If anything, lefties shouldn’t be a single issue voter at all. They should be picking someone who might move toward that direction and have the chance to win, not abstaining.
As the famous word goes: Evil triumph when good men do nothing. You can’t abstain or do protest vote and expect anything to change under Trump, that single issue you hold so important will get worst, or even impossible.
Well this “single issue” of land stealing, white supremacist subjugation of a people on their native land, ethnic cleansing and genocide, has only gotten worse with every election.
If we look at AIPAC they arent powerful because they influence who wins. They are powerful because they onfluence who looses.
That is why being pro genocide remains a staple of both parties policies. The only way to change that, is to punish the side that claims to not be pro genocide generally, so it has to become against genocide specifically.
And we had one year of trying to do that before the election, where people here and in othernplace vigorously defended being pro genocide, as challenging that before the election would be bad for the election.
We saw with Biden stepping down that challenging the dementia candidate was actually beneficial for the Democrats election chances, despite the same denial and backlash over pointing out Bidens failing mental capacities.
Now i am sure that these sentiments of immediately attacking people who wanted the Democrats to become a non genocide party when it was still possible to achieve that for the election, were stirred by AIPAC and other establishment actors, who would rather have Trump win than end genocide or get to meaningful progressive politics like proper healthcare and workers rights.
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Most of what you say is exactly correct. The thing is, you have drawn a little outline of a box around this one situation, and allowed its glow to obscure all else outside the line.
Make the box bigger. Let the other issues that still count and effect people be inside the box.
Trans people need you to vote Harris, because they’ll be in extermination camps under Trump. Women in Mississippi whose pregnancies are going to tragically go bad next year need you to save their lives by voting Harris, because Trump will put the final nail in the coffin on abortion. Plenty of people will go homeless under Trump who would have hung on with higher wages and monopoly busting under Harris.
Being a single issue voter is a luxury that assumes everything else is basically solid, so we can press the one issue extra hard and let the rest of the garden tend itself a bit.
We are in the exact opposite of that situation in the 2024 presidential election. Dont confuse the shittiness of the whole situation with relatively much much better choice of Harris over Trump.
So women needlessly dying of miscarriages and trans people getting locked up in camps is fine so long as the democrats are punished.
Mass deportations with sketchy legal grounds are also fine because the democrats will totally learn their lesson this time.
Wake the hell up. You’re only punishing innocent americans. The democrats will be FINE if trump wins.
Can’t believe I missed you when I blocked all your little friends.
Why do people feel the need to publicly announce blocks?
Block me as well. Do not forget the blocking user ceremonial reply to my comment!
Ho Chi Minh knew all about America’s long history of genocide and slavery.
When the time came to work with the American OSS to fight the Japanese he helped the Americans.
Any questions?
Yeah one question, what did America do to Vietnam after that?
What were the Japanese doing then?
Are you saying we should allow the genocide in Palestine to continue, and add suffering in America too?
Im saying using Vietnam as an example why working with the US is good is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.
Fine, give me a better example.
I’m not married to that analogy.
I could talk about the women and former slaves who worked for politicians who couldn’t promise them the vote.
Would that get the point across to you?
I think it was less, “the US is good” and more “one way or another someone is gonna fuck you over, sometimes the only choice you have is who”
Okay, sure, but let’s say Trump win and you successfully punish Democrats, the results are…you also punished abortion right, people of colour, the lgbtq community, american with middle-eastern origin, worsening the immigrant deportation, and lastly, eliminating the chance of palestine-israel ceasefire and basically confirming the annexation of Gaza and West Bank. Isn’t that the thing you most concerned with? That doesn’t sounds like left-wing thinking to me at all.
I leave out a lot of thing, it’s really up to you to figure out what you will lose. I’m not even from US and another Trump term will undoubtedly affect the world in one way or another.
Jay Shapiro explains this well in a video:
TL:DW?
In this video, I challenge the dismissive label of ‘single-issue voting’. I break down how a focus on an issue like genocide reveals deeper political and moral stakes, rejecting the idea that elections are merely a choice between the ‘lesser of two evils,’ and offering my reasoning—and hope—for refusing to play the game.
Just make sure it does work, this plan… The world doesn’t want Trump back…
Sounds like you’re very concerned with the spoiler effect that is inherent with First Past The Post voting.
Feel free to stop by my ask lemmy Post to discuss your post election commitment to replace FPTP voting in your state.
It’s all the fault of the Democrats. If they had run Bernie he would have been voted in and we wouldn’t be here.
The fact that Bernie endorses Harris is meaningless, because he’s not a real Socialist.
Things I’ve heard today on Lemm.ee
Ahaha, you had me terrified for a sec there.
Who on .ee are you seeing comments like this from?
I’ve never seen a fellow .ee like this. Curious to hear what communities it’s on
B-but Bernie is an independent and not in any party. Therefore the democrats can’t really run him.
Biden got more votes in primaries than all the other candidates combined. That’s kind of how popularity works.
People on the internet like to pretend that US has more progressives than it has, but all the statistics show that even the most popular progressive candidate can’t get enough support to win primaries, so chances of him winning the general election were even more slim.
Unless that will change, best we can hope for is a competent centrist.I’ve heard the “progressives” going on and on since high school. According to them the entire nation is a powder keg primed to blow up into glorious revolution any day now. Any day now…
I mean, they might be right but not for the reason they think and definitely not by the people we hope. “It could happen here” and all that
To be fair, Bernie would have won in 2016, and I do blame Clinton for Trump winning in the first place.
Didn’t stop me from voting for Harris though in an actually important election. Just glad it’s not Hillary i’m having to hold my nose over.
I haven’t done the math. Assuming full support, is there a 3rd party candidate on the ballot in enough states to actually win?
It’s a 2 party system. Any 3rd party added takes away from either side, which can often swing elections. The opposing party will even sometimes support 3rd parties just to increase their chances of winning.
If you want 3 parties, change the system; or else you are just helping the person you want the least get elected.
Nope. The Green party’s got their candidate on the most states’ polls, and they only managed to get 38 states. Granted, it’s still mathematically possible, considering the threshold is 270 votes, and the states that have Stein on the ballot comprise 440 votes… but still. Would be incredibly, almost impossibly difficult.
It doesn’t even matter whether or not the Green party is technically able to win. As long as America has this first-past-the-post voting system, people will have to tactically vote for Democrats, because otherwise the Republicans will win. To stop the current duopoly, there needs to be an electoral reform first. It’s probably nearly impossible to get that through but there’s no other way.
If it’s “probably impossible” then can you explain why Alaska and Maine have already been successful implementing electoral reform? Why are several states working towards getting rid of First Past The Post voting right now?
It’s not impossible. This reform is possible at the state level. We don’t need an act of God from congress to make this happen. It’s already happening, and it can happen in your state to!
No. Because even if they carried 100% of the vote in a state, the delegates can and most likely would just cast their votes for one of the major parties.
Do you mean the electors? Delegates are part of the nomination process, not the general election. The electors for a party are chosen by that party, then the voters cast votes for the electors. It’s unlikely that electors pledged to third parties would be faithless, as they probably deeply identify with the party ideals.
The last time a 3rd party candidate had an actual shot (and it was a looooong shot at best) was in 1992 when Ross Perot ran. He split the R vote badly enough that it handed the election to Clinton.
So long as we’re using first past the post a 3rd party candidate has a vanishingly small chance of doing anything other than helping elect the opposition.
Yes, I was there and that’s not what I was asking.
And the lesson the Republican Party learned from that was to support the Greens—or any vaguely left party—hard.
Admittedly, watching PR play out across the rest of the world kinda scares me. Israel is paralyzed into a destructive war because the ruling party is in a coalition with a few crazy extremists who will bring down the government (and thus expose Netenyahu to criminal trial) if their increasingly wild demands aren’t met. Germany’s having a clusterfuck of a time etc.
While there would be different parties, imagine the horribleness of a PR system right now in America. You could easily see a scenario where RFK acts as kingmaker and gets to demand whatever from trump or Harris. Given that trump would sell his children (maybe sub Melania for Ivanka) for the presidency, who knows what insanity would ensue? And there would be no real mechanism between the election and the next one to reign them in.
I didn’t think there was anything scarier than a trump presidency until thinking that one through. Uggggh.
Stein and Oliver both do, though that’s certainly not going to make a difference in their actual chances
Liberals explaining how “harm reduction” means voting but never demanding anything while calling anyone who criticizes them a “Russian bot”:
Liberals during election time: VOTE BLUE NO MATTER WHO
Liberals during the rest of the 4 years:Liberals during the rest of the 4 years: Still getting beaten by police trying to change the system
I’m sure electing a cop will change everything.
Third party voters during election time: RHEEEEEEE! I refuse to vote because of [ISSUE]
Third part voters the rest of the four years:
Wait… What issue?
I’d make a far leftists troll meme, but you’re just not relevant enough to waste the time.
Actually… that should be the meme.
How meta!
Honesty I spent three seconds making that low effort meme
So. We both know it took longer than three seconds. But even if it did, that’s also a waste of time.
Also third party voters during local and regional elections: crickets
Sounds like a Russian bot
Ah im sorry I mean I fully support the party and would never betray it. I apologize for my thought crimes and will fight for democracy by blindly supporting the party :3
More like “americans trying to justify voting for the peeps who sent the bombs”
What bothers me about the people taking the bit of time and effort to go vote for 3rd parties is that there’s really no point to it. Making sure your own vote doesn’t matter is insane to me when voting isn’t mandatory. They could’ve just done nothing and achieved the same outcome.
Voting for one Party no matter what their policies are, is what makes your vote not matter. You signal blind loyality and no red lines. So the Party would be stupid to care about you.
They care about the ones willing to withhold their vote and money. That is how AIPAC helped shape both US parties into being pro genocide. Play both sides and punish the one that may “step out of line”
You saw how Dems panicked when there was the uncommited movement? Instead of seizing the moment and turn them into a non genocide party, people vigorously defended being pro genocide as the safer option. Just like people denied Bidens dementia until it was possible to deny. And switching from Biden was actually helping the Dems chances.
At the end the people who opposed pushing the Dems by making credible threats to their voting base, did not only accept genocide this way, they also helped Trump tremendously by preventing the Dems to switch to the majority platform of being against genocide.
The majoriy of Americans say they are against genocide. Some of them know that genocide has to be a red line. By preventing the Dems from becoming a non genocide party, it was prevented to unify the non far right side of the political spectrum to win in a landslide.
Brother, I’m voting against the party with the absolutely insane and oppressive declared policies. What are you talking about?
This is only true under a better voting system than first past the post. In first past the post, you’ve got a dumbass set of broken game rules where once two parties get big enough, they become the main and only characters, and all third parties can do is debuff one of them so the other one wins.
It’s such a reliable thing that the two parties often try to fund third parties the other party’s voters will like.
Obligate games blow ass.
I’m happy for those people who have enough privilege to sit this election out; but to even try and imply that the two dominant parties are even similar is an insult when only one of them wants to fucking kill me.
There is plenty of black and arab people, who are at an immediate threat by Trump too. But if it becomes normal to murder them abroad it is also easier for it to become normal at home.
Trump and his followers are the ones fostering hate and resentment though. America needs a break from that jackass.
They only be a statistical footnote that almost nobody will notice.
Even if a notable number of people voted 3rd party, they’re still going to be treated the same as those who didn’t vote at all, because in a practical sense, thats what they are.
Why are you encouraging people not to vote?Edit: sorry I thought you were a different poster. I am not trying to spam you multiple times
Any time you vote for a candidate that loses, this is the case. And of your preferred candidate wins in a landslide, every extra vote they didn’t need might as well have been blank.
tbf if you don’t live in a swing state, your vote doesn’t really matter either way
It sounds like it’s young people (under 25) who don’t understand exactly how bad it will be if trump wins.
I’ve survived a lot of shit presidents. Trump is the first one who actually scares me.
Hopefully they will do the right thing when it comes time to actually vote.
Are these Schrodinger’s young people who simultaneously don’t vote, but also single-handedly tip the entire election?
Germany’s first time voters helped the far-right (Nazi) party AfD getting a lot of votes in the EU elections recently. AfD’s TikTok game (with Russia’s support) is very strong. Go figure.
If every young person voted, the Republican party would collapse until it took a hard left turn. This is not a paradox.
If wishes were fishes we’d all be in the sea?
W was actually worse than trump’s first term.
But that’s only because W had far more competent people, it’s like how Germany was severely handicapped in the war by Hitler always getting in the damn way.
This time I suspect he’d have better minions.
Even Dick “I did 911” Cheney is against him. He’s an actual evil person who thinks Trump is too evil
In a way, this is all you need to know right here.
Too evil for Dick Cheney is a very special form of evil indeed.
I think ‘too evil’ is an oversimplification. DC is lawful evil, DT is chaotic evil. It’s the chaos DC doesn’t like, not the evil.
Well put!
shortsightedness is a stubborn affliction
I imagine that folks on both sides believe this comment is about the other one.
I wish that more people could see that there aren’t two sides. Neither side is on your side, nobody is on your side, and you can think you’re on their side but it just doesn’t work that way.
Good point. Same goes for fake news. Let’s address the fear and anger on both sides first, only then we can get some facts in.
What other side? America is a one-party country with a republican cancer metastasizing.
The only reason voting for a third party doesn’t help is because so many of you are too stupid to realize that if you keep voting for Republicans or Democrats then they will stay in control of the country.
In a different voting system that would be true, and if you don’t have the somewhat obscure and technical piece of voting knowledge that this video explains really well, there’s no reason not to think that:
Once you understand that the dumb is baked into the voting math itself, “too dumb to vote third party” clarifies into “first past the post is shit”, and the solution becomes pushing like hell for ranked choice voting, single transferable vote, alternative vote, etc. Stopping the fourth reich is an implied portion of that process, as a way of preserving voting itself.
Make sure to watch that video because you’re thinking correctly, just without factoring in one key game piece that there’s no reason for you to have heard of, one that kind of flips the while thing around.
I will say, the voting system that we advocate for is important.
There are three common choices. RCV, Approval, and STAR.
RCV has some momentum, but is just a bad voting system. It’s arguably worse than Fist Past the Post, because in a way, it is FPtP. Or rather, it’s several FPtP elections in a row, dropping the lowest each time.
Which is where a problem creeps in. See, it’s drop lowest, and then never hear from that person again. So if they are the literal second choice of 99% of voters, they’re dropped in the first round and never seen again.
This leads to ballots that look like this;
1 - dropped in 4th round 2- dropped in 1st round 3- dropped in 2nd round 4- dropped in 3rd round 5- Guy you kind of hate and only listed because the rules said you had to list 5. He’s the one who got your vote.
If you had dropped your first choice, Your second through third might have won.
There’s also a version of the above ballot that doesn’t have a number 5, in that case your ballot is just thrown out as exhausted. Up to 18% of ballots get thrown out as exhausted. At least that’s what the data from California and Maine has said.
Most countries that use IRV (RCV’s real name) don’t publish any election data, so we use what we’ve got.
Anyway, Approval and STAR are both immune to shit like the above, because how you rate one candidate has zero bearing on how you rate another. Woo for cardinal voting systems.
I love the “You should just vote in the primaries” Democrats, who didn’t even blink back in 2020 when Chris Matthews was on national television screaming that Bernie Sanders supporters were going to drag him into Central Park and shoot him.
This is the state of modern American politics. Republicans are told that they need to vote for the most reactionary, fascist, fringe candidate or they’ll be murdered by migrants. Democrats are told that they need to vote for the most centrist corporate shill in the Senate or they’ll be invaded by Russia.
Everything is fearmongering all the time. Nobody even talks about policy anymore.
Voting/Electoral Fetishism replaces actual political action:
Issues, policies, and outcomes are all carefully manufactured and managed by a small number of power elites. The media, political parties, security forces (psych-ops), even the mafia and intellectual and artistic elites all work together to shape a political simulacrum within which our limited discourses and actions circulate. source
That and the fact that it’s legally impossible for one to win the presidency, yeah.
Every 4 years, hundreds of millions of people set their conscience to the side and continue to vote for the thing they’ll complain about until the next time, when they do it all again.
But Palestine hurr Durr
You dumb fucks know how many more Palestine’s there’s gonna be if he gets in? You can kiss Ukraine goodbye, and probably hong kong too. This is nothing.
2016-2020 was the beta test. If this goes into production we’re all fucked.
I echo the sentiment (regarding Trump being a much, much worse outcome), but you can already “Kiss Hong Kong goodbye”. It’s part of China, they have cracked down, and the two systems has been reduced to like 1.5 systems ahead of schedule.
I am genuinely curious what you think either presidential candidate would do about this, considering they will continue to espouse the One China policy. Where they might differ is in their support of Taiwan, whose status is much more murky.
Hong Kong though? Pretty sure that ship sailed once the UN decided: no Empire no longer, and the 99 year lease came to an end.
What you guys are planning to genocide chinese people too?
Nah china already has that under control with their summer camps and organ harvesting
Ope sorry I meant Taiwan
Lol, yeah this makes more sense. Thanks for clarifying 😅
You dumb fucks know how many more Palestine’s there’s gonna be if he gets in?
It seems like such a basic concept; trump means more dead Palestinians. How can someone simultaneously claim to support Palestinians and advocate for more dead Palestinians?
Nobody is advocating for that. That is the most vile claim. We tried to get the Democrats to become a non genocide party. There was plenty of time before the election. Instead we got attacked with the same sentiment like now.
The people accepting that genocide is the acceptable baseline and opposing the push for a non genocide option are the omes advocating for it.
Advocating against voting for Democrats, no matter what the particular language, is advocating for actions that will increase the chances of Trump getting elected, of Republicans having majorities and of Israel’s further escalation in Palestine, in addition to all the other bad things Republicans will do.
The time to move Democrats on the issues is not now. Those times were during the primaries (in which I voted uncommitted on the presidential level and for pro-palestinian candidates on other levels) and after the election through things like lobbying.
If there are particular third-party candidates who have any reasonable chance of winning rather than being a spoiler (I don’t know of any), it’s reasonable to advocate to their electorate that one vote for them instead of the Democratic candidate. However, if one supports Palestinians and opposes genocide, the best vote in the presidential election and in most national or state elections on November 5 is for the Democratic candidate. That’s not a “vote blue no matter who” opinion or an “all you need to do is vote for the Dems” opinion. It’s harm reduction in the short term so that we can ensure that there actually are medium and long terms for as many people as possible.
What primary?
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You dumb fucks know how many more Palestine’s there’s gonna be if he gets in? You can kiss Ukraine goodbye, and probably hong kong too. This is nothing.
Tankies would love that, though.
You dumb fuck yanks should have done something about trump 4 years ago. But you needed him as a scapegoat to direct people’s gaze off your war crimes.
Jill Stein was endorsed by David Duke (KKK).
I’m sure it has to do with Duke being a really conservationist, nature loving guy who wants to support renewable energy.
And Stein investing in fossil fuels and tobacco must be because she wants to heroically rob the execs of their money.
“The second challenge to a third party is both statistical and tactical. Duverger presents the example of an election in which 100,000 moderate voters and 80,000 radical are to vote for candidates for a single seat or office. If two moderate parties ran candidates and one radical candidate ran (and every voter voted), the radical candidate would tend to win unless one of the moderate candidates gathered fewer than 20,000 votes.”
2016 had a historically high 3rd party voter turnout (6%):
2020 only had 2% 3rd party voter turnout. But no that can’t be the reason a soon wanna-be dictator will take over your country again soon (and proceeds to fuck up the world). Nah…just show it to genocide Kamala. Your voice matters. Vote for Jill Stein. She’s so cute, isn’t she?
The concept that voting for a third-party candidate is somehow “helping” one of the major party candidates is based on the assumption that the third-party candidate’s voters would have otherwise voted for one of the major party candidates.
well, we are all indeed aware of your ignorant idiocy so you have succeeded there
