I love how entitled to peoples votes the democrats are.
Thank you for revealing what you are so I can block you
you dont feel they are?
No, they are showing how Trump, a person who never should be president, became the president. It shows that 3rd party voters can impact the outcome but choose not to. It doesn’t have to be that way, you can make an impact.
They are not arguing in good faith
However, calling a person a (person who has an agenda) from (country that they are from) is against the rules
So just block them
Did I just get profiled for questioning the Democrats?
Block me as well blue conservative.
I don’t take orders from pompous shitbags, good sir.
“Im going to be barely better than the alternative and people will literally worship me for it. Also even though i support killing children, trump would kill more probably. Vote blue!”
Disclaimer because lemmy users are becoming more like redditors everyday:
yes trump sucks. Yes vote kamala if youre in a swing state. No, dont attack every person who points out the massive flaws in your democratic system or the “democrat” party. Because they fucking suck also. Just slightly less.
“And we won’t even support you federally and protect your rights … Vote blue!!”
(Completely agree with your disclaimer)
Voting third party in a first past the post voting system ensures you get the candidate you want the least.
Third party is not a solution to a two party system but it does disproportionately affect democratic votes who want change and don’t blindly vote. That’s why it’s often with Republican interests that these 3rd parties are funded in the first place.
Without third parties Republicans would win more
The opposite is true. It’s not republicans splitting off to vote green lol When Trump won and when bush won, third parties took away significant votes (1-3%) away from democratic candidates.
In 2016:
In Michigan Gary Johnson got 172,136 votes, in Pennsylvania he got 146,715, and in Wisconsin he got 106,674. If all Greens voted Clinton and all Libertarians voted Trump then New Mexico would’ve only been won by Clinton with around 1,000 votes, Colorado would’ve also been nearly Trump. Nevada, New Hampshire, and Minnesota would’ve been won by Trump. Maine might’ve gone majority Trump.
In 2020 if Libertarians went Republican and Greens went Democrat, Trump would’ve won Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and nearly Pennsylvania.
That would’ve tied the election, leading to a Trump presidency.
You’re right about 2000 though.
“if they did that”. Which they didnt, because third parties disproportionately affect democrats.
Understandable. I’m not arguing about the technicalities of third parties in the first past voting system. You are 100% correct.
I just don’t like the entitlement. I also don’t like the green party cause I only hear about and of them once every 4 years for the elections. I’m simply stating how annoying and frustrating it is to see Democrats court more centrists and trad republicans than to their core base who they take for granted in a “who else you gonna vote for removed” kinda attitude.
Long term, its a solution to neither candidate supporting your values. It shows that you wont blindly support whoever is barely less bad. If your vote counts at all (which it pretty much doesbt) then you cant tell people not to vote for whoever is closest to their values. You should be telling the candidate to listen to their voters.
Long term plans that will fail if you let the system break before those plans have a chance come to light. You’re trying to fine tune a system that’s in danger of falling apart. We need to make sure the system doesn’t fall apart before we can worry about tweaking it.
Candidates should listen to the voters, but we need to be realistic on how and when we can make moves. We need to look at the situation and see how we can best move the needle in the right direction. If you let evil men come into power as a result of your rigid morals than you are actually helping create what you hate most. You want the needle to move all the way to good, you won’t take just %10 better, and as a result things may get much worse.
The road to hell is paved with the best intentions had never been more true.
A broken system gives you broken candidates.
Democrats who are actually concerned about Republicans should be pushing hard for ranked choice voting.
These memes make Democrats feel good, but only annoys third party voters.
Maybe the Democratic party should consider what not following through on their campaign promises gets them. I don’t how their failure to realize their promises to their voters is the fault of people voting for third parties
Don’t mind me, just sweeping þrough to prune ð propoganda weeds on ðeir latest block/ban dodge accounts!
Jill Stien only had 2% of the vote in 2016. That is nothing. Most of those people would have stayed home. The reason Hillary lost was because she was a bad canidiate who was unable to resonate with young voters.
I remember 2020 where Trump did not win. All problems are fixed now.
Would you rather he did?
No more children in cag- uhh I mean no more war in the middle- ah fuck surely no more fracking at least??
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.
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
it’s not worth it until first past the post is removed.
Until then it’s mathematically impossible for a third party candidate to win. Focus your energy instead on removing first past the post, then you have a chance
The only time I went third party it wasn’t to win. It was because I saw it as two main candudates so shirty that there was a good chance for third party to snag more voters than usual, possibly enough to gain slightly better recognition in the future.
The monkey’s paw curled.
We got Trump. The recognition came as irrational blame for Trump.
I won’t make the same mistake of voting for someone I think would do the best job. Now it’s merely an effort to keep the worst viable candidate out.
You do understand that this is exactly what the democrats and the GOP want? Most importantly, what the people funding both parties want. If you’ll vote for an unelected enabler of genocide just to keep another guy out you’re showing them morals don’t come into the equation for your vote.
What’s stopping them from running a charismatic fascist vs an unlikable one?
Stop blaming voters for the democratic party repeatedly choosing the most conservative candidate and pretending they did it for “electability”, only to end up in tight races.
What I want is to vote for someone I believe in. I don’t get to have that in this current reality. So I opt to do the most good I can with what extremely little power I have. It doesn’t matter what any other faction wants at that point. If the Republicans want my vote, they can stop presenting the greater evil.
This is the way.
Voting democrat or republican gets you a divided republic. The repercussions or their actions are about to reverberate through society. I fucking warned you.
a vote for stein is a vote for trump, both of which are a vote for poo-tin
Best Putin Pronunciation Award Goes To..
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.
in my tiny way contributed to Reagan winning
Reagan won in a landslide
John Anderson shoutout!
Man, Lemmy is awesome.
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.
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.
We would absolutely have a 6-3 conservative court with Clinton. We just wouldn’t call it conservative.
We probably wouldn’t have a fascist court like we do now though.
These numbers are not correct according to NY Times
I double checked the subtraction with the NYT numbers you linked to, and the numbers look correct to me. Which numbers are wrong?
I can’t math and I think I looked at the wrong state for Michigan
I didn’t actually realize the numbers were that high for her… Ffs.
They know what they’re doing. The elections in swing states are always down to razor margins. The right spoiler is almost a guaranteed win for the opponent :/
Third parties help the democrats because the biggest third party is more right-aligned.
In Michigan Gary Johnson got 172,136 votes, in Pennsylvania he got 146,715, and in Wisconsin he got 106,674. If all Greens voted Clinton and all Libertarians voted Trump then New Mexico would’ve only been won by Clinton with around 1,000 votes, Colorado would’ve also been nearly Trump. Nevada, New Hampshire, and Minnesota would’ve been won by Trump. Maine might’ve gone majority Trump.
They weren’t. Check out PA. Trump won by 68K, Stein got 48K, Trump would still take PA, the EC totals would be 280 Trump, 258 Clinton. The whole thing is just a lie.
Third parties certainly know what effect they have. Their motivation is not to make the second party candidate win. Their motivation is to change the first party candidate.
According to Hotelling’s Law, a two-party political system with FPTP voting results in candidates that are very similar. This is why the Democrats won’t run real progressives for most offices, and why Sanders was forced out in 2016 with the excuse that he wasn’t “electable” enough.
Third parties running for president aren’t trying to win. They’re trying to eat some of the votes on their side, thus pulling the main party candidates toward that third party candidate to reclaim those votes.
I have no idea why this is being downvoted. Thanks for the info.
Third parties certainly know what effect they have.
Third party candidates that are running specifically in presidential elections and nothing else.
Third parties that actually want to move the needle participate in local elections, caucus with a major party for ballot access, etc. (WFP)
Their motivation is not to make the second party candidate win.
Bullshit.
Green’s team literally stated the goal was for Kamala to lose.
Citation for that?
https://www.nj.com/politics/2024/10/harris-vs-trump-spoiler-says-the-quiet-part-out-loud.html
You can find others if you’d like to look, quite easily.
Edited to add the quote from Sawant:
We are not in a position to win the White House, but we do have a real opportunity to win something historic, we could deny Kamala Harris the state of Michigan. And the polls show that most likely Harris cannot win the election without Michigan.
Its pretty clear the goal there.
Jesus fucking christ. I’m so tired of the American political landscape
If you don’t like stein, consider voting party for socialism and liberation instead.
They’re running Claudia de la Cruz on a platform of Palestinian statehood and an end to arms shipments to israel.
I found out recently that they’re on the ballot or have official write in status in 42 states, so unless you’re in Alaska, Nevada, Montana, South Dakota, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Georgia or Pennsylvania go for it!
E: forgot Nevada. They’re not officially recognized in Nevada.
I’d advise that no one buy into any of this nonsense. De la Cruz has a barely above zero chance to win, and at this point will serve only to siphon votes and spoil the election. Knowingly or not, this is what is happening.
Think about it: Ever wonder why you’re really only hearing about them recently? Where were they four years ago? What have they done to prove they will even do as they say? They have no track record to stand on, but for some reason, these people seem to think they can sneak into an election and have a chance to win on unproven, untested policy with no practical or effective way to make any of it happen?
Make no mistake- there is no good intention from anyone asking you to throw away your vote on these people this late in the game.
We’re it a year or two ago, I could maybe see it. But weeks away from white might be the most important election of our lifetime- to even think to request people not do emerging they can to stop Trump from forcing America’s militarily on us is shamelessly in bad faith.
DO NOT LISTEN TO THESE PEOPLE.
I might be misremembering the electoral values of the states here, but I think the combined value of the states they’re not official write ins or on ballot is only 64.
That leaves 474 electoral votes that psl could get, so they very much could win.
The history of the party is easy to find. They’ve been around for a little while now.
I’d choose a party with no track record over one with a consistent track record of genocidal violence and extrajudicial killings, but luckily psl has a track record of grassroots activism that’s pretty consistent, so I don’t have to take a gamble.
It’s a bit absurd to call opposition to genocide and apartheid unproven, untested policy.
I’m swiftly climbing the ladder of age and my whole life people have been saying “well, you should have been advocating for this or that last year, it’s too late now, this is the most important election of our lifetime!”
The best time to vote (and do groundwork for) psl was last year, the second best time is now!
I agree with the last part though, don’t listen to people peddling tired cliches and misinformation trying to manipulate you into voting one way or the other!
News flash genius…. Most everyone here is opposed to genocide. As has been said before, you’re not part of some fringe grassroots group that figured out that genocide was bad ahead of everyone else.
Stop with that shit. I don’t believe you’re here in any good faith to help anyone in any way.
If most everyone is opposed to genocide then I agree with them and want to help them find parties and candidates that oppose it too, like psl!
What party in opposition to genocide do you support?
I’m not going to stop politely and courteously advocating for the party and candidate I think is appropriate in threads where it’s on topic in a political comm.
It might not be a good idea to accuse people of bad faith when you open up with a sarcastic insult. World is pretty strict about that stuff, it’s like their number one rule.
America is a two party system.
Someone should tell it there’s all these other parties then.
With the way our system is set up, a third party will never win. Especially when 50% of America is still backing Trump. We need a new voting system before anything can change
I accused you of bad faith because that’s what I think you are. And I think the PSL is hot garbage and that’s why no one is taking them seriously.
Is there an argument I could make from my position that wouldn’t read as bad faith to you?
You’re here trying to garner support for the hopeless psl within weeks of an election, so….
No.
Most everyone here is opposed to genocide.
Most everyone here is also voting for the Democrats, instead of agreeing to vote for a third party who is opposed to genocide
Again… everyone is against genocide. Your bad faith accusations aren’t working on anyone anymore. It’s just… cringy as fuck now.
And so you know- the third party clowns currently running have no viable end game to shut shit down over there. Go ahead and look it up. They say they do- but have no clear answer on how they’d do it that is even remotely viable. But it all looks good to the smug edgelords that think they’re somehow unique because they are against dOiNg gEnoCiDes!
What part of cutting military funding by 90% (Claudia de la Cruz’s platform) would fail to stop funding Israel?
They will have a barely above zero chance of successfully doing this. My god you people will believe anything won’t you?
I wonder why they didn’t just say they’re going to end world hunger…. Or cure cancer.
De la Cruz is a nobody that has no idea what there doing and no chance to ever see a position of authority to create let alone enact any policy that would produce meaningful change.
She’s a spoiler. And at this point- I’m beginning to think it’s purposeful.
You really think she’d have the support of Congress to do such a thing? In a system like America’s? That’s ridiculous. You should know full well such a thing would never happen even if Cruz were to magically win the presidency.
Talk is cheap, and it’s easy for third parties to say they’ll make such sweeping changes when they don’t have to actually back it up. They can tell you what you want to hear, but at the end of the day it’s all talk because such policies will never get past Congress.
Are they running anyone in elections they might actually win? I might vote for a party like that for mayor or something. But I wouldn’t even vote for them for state house representative unless they were well known enough in my state that they might actually win.
‘Third’ parties in this country can show themselves as serious if they try to establish themselves from the bottom up. If all they do is run for president and occasionally Senate or House, then they show themselves as unserious parties which are probably nothing more than attempts to siphon votes that might have gone to a real candidate.
I don’t know odds, I’m not much of a gambler. You gotta start somewhere though and winning isn’t all that matters: at the presidential level losing parties’ turnout determines their ballot access, event presence, access to funds and media and obviously how much you hear about them.
At the state and local levels there are Byzantine other benefits to having some percentage of the vote that vary wildly from place to place.
So its worth it to vote for a small candidate even if they lose because it can have big effects down the road.
Psl runs candidates at lots of local races, especially in California because that’s where they started.
Of course, if your main worry is having voted for a candidate that can win: good news! Psl can win every race it has a candidate in as far as I know. People were saying that they didn’t have enough ballot presence to tip the electoral college but they were wrong!
Never forget that in 2016 13% of Trump voters voted for Obama in 2008/12. Maybe the Democratic Party can share some blame, instead of just shaming the voters.
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.
