3rd party voters didn't swing a single swing state. That is a demonstrable fact. It's time to stop punching down.
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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People will, in a single breath, tell people to exercise their right to vote in democracy and also that voting for the person/party that best represents them is wrong if it's not a Big Party.
The issue in the US is that it IS against your political interests to vote for anyone but the least bad option.
The first past the post system simply doesn't allow for a diverse political landscape.
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Usually in a democracy the people are represented by parties which they align most with. In my country I can vote for one of seven, which get proportionally represented by a number of seats in parliament. The winning party rarely has more than 50% of the vote, if they do, all the losing parties will become the opposition, and if they don't they have to combine with another party to have at least 50% of the votes. This assures that the winning party or coalition still has to negotiate their position and decisions every single day. If one party would want the power the current administration in the US has they would probably need 80 or 90% of the votes.
Is it complicated? Yes. Does it make sure the people are represented? Also yes.
In the US if a state votes 51% one way, 100% of the electoral votes go to that party, causing a reality where a party could get less than a majority vote and still win. This alone is proof that the people are not fairly represented and isn't a fair democracy. In local elections you'll have a much more nuanced choice but at a federal level it's antiquated to say the least.
I will say that in a fair democracy, you should vote for your representative, in the US you have no such choice. Be it by living in one state counts as more than another, or the fact that a third party has little to no representation post election.
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Yeah, that's right. You have the freedom to make bad choices and the government can't stop you. But other people can still make fun of you. People calling you dumb because of your bad decisions isn't a violation of your rights.
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Rofl, victim complex much? "Punching down" like you're some repressed minority for having shitty prioritization skills. Jfc
Third party voters are in fact a repressed minority
They are the minority
And their beliefs are repressed with constant anti-third party voting sentiments
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Dont you know?
The people who say they dont want to support genocide but actively choose the worst of the genocide-related options are the real victims here.
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Its so hilarious how this ridiculously toxic culture around blaming third party was developed, worked on for months, and then when it came time, the impact of third parties was so utterly irrelevant as to be laughable.
The real beef was with stay home single EDIT issue folks who would otherwise be Dem voters.
Edit for clarity: the above group are historical, nominally Dem voters, who stayed home abnormally this election.
3rd party "voices" were annoying because they only punched at Dems, never at republicans. Interestingly, a few of them migrated to libertarian and conservative instances now
Don't blame the people staying home. Blame the Democrats for doing nothing to earn those votes but say "Orange Man Bad". They did the exact same thing in 2016. Democrats ran on maintaining the status quo at a time when no one is happy with the status quo.
The Harris campaign should have campaigned on issues that would attract progressives and others on the left. Instead they tried to get conservatives to leave their cult by touting the endorsement of Dick fucking Cheney and his incredibly unpopular daughter and saying they'll close the borders and continue funding Netanyahu's genocide. It's like Harris didn't want to win.
If Democrats want to win they need to stop being Republicans.
Edit but in the spirit of conversation: Biden AND Harris are lame candidates that absolutely only maintain the status quo. As you say, voters are unhappy with that.
Edit restructure
I disagree with the conclusion that OMB isn't valid reasoning. But it's just one dudes opinion that I've laid out in the thread.
Orange man bad was more then enough to pick a rock with a smiley face on it as alternative
People will learn the consequences, regardless of what brought them in our kept them home.
If folks fundamentally can't play out the math on 2 choices in a FPTP where one is a serial rapist, anti abortion candidate, who is on record for wanting to accelerate Gaza, then I dunno what to say on that. "Status quo" starts looking pretty shiny, which is terrible, but the world we live in.
But now we have trump, and a lot of folks get to say "they didn't attract me"
Orange man bad was more then enough to pick a rock with a smiley face on it as alternative
It's a logical argument and it's a correct argument. Unfortunately it's demonstrably not an effective argument, especially when it's all you're doing. The same thing happened in 2016 with Clinton thinking she was owed votes because Trump would be (and was, and will be again) a disaster for the US. Yet they still went with the same strategy anyway.
I say this as someone who did make the "correct" choice of voting blue despite my moral objections to a lot of what she was saying. We will now all see the consequences of only barely trying to win an election against fascists.
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This is all just the same toxic projection that I've been pointing out in this thread.
You want to blame third parties but there is basically 0, practically negative evidence for it.
No, I haven't discussed 3rd parties at all in my comment. I said 3rd party "voices", reading comprehension meaning "commenters/online personalities" because I noted their movement to new instances.
Edit also note I had a typo in my above "single party" to 'single issue"
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None of us would "otherwise be dem voters". What part of "I'm not voting for you because I don't support your policies" did you not understand?
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Well election is over, the time to start building up a third party is NOW
Didn't Trump basically promise "no more elections if I win"?
Oh yeah, he did. A few times, even.
Then stop complaining about third parties forevermore. If you honestly believed that was our last election, then focus on direct action.
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No. The time is to push the Democrats further right to gain Republican voters. Stop trying to get third parties to happen.
I almost thought this wasn't sarcastic, close one
The last panel should be the deer bumming around on the couch instead of voting, with some kind of line like "the trees just don't excite me'.
Oh I'm sure the comments on this post will be nice and calm
I'll never understand why people refuse to blame the powerful rich people running the Democrats for not drawing people in with good leftist policy.
First mistake is believing Democrats are leftist. They're also right of moderate, but not quite as right as Republicans. Libertarians are also not really on the spectrum as we know it either. We have no liberal parties that are capable of making a difference.
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What if the deer lives in one of the 43 states that do not matter?
Supposedly if every single liberal-leaning person were to vote Democrat, they (edit: some of them) would have become swing states.
But I think it's more that people just want an easy target to punch, which makes people feel more in control. Like, it's not our glorious leader(TM)'s fault, it's "those" people, over there. And the number of Internet searches for what happened to Joe Biden on the very morning of the election should legit be worrisome to us all imho...
Ngl, I was kinda impressed by storing told about Kamala's campaigning and dedication. (Or was that simply part of the spin machine?) Maybe she could - no, surely she could have done better? But she also gave it as much as "the establishment" would allow, and came up short.
So now we can either roll up our sleeves and try to fix things... oh who is anyone kidding we'll just take whatever handouts we are given, as always.
I don't understand why the USA doesn't use preferential voting like Australia does: https://www.chickennation.com/voting/
Instead of just picking one candidate/party, you number them based on your preferences. First all the #1 votes are counted. If no party gets the majority (over 50%) of votes, the party with the least number of votes is removed, and for everyone that voted for them, their #2 votes are used. Repeat until someone wins.
Independents (what you call "third-party" in the USA) can win, and any party that gets over 4% of the #1 votes gets election funding from the government (a fixed amount per vote).
Because both of the major parties benefit from excluding the competition.
It's kind of like, if your car won't start, you need to take it to a mechanic, but because it won't start, you can't drive it to the mechanic. We need to change how our elections work because FPTP prevents us from implementing the policies we want, but it's precisely because it prevents us from implementing the policies we want that we're unable to change it. It's a catch-22.
We're too corrupt to allow the competition :)
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Is this why coffee is often served as molten lava? Because all yall blow on your coffee before every sip? I despise all of you. I just want to drink coffee like any other drink
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