ash)
I say Democrats should be reformed in the primary, voted for in the election. The time to support Mamdani as a Democrat is now. (Billionaires like Ackman, Bloomberg aren’t real Republicans or Democrats anyway, they just have a lot of money and they want to back a horse that will let them keep it). The time to bring about a change in Democratic candidates ahead of the midterms (if they happen) and next general is now. In 2~4 years, it will then be time to vote in whoever’s been put forward as the best chance to stop fascism.
The same as before, that you made your choice to hand the White House to trump rather than a Democrat you didn’t agree with. It’s the same story down the ticket too. The Democrats may have run a lousy campaign, with poor candidates, but we all knew what the alternative was, and some ostensably left wing voters chose not to oppose that.
The same story down the ticket is that Democrats feel entitled to progressives votes and conitnously adjust to be just slightly better than Republicans.
As you saw they rather handed the country to Trump than stop a genocide and aclnowledge the cost of living crisis.
You have no power to reward people that feel entitled to your vote. You only have the power to punish them.
You didn’t “punish” them in the slightest, they’re not the ones who will suffer, you punished everyone else instead by deliberately acting to boost the republicans.
To be clear, this is not a good, or even acceptable situation, but it is the reality. Each voter had the choice to accept that reality and work within it to seek out the least bad result or vote as if their fantasy was true, and aid the republucans.
The time for trying to change the Democrat positions is every other day, not on the day of a massively consequential election.
Let’s be real. Roe would not have fallen without Trump. And the erosion of the 3 branch system would not have gotten this far. With DEMs.
But that’s what they do. While eroding the working class through continued subsidies to the rich. It’s why the middle class is dead. Yea, Reagan started that death but the Dems just took their payments and quietly kept things moving, between every Repub term, bringing us to the present state of the billionaire class, lack of middle class, and a country where 60% of the population lives paycheck to paycheck.
This one would say all the things Harris would have done wrong are still better than all the things Trump is doing wrong. I’m not and have not been a fan of Harris. She’s still not Trump.
If you are going to make a principled vote in the name of sending a message, I think it’s only reasonable to be honest about the effects of that decision.
Oh my god I feel this so much.
Did you take a stand and stick to principles? Yes! Congratulations. But if you cannot accept that in doing so, you effectively voted for whatever you felt the majority of votes would go to.
I am related to several people who voted 3rd party, are adamant they did nothing to assist Trump getting elected, but ALSO hold the opinion that congressional members who vote “present” instead of yes or no are cowards hiding behind a “no vote” because they want the majority to win but they don’t want to be on record for it.
The problem is that by reinforcing the narrative you reinforce the two party system. Noone believes in a third party so a third party cannot gain critical momentum because of people saying not to believe in a third party.
Repeating this mantra at every point makes it dogmatic to ensure the Democrats not faving any accountability for being a far right party with some gay rights sprinkled in between (but only if these arent inconvenient to uphold).
We have the same issue in proportional systems with a minimum votr to enter parliament. The threshold is lower but the game is the same. The old parties will always band together to fight any new party that could emerge and require them to deal with people they havent brought in line of the donor class yet.
That only works when running for president. Running third party in every other election is what we should be doing. Bernie Sanders is a independent. He preached on that but nobody fucking listens. Instead they think we can fix the Democratic Party (we can’t) Like police reform can’t be done.
You have to build something NEW from the ground up. Why every local election we should be running candidates with a new party. One that actually stands for the people. Once we take over all the states. Then and only then do we run for president.
Because our elections system is fundamentally broken in such a way that creating or promoting something other than the existing two makes the side you like least more likely to win. As such, unless you can get literally the entire base of one of the major parties to switch to you in the span of a single election cycle, “asking for something more than the lesser of two evils” has mostly the same practical consequences as “asking for the greater evil”.
This largely breaks the premise of democracy, of course, because the two main parties don’t have to follow “the will of the people”, they just have to look slightly better in the eyes of their base than the other party. The way to fix it would be to greatly reform our election system, but that’s difficult to do (admittedly not entirely for bad reasons, it probably would not be ideal for authoritarians to make changes to that for example), and made worse by the fact that both parties benefit from the current system vs one where even more competition can exist.
That latter point means that what it would really take, is first usurping control of one of the existing parties from those that currently run it, and then getting those newcomers into enough power at a national level to get election reform done. That’s not a terribly likely path to work out, I’m afraid, but it’s probably all we’ve got short of an actual violent revolution (which have a high risk of failing or getting co-opted by authoritarians, and in any event are a lot harder to start than some people on the internet seem to think they are). This is probably why the establishment democrats hate this guy so much, despite him only running for mayor (of a large city admittedly, but still, not exactly president or anything). Popular candidates from outside their established group are exactly the kind of thing that you would need to start this process, and if successful that group would lose much of their power.
There are 3 years and 11 months many of us spend fighting for that. Then there’s one month where keeping the literal modern nazis out of power requires some unsavory choices.
Insert long, tired diatribe about FPTP voting and the US two party system here.
TL;DR: Third party votes were effectively a vote for Trump. And while I actually did not truly shame anyone for their vote (I hope) this was always true, and I do think folks shouldn’t pretend it wasn’t true. If you are going to make a principled vote in the name of sending a message, I think it’s only reasonable to be honest about the effects of that decision.
Logically, third party votes were only “effectively a vote for Trump” if you assume that otherwise all of them would be votes for the Democrat Party AND that the Democrats could not possibly win without those people sacrificing their vote to a party that doesn’t represent them (i.e. that it would be impossible for the Democrats to appeal to those voters the way politicians are supposed to, by supporting policies that those voters wanted).
As an outsider, it’s painfully obvious that the Democrat Party establishment strategy was to try and get those votes without trying to appeal to those voters using the exactly Propaganda you’re still now parroting, and it failed miserably.
They tried to cheat at representative politics (by wanting the votes without offering representation) and failed (worse, failed when their adversary was a loudmouth buffoon), but you’re blaming those who wouldn’t vote for those who did not at all want to represent them.
Interestingly, Zohran is starting to show that the strategy of appealing to such voters is a winning strategy (in other words that the Democrat Party establishment did not won because of their refusal to represent in any way left of center voters), a proof which will become undeniable if the NY Mayoral race ends up as a three horse race with him, Cuomo and a Republican and he wins.
I wonder what all the people who shamed 3rd party voters will say if establishment Democrats start throwing their support behind an independent Cuomo.
We will say what we have always said: vote for the DNC candidate. Zohran Mamdani.
Schumer already did a kind of shy endorsement of Mamdani, after that the others politicians don’t have much room to stab the party in the back. The problem here are the donors; oligarchs are pissed.
My current bet would be that Cuomo will leave his name in the ballot out of spite but not really campaign, and lots of right wing Democrats will stay silent, while the oligarchs will try to resurrect Adams’ political career by throwing money at it (may all their donations burn into a pile of useless ash)
I say Democrats should be reformed in the primary, voted for in the election. The time to support Mamdani as a Democrat is now. (Billionaires like Ackman, Bloomberg aren’t real Republicans or Democrats anyway, they just have a lot of money and they want to back a horse that will let them keep it). The time to bring about a change in Democratic candidates ahead of the midterms (if they happen) and next general is now. In 2~4 years, it will then be time to vote in whoever’s been put forward as the best chance to stop fascism.
The same as before, that you made your choice to hand the White House to trump rather than a Democrat you didn’t agree with. It’s the same story down the ticket too. The Democrats may have run a lousy campaign, with poor candidates, but we all knew what the alternative was, and some ostensably left wing voters chose not to oppose that.
The same story down the ticket is that Democrats feel entitled to progressives votes and conitnously adjust to be just slightly better than Republicans.
As you saw they rather handed the country to Trump than stop a genocide and aclnowledge the cost of living crisis.
You have no power to reward people that feel entitled to your vote. You only have the power to punish them.
You didn’t “punish” them in the slightest, they’re not the ones who will suffer, you punished everyone else instead by deliberately acting to boost the republicans.
To be clear, this is not a good, or even acceptable situation, but it is the reality. Each voter had the choice to accept that reality and work within it to seek out the least bad result or vote as if their fantasy was true, and aid the republucans.
The time for trying to change the Democrat positions is every other day, not on the day of a massively consequential election.
Let’s be real. Roe would not have fallen without Trump. And the erosion of the 3 branch system would not have gotten this far. With DEMs.
But that’s what they do. While eroding the working class through continued subsidies to the rich. It’s why the middle class is dead. Yea, Reagan started that death but the Dems just took their payments and quietly kept things moving, between every Repub term, bringing us to the present state of the billionaire class, lack of middle class, and a country where 60% of the population lives paycheck to paycheck.
They’ll say they’re cool with rape. Isnt that what Cuomo is in trouble for?
This one would say all the things Harris would have done wrong are still better than all the things Trump is doing wrong. I’m not and have not been a fan of Harris. She’s still not Trump.
Oh my god I feel this so much.
Did you take a stand and stick to principles? Yes! Congratulations. But if you cannot accept that in doing so, you effectively voted for whatever you felt the majority of votes would go to.
I am related to several people who voted 3rd party, are adamant they did nothing to assist Trump getting elected, but ALSO hold the opinion that congressional members who vote “present” instead of yes or no are cowards hiding behind a “no vote” because they want the majority to win but they don’t want to be on record for it.
What is a 3rd party vote if not “present”?
The problem is that by reinforcing the narrative you reinforce the two party system. Noone believes in a third party so a third party cannot gain critical momentum because of people saying not to believe in a third party.
Repeating this mantra at every point makes it dogmatic to ensure the Democrats not faving any accountability for being a far right party with some gay rights sprinkled in between (but only if these arent inconvenient to uphold).
We have the same issue in proportional systems with a minimum votr to enter parliament. The threshold is lower but the game is the same. The old parties will always band together to fight any new party that could emerge and require them to deal with people they havent brought in line of the donor class yet.
That only works when running for president. Running third party in every other election is what we should be doing. Bernie Sanders is a independent. He preached on that but nobody fucking listens. Instead they think we can fix the Democratic Party (we can’t) Like police reform can’t be done.
You have to build something NEW from the ground up. Why every local election we should be running candidates with a new party. One that actually stands for the people. Once we take over all the states. Then and only then do we run for president.
I’m not from US, but why not ask for something more than lesser of two evils?
Because our elections system is fundamentally broken in such a way that creating or promoting something other than the existing two makes the side you like least more likely to win. As such, unless you can get literally the entire base of one of the major parties to switch to you in the span of a single election cycle, “asking for something more than the lesser of two evils” has mostly the same practical consequences as “asking for the greater evil”.
This largely breaks the premise of democracy, of course, because the two main parties don’t have to follow “the will of the people”, they just have to look slightly better in the eyes of their base than the other party. The way to fix it would be to greatly reform our election system, but that’s difficult to do (admittedly not entirely for bad reasons, it probably would not be ideal for authoritarians to make changes to that for example), and made worse by the fact that both parties benefit from the current system vs one where even more competition can exist.
That latter point means that what it would really take, is first usurping control of one of the existing parties from those that currently run it, and then getting those newcomers into enough power at a national level to get election reform done. That’s not a terribly likely path to work out, I’m afraid, but it’s probably all we’ve got short of an actual violent revolution (which have a high risk of failing or getting co-opted by authoritarians, and in any event are a lot harder to start than some people on the internet seem to think they are). This is probably why the establishment democrats hate this guy so much, despite him only running for mayor (of a large city admittedly, but still, not exactly president or anything). Popular candidates from outside their established group are exactly the kind of thing that you would need to start this process, and if successful that group would lose much of their power.
There are 3 years and 11 months many of us spend fighting for that. Then there’s one month where keeping the literal modern nazis out of power requires some unsavory choices.
Because that’s what we were given to choose from.
Insert long, tired diatribe about FPTP voting and the US two party system here.
TL;DR: Third party votes were effectively a vote for Trump. And while I actually did not truly shame anyone for their vote (I hope) this was always true, and I do think folks shouldn’t pretend it wasn’t true. If you are going to make a principled vote in the name of sending a message, I think it’s only reasonable to be honest about the effects of that decision.
Logically, third party votes were only “effectively a vote for Trump” if you assume that otherwise all of them would be votes for the Democrat Party AND that the Democrats could not possibly win without those people sacrificing their vote to a party that doesn’t represent them (i.e. that it would be impossible for the Democrats to appeal to those voters the way politicians are supposed to, by supporting policies that those voters wanted).
As an outsider, it’s painfully obvious that the Democrat Party establishment strategy was to try and get those votes without trying to appeal to those voters using the exactly Propaganda you’re still now parroting, and it failed miserably.
They tried to cheat at representative politics (by wanting the votes without offering representation) and failed (worse, failed when their adversary was a loudmouth buffoon), but you’re blaming those who wouldn’t vote for those who did not at all want to represent them.
Interestingly, Zohran is starting to show that the strategy of appealing to such voters is a winning strategy (in other words that the Democrat Party establishment did not won because of their refusal to represent in any way left of center voters), a proof which will become undeniable if the NY Mayoral race ends up as a three horse race with him, Cuomo and a Republican and he wins.
If they aren’t on the ballot nationally, its too late.
Because the system is specifically designed to prevent that from happening.