collectively, yes--and there are consequences which flow from that, yes, at least for some offices.[^1] but in Texas alone there are five million people, before non-voters and third party voters, who voted for Biden. i'm pretty sure those people don't deserve to suffer just because slightly more people in their state voted for a ghoul.
[^1]: Texas is of course quite gerrymandered, so "vote them out" is not exactly a universal option for people.
Even the people who did vote for this and othwr idiocy don't deserve to die in the cold for their mistakes. They deserve to live, as anyone does, and they deserve the chance to learn from their mistakes.
yeah, that's the corollary here: the fact that there are consequences for doing a dumb thing doesn't mean people should inherently suffer for doing the dumb thing.
Republican actions have prevented a number of people from voting over the years, and a shockingly small number of people choose to vote even when they can. If people would just get off their asses, Texas politics would be turned on its head. Here’s some quick google results:
On December 17, 2020, Gallup polling found that 31% of Americans identified as Democrats, 25% identified as Republicans, and 41% as Independent.
In Texas, 45.7% of the 17.7 million registered voters cast ballots in the 2022 midterm election. That’s 7.3 percentage points lower than the state’s total turnout in 2018 but higher than in every other midterm election in the last 20 years.
[In the 2022] At least 18,000 Texas mail-in votes were rejected in the first election under new GOP voting rules
this is true. i lived in a very red state for most my life, and always felt my vote didn't matter. i went through the motions of voting, but didn't feel i would have a real impact. i did it because i felt a sense of civic duty, but I'm a white cis dude so i didn't feel the effects like someone else might so i cant blame them if they don't feel that same sense of duty.
Yeah, which is why I don’t think republicans should be allowed to vote. But that opinion isn’t too popular.
And since they’ll always be allowed to vote, and people like Boebert and MTG will always be allowed to hold public office (no matter how many innocent people die as a result of their participation in government), then all I can do is laugh when they get fucked.
The people who voted for these politicians are by and large not the demographics being fucked over by those policies. I also used to feel like the right response was to laugh at these states, and being reminded that people who didn't want these policies are still suffering from them didn't really convince me of anything--after all, collectively, isn't that the community they're choosing to live in?
What changed my mind about that is realizing the harm is disproportionately distributed. Disenfranchised people are LESS likely to vote republican but MORE likely to suffer the effects of republican government. So when "they get what they voted for", it's really, "the poor get what the rich voted for", and that doesn't make me happy to laugh at at all.
There's a decent chance some of the Texan politicians were hanging out at EPCOT while their constituents were at home without power, so you might not be too far off.
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