This is SUCH a pointless thing to harp on. Take it up with the Republicans instead of the miniscule fraction of a percentage of leftist who didn’t vote. Finger pointing at people who agree with you produces nothing.
There is an argument (that I don’t necessarily agree with) that the people this post is targeted at are more likely to be convinced to vote Democrat next election than the people who voted for Trump.
This is just another version of vote blue no matter who. It’s just as dumb as people who only vote Republican. Trump didn’t win that election, Hillary lost it.
When Democrats are normal sleazy politician evil and Republicans are straight up Saturday Morning Cartoon Evil, so there is sense in it… Ya don’t vote Democrat expecting them to fix shit, you vote Democrat to keep the Republicans from being as evil as they could be.
Yeah… I feel like Hillary was the ONE opponent Trump could actually beat… I know the DNC felt like they “owed her” the nomination, but never rig a primary if you can’t rig the general. I mean even if Hillary wasn’t Hillary, people are going to vote in Literally Hitler before they let a woman be in charge.
I entirely agree with you that sometimes we have to hold our noses and vote for the lesser of two evils. On the other hand, blaming the left for Hillary’s failure is both dumb, and self defeating. It’s a tiny percentage of the politically engaged electorate that need to hear this message, and an even tinier percentage of those who might listen. Meanwhile, it just further alienates more people than it attracts. Anyone who persists in blaming voters is more concerned about virtue signaling than winning elections. If you want to win elections, figure out how to reach voters who have given up and checked out.
We’ve been playing this game for decades where “lesser evil voting” keeps pushing both parties further right as Republicans say more of the quiet part out loud and Democrats keep clawing further to the right to “capture the moderate vote.”
Voting for 10% more evil instead of 20% more evil still gets you more evil and still puts you eventually at 300%+ more evil. The best time to fucking stop it was around Reagan times, the second best time to cut it out is now.
The Democrats have been pushed Left in some ways, Obama started his career saying “Marriage is between a man and a woman” and ended with Gay Marriage being legalized
Well no. Hillary was a center-right candidate. If she wanted votes from progressives or left-wing voters, she knew exactly what to do. But she threw those votes away, relying on rhetoric like this post. We all saw it happening, and she did it anyway. What if she had pushed for universal health care, or unions, or campaign finance reform, or gun laws, or against wars? It would have been an exciting election.
In regard to abortion the outcome certainly would have been different had she won the election. Trump put 3 anti-abortion and strongly right wing justices on the Supreme court directly leading to this outcome.
Obviously like other mainstream Democrats there’s a ton to be desired in policy, but the whole point of this post is that it is still important to vote even if it’s the lesser evil.
I think most commenters agree that voting is peachy, but the question is whether to support a real left-wing candidate or a centrist Democrat candidate.
When there is a two party system with an electoral college, not voting is extremely irresponsible because the alternative is a super fascist. I don’t like Biden, but if voting for him keep Trump out of the White House, you absolutely do that. Heck, I’d prefer a literal pile of turd in the Oval Office than orange Hitler.
That doesn’t mean you can’t be politically active and support real left-wing agendas. Local elections are where you can make a bigger difference, because your vote has a greater influence.
If you actually care, you vote, vote at every opportunity, every single time. If you can’t vote for a great candidate, vote for the lesser of two evils.
Right? All she needed to do was start parroting Bernie’s platform, get the votes, follow up on none of it like when Obama promised similar things, and… well… it’d not be great, but it’d be better than what we have…
Fuck this post. I vote. I did not vote in that election because I had shit choices. It’s not my fault that Dems ran a shit candidate. I did not think that asshole could get elected or I’d have voted against him, while hating the other shithead that I voted in. Dems need to run real candidates. Not vote-for-me-or-else-bad! candidates.
Hillary shouldn’t have bought the DNC and used dirty tricks to get the nomination. Had she felt just a little bit less entitled to the office, I bet she would have run a much better campaign.
Except that the left actually did show up and vote for her. Anyone who cares enough about politics to call themselves “left” is not likely to sit out an election, and third party votes didn’t make the difference. Bernie supporters overwhelmingly showed up for Hillary. That shouldn’t have been surprising since Bernie campaigned harder for her than she did for herself.
It’s every day apolitical Americans who stay home and cost the Democrats elections, and the reasons why are clear. Democratic political strategies are intended to be vacuous and put the electorate to sleep. The establishment doesn’t want to win an election then have the voters actually expect them to do something with the office.
The left has been telling the establishment what’s going wrong for decades. Campaigns that actually speak to the people win elections. The Democrats would rather just shoot the messenger.
This. Every single time the democrats have power they do nothing to cement any kind of progressive or moderate holdouts when inevitably the Republicans win an election. They lost the Supreme Court, they watched the Republicans bend the rules, break the law, try and overthrow the government, and here we are. Biden has had the presidency this whole time and has done precious little to actually push back on anything the Republicans have done. Too concerned with appearing civil and considerate to actually hold senators accountable for their words and actions. If Trump wins this election, he will smile and shake his hand as he transfers power to a literal fascist dictator.
I think that a lot of people have an overblown concept of what Democrats can get past Republican obstructionism, and nebulous concepts like “holding senators accountable” are pretty useless.
The way Democrats get policy past the goal is to inspire the electorate to fight with them. That is where establishment Democrats fall flat. Far from being ready to use an energized electorate, they are actually afraid of one. Their campaigns are literally designed to soothe the American spirit to sleep. That worked when the middle class felt secure, but not anymore. We don’t just want competent administrators who can keep things running, we want reformers and visionaries who aren’t afraid to shake things up. That scares the shit out of the establishment.
Trump was a molotov cocktail aimed at DC, and Biden was a response that said “we don’t hear you, go back to sleep.”
No, but he’s kept and opened more border camps than 45 and is actively facilitating the genocide in Gaza. There are plenty of good things Biden’s done, but shouting at D voters who have suffered a moral injury because of his actions isn’t really going to help anyone.
I think a lesson the DNC definitely learned is never rig a primary if you can’t rig the general. (And at this point, it wouldn’t matter if they did, they’re going to get accused of it by the Right either way)
I basically gave up any notion I had that Hillary was on the level (not that I had much of one) when they did the vote count early that day, Bernie one, so they just pretended he didn’t and did the count again later that same day.
And second, yeah… the Media kept parroting that Hillary was a sure thing (Even as Nate Silver begged people not to trust his own site’s polling)
I actually knew people who skipped voting altogether to go to a “Hillary Won” party… The look of shock on their faces would have been funny if not for the horror of what happened on that night. I think the most tragic was a friend of a friend who was bullied into suicide that night.
Her parents told her that “Trump won” and she’s “Not allowed to pretend she’s a girl anymore”, and made it clear they’d point to Trump as justification to reject her trans identity… She killed herself very shortly after, it was…
Look when Republicans win, the consequences are literally deadly. That’s not a threat, that’s a warning about how dangerous America’s true enemies are.
Seeing as the biggest problem facing the world right now is that there are too many internal combustion engines, you should probably come up with a better metaphor.
You might be able to get the numbers to work if you say that if every leftist who stayed home OR voted third-party OR went to Trump voted for Clinton she’d have won, but that’s incredibly hard to prove and probably relies on some specious assumptions (for example, that every Green Party voter was a disgruntled Democrat). At that point, you’re pulling so many different groups together under a single banner that it’s basically meaningless. You might as well say if women had voted for Hillary abortion would be legal.
I voted for Stein in 2016. My state still went to Clinton by 16 points. If I’d lived in a state that was even remotely competitive, I would have held my nose and voted for Clinton.
It was very brave of you to admit that you voted for Jill Stein, I mean even if she had no chance to win, she’s still a pseudoscience promoter who believes we can use crystals as an alternative to heatlhcare and that vaccines cause autism.
Same, and the number of people who voted for Stein in swing states was not enough to change the election outcome. I support voting for the lesser of two evils (when your vote actually counts), but I’m tired of people blaming leftists when it’s just factually wrong.
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