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.
I cringe every time I see this come up.
Because it isn’t what you actually mean, and the horrible logic of it makes it easy for the Lemmy Lefties to dunk on.
Of course a 3rd party vote isn’t a vote for Trump any more than it is a vote for Kamala.
What it actually is is a discarded opportunity to vote against Trump. Which is also dispicable, but actually accurate.
Everyone knows that’s what you mean by this, but the Lemmy Lefties will play dumb and latch onto that logical fallacy every time.
The Dems are running on Trump’s 2020 platform. Build the wall. Lock up immigrants. Both parties are far-right shitholes, and it’s time people started realizing that.
The Dems in 2028 will be calling for mass deportations.
This went so far past just being wrong that it might just end up creating an entirely new paradigm of stupidity.
Cringe
^ This right here. Exactly my point. They are going to keep telling you Kamala and Trump are the same so you spoil your chance to prevent Trump from taking office again.
They are not subtle, and they do not care about the fallout of a Trump reelection. They are privileged enough that it won’t affect them or their loved ones. It’s despicable.
My loved ones are affected by americans actions for the last years idiot. You are a shit person throwing foreigners under the bus because you think americans life is worth more than the rest of us.
Not everyone lives in a swing state where votes actually matter.
Do you know what will definitely NOT help get rid of the electoral college? People wasting their votes on 3rd party spoilers
Do you know what would MORE LIKELY move people to demand the elimination of the electoral college? Harris getting 10 million+ more votes, and Trump either winning the electoral college or attempting a coup based on lies because a swing state was close.
The more votes Harris gets, the clearer the will of the people, the harder it is to pretend there was voter fraud.
What a bold and bizarre claim to think there is any winning margin that would repel suspicions.
If Harris wants liberal votes, why is she courting Republicans?
“You have to vote for a candidate that refuses to represent you so that people who don’t care about the will of the people will think that you support that candidate.” is a new one.
No one is buying the bullshit you have for sale.
Thank goodness not enough people in “safe” states think that way.
They use the same logic of people in swing states??
You sure seem to have every excuse in the book, don’t you?
I think we have the best chance to break the third party at the local level.
I must have missed that footnote in their rhetoric.
Come on, guy.
I’m not your guy, buddy!
Hey, not only am i your buddy, I’m also your fwiend, guy.
By definition, most people do not live in swing states.
Disclaimers and footnotes are irrelevant.
At least MAGA is honest. Yuck.
Honest lmao
Yeah – they’re proud of their hatred and open about wanting Trump to dismantle the system.
Lemmy Lefties just posture and virtue signal. It’s disgusting.
Check my history. Vote third party if you don’t live in a swing state is literally what I have been saying.
Ex https://lemmy.ml/post/21262971, https://lemmy.ml/comment/14519387
Good. Tell your Lemmy Lefty buddies to do the same.
They loved Bernie and praised him to the skies.
Then he endorsed Biden and Harris.
Now he’s a ‘sheepdog’ that rounds up people to be slaughtered.
If nobody votes 3rd party then we’ll never have a 3rd party candidate that matters.
It’s like bicycle infrastructure. Nobody wants to ride bikes on a highway, but you won’t see bike riders until there’s a trail somewhere for them to ride on. You can say it never matters and that there aren’t any cyclists out there, but you’re wrong. I think there’s a lot of Americans looking for another party right now.
It’s the trolley problem again. This time, you have 3 tracks and 2 switches. The trolley is headed towards 5 people, one switch sends it to 1 person, and the other switch would send it to 0 people, but it’s broken. Voting third party is pulling the broken switch, knowing the 5 people will die but you’ve shifted the responsibility from yourself to whoever was supposed to fix the switch.
I see you are upset the 3rd switch is broken. Me too, thanks.
Let us begin working on the switch together. I hope you swing by my ask lemmy Post to discuss your post election commitment to replace FPTP voting in your state.
Who would leave such a critical piece of infrastructure unfixed? Most certainly not you I’m sure.
Excellent analogy. If anyone still plays dumb after reading this, they probably are
I really like your take on this. So how is the switch going to get fixed, when the only time anyone pays attention to the fact that it’s broken, is when lives are on the line?
Why do neoliberals bring up the trolley problem as if it is some settled debate among scholars that there is one clear possible answer?
The trolley problem isn’t “settled debate” for the same reasons that Kamala vs Trump isn’t “settled debate”.
The point of the trolley problem and why it’s analogous is that it’s coming up fast and you must choose to either pull that lever or not. Whichever choice you make, that’s the moral character you’ve chosen to exhibit.
What is the moral character of someone incapable of questioning the validity of orphan crushing trolleys?
Imagine being able to walk and chew gum at the same time!
Imagine having an imagination!
Sometimes, I wonder if a Trump victory would be the only way to getthe various leftist factions to stop arguing and stand together, side by side, united in the fact that fascists don’t care what flavour of ideological opposition they’re executing.
Who gives a shit about whether the Trolley Problem is settled - it’s about your answer: Which option do you endorse?
I’m not a neoliberal, I’m a socialist. I’m just not an idiot who will give a fascist free rein just because his opponent has the same shitty foreign policy as every politician in the whole fucking country has. There is a difference between the status-quo level of bad and catastrophic.
Harris supporters on Lemmy have called for me to be put in a concentration camp.
Your fears of fascism are ignorant of the capacity that Democrats exhibit.
Harris supporters on Lemmy have called for me to be put in a concentration camp.
Lol no they haven’t.
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So Harris supporters are a joke, a very bad fascist* joke.
I hope people like you are the first people put in the camps
Some of you idiots yesterday told me: “Imagine I’m tying you to a chair, and gives you a choice between ripping one or both of your eyes. Wouldn’t you prefer to keep one eye?”.
But of course the mod have too much political censorship to do to care about actual disturbing content.
I think that is reportable violence.
Can you please link to that?
Excellently put!
I like your analogy. Let me expand.
This same situation happens every day. For years now, 1 person has died every day. Nobody pulls the broken lever, but if people started pulling it, it would start working. For the first couple days or weeks, 5 people would die each time, but eventually we would be able to get the train on a safe track.
Here are two candidates, and you vetter like one of them, because that’s all you get, otherwise we couldn’t call ourself a “democracy” anymore.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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!
Stein and Oliver both do, though that’s certainly not going to make a difference in their actual chances
Tiiiired of the same loser rhetoric of voting for the lesser evil of two consistently deteriorating parties.
Dummies, where will it end? Put these corporate cock suckers on notice. Do not legitimize their rule with your lips.
End the duopoloticial tyranny. Used to be whig party vs democratic party. Used to.
You don’t end the duopoly by voting third party. You end it by organising between elections. But it’s so much easier to virtue signal now and then lay back on the couch for the next 3.5 years plus you get the smug sense of self-satisfaction!
Also the last democratic presidency has sucked a lot less corporate than previously.
Well we tried that by demanding proper primaries and putting non genocide candidates on the ballots. And we got called being Trump shills for that. We also got called Trump shills for saying Biden is clearly too old for office. If it wasnt for Harris to replace Biden, the race would already be over.
Deine bisherigen Posts haben nicht gerade den Eindruck erweckt, dass du in diesem Kontext von “wir” sprechen solltest - bist du in den USA wahlberechtigt?
I have raised my voice to push voting eligble people to do so. Unfortunately the US has so much power that non US citizens also need to form opinions and raise their voices, as little effect it has.
No one called anyone a Trump shill for supporting progressives in down-ballot elections. If you’re just talking about the start of the presidential election cycle, that’s too late.
What were you doing? Clearly you understand the faults of the voting system.
Let me rephrase that: why are you okay with people being underrepresented by the voting system?
It will end when a democrat gets rid of first past the post. Here’s why:
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.
Yankies, I swear to fucking god - don’t you fucking dare.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
shortsightedness is a stubborn affliction
I imagine that folks on both sides believe this comment is about the other one.
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.
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I voted Stein in Georgia. My vote never belonged to Harris, so me not voting for her has taken nothing away.
Maybe stop assuming people will vote for candidates, and start earning those votes.
More like “americans trying to justify voting for the peeps who sent the bombs”
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.
Ope sorry I meant Taiwan
Lol, yeah this makes more sense. Thanks for clarifying 😅
What you guys are planning to genocide chinese people too?
Nah china already has that under control with their summer camps and organ harvesting
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.
well, we are all indeed aware of your ignorant idiocy so you have succeeded there
