Around here the only third party we get is Libertarian, so it's a moot point, but I love how 90% of the liberal discourse around voting is "Go vote for the least bad candidate. No not that one, the Democrat."
The Democrat is always the least bad candidate.
Absolutely not true.
Outside of primary elections, it’s more or less true for elections in the US.
Disagree, anyone can get on the ballot as a third party
And they will lose until our system changes. They aren't the best candidate because they will lose. Their stances are basically immaterial until they can manage a W.
It's why ranked choice voting is absolutely the best improvement we can make to our system as a whole. I think it definitely results in third parties being able to put up Ws more frequently because I think more people would put them at the top of the list with a major party candidate second.
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Theodore Flooseveltproud parent of eight beautiful girls and shalmelodorne (which is currently being ruled by a woman (awesome role model for my daughters)) #dornedadRegistered Userregular
Around here the only third party we get is Libertarian, so it's a moot point, but I love how 90% of the liberal discourse around voting is "Go vote for the least bad candidate. No not that one, the Democrat."
The Democrat is always the least bad candidate.
Absolutely not true.
Absolutely true.
Pick your democrat in a primary but in a general all Republicans are outright terrible or will cave to the hive mind and all third party candidates are just a short sighted wasted vote that accomplishes nothing but empowering the wrong people.
A lot of people don't like Joe Manchin, but Joe Manchin would not vote for Mitch McConnell to be Senate Majority leader.
I fucking hated that Phil Bredeson put out a statement in support of Kavanaugh but what am I to do? Not vote or vote for Blackburn?
Jill Stein got more votes than the difference between Hillary and Trump in Michigan and in Pennsylvania and very nearly more than the difference between them in Wisconsin, Gary Johnson absolutely did in all three. The shortsighted ignorance of their voters and people who did not vote put us in the situation we are in today. They are why we are fucked for a generation with Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. They are why we are torturing immigrants and people seeking refugee status and asylum.
If you aren't voting for a Democrat then you're voting for a Republican one way or another. You want them in charge. There's no way around it. That may mean voting for someone you don't think is perfect and I know that feels frustrating, but that is just the effective political reality that you are living in.
i think people who voted for trump probably bear more responsibility here than third party voters
Like to be clear, that sanctimonious "it's time for some game theory" lecturing on how if you don't vote for a democrat (who for a lot of the people you're sneering at, will not be substantially better than the republican) you are de facto voting Republican (which isn't even really accurate) is one of the biggest reasons why people say "fuck it, I'm not voting then." You're not going to win anyone over with that shit. "Your vote doesn't matter, so vote my way instead" is not the sales pitch you think it is.
Around here the only third party we get is Libertarian, so it's a moot point, but I love how 90% of the liberal discourse around voting is "Go vote for the least bad candidate. No not that one, the Democrat."
The Democrat is always the least bad candidate.
Absolutely not true.
The shortsighted ignorance of their voters and people who did not vote put us in the situation we are in today. They are why we are fucked for a generation with Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. They are why we are torturing immigrants and people seeking refugee status and asylum.
If you aren't voting for a Democrat then you're voting for a Republican one way or another. You want them in charge.
Putting aside the rest of your post and the fact I think Jill Stein and Gary Johnson are terrible politicians; this is objectively not true.
People voting third party are not the reason we have Trump in office, and it's absolutely not fair to blame them for all the fucked up nonsense this administration has gotten up to; we have Trump in office because the DNC mishandled the entire election cycle, Hillary's campaign made crucial mistakes in where to make their case in an ill-advised attempt to run up the score, and because the Democrats continued to alienate their base while relying on Trump's ineptitude to deliver them the White House. Not to mention the fact that the Electoral College is an outdated mess that actively undermines our democracy.
If you ignore tacit mistakes the Democrats made in 2016 and refuse to engage with long-term systemic problems in America related to how our political parties try to make their cases for election, then you might have a case that it's all a third party candidate's fault. And even then, it's still kind of a bullshit argument.
When the three closest states that gave Trump the election had third party votes that vastly outnumbered the difference in votes between Clinton and Trump then it is intellectually dishonest to try and say that third party votes did not make the difference.
But why blame the racists when you can blame the real monsters, idealists
The racists depend on the idealists being suckers to stay in power.
They don't "depend" on the 2% of the vote that gets siphoned off, they "depend" on the fucking 48% they get
Goodness you are being willfully silly
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GustavFriend of GoatsSomewhere in the OzarksRegistered Userregular
Guilt tripping and told you so’s rarely are an effective tool to get people in your camp. Even when they are accurate, which here they are highly suspect at best.
GustavFriend of GoatsSomewhere in the OzarksRegistered Userregular
edited November 2018
I would place more blame of Democrat losses on ignoring or writing off large swathes of the country for ages before I would even think about third parties tbh
When the three closest states that gave Trump the election had third party votes that vastly outnumbered the difference in votes between Clinton and Trump then it is intellectually dishonest to try and say that third party votes did not make the difference.
I'm not saying third party votes didn't make the difference; I'm saying that even if they did, placing the entirety of the blame for our current political reality on people voting for third party candidates while ignoring larger systemic issues is irresponsible, if not outright childish.
Around here the only third party we get is Libertarian, so it's a moot point, but I love how 90% of the liberal discourse around voting is "Go vote for the least bad candidate. No not that one, the Democrat."
The Democrat is always the least bad candidate.
Absolutely not true.
Outside of primary elections, it’s more or less true for elections in the US.
This is both moving the goalposts and wrong
It’s a clarification of a much broader point and absolutely not wrong.
People vote third party for many reasons, many of them legitimate ones.
I can understand the concern about splitting the anti-fascist vote but there are other extremely practical concerns as well, like the Dems blithely assuming that anyone to the left of the GOP will hold their nose and vote for them so they don't need to progress their politics etc.
That's a big concern which has led to things like Pelosi quoting Reagan in her acceptance speech and saying they have to work with Trump because what're you gonna do, vote for someone else?
It's not just about this one election and its not a simple game. The Democrat party needs to earn your vote through good policy and leadership too, not sit on its laurels as the Next Worse Option. If you can vote to push them left to pick you up next time, that's a viable tactic.
The people on the further left, often the most vulnerable onea, are not interested in propping up Blue corporate Imperial America over Red Corporate Imperial America, they want another option. And they live the shit day in day out, these people are tough. Would you suck up four years of Trump to get in a genuine leftist or keep the neoliberal two party system going? Some people say "fuck it I'm going for the former" and that's a fair way to play.
Solar on
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Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
Around here the only third party we get is Libertarian, so it's a moot point, but I love how 90% of the liberal discourse around voting is "Go vote for the least bad candidate. No not that one, the Democrat."
The Democrat is always the least bad candidate.
Absolutely not true.
Absolutely true.
Pick your democrat in a primary but in a general all Republicans are outright terrible or will cave to the hive mind and all third party candidates are just a short sighted wasted vote that accomplishes nothing but empowering the wrong people.
A lot of people don't like Joe Manchin, but Joe Manchin would not vote for Mitch McConnell to be Senate Majority leader.
I fucking hated that Phil Bredeson put out a statement in support of Kavanaugh but what am I to do? Not vote or vote for Blackburn?
Jill Stein got more votes than the difference between Hillary and Trump in Michigan and in Pennsylvania and very nearly more than the difference between them in Wisconsin, Gary Johnson absolutely did in all three. The shortsighted ignorance of their voters and people who did not vote put us in the situation we are in today. They are why we are fucked for a generation with Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. They are why we are torturing immigrants and people seeking refugee status and asylum.
If you aren't voting for a Democrat then you're voting for a Republican one way or another. You want them in charge. There's no way around it. That may mean voting for someone you don't think is perfect and I know that feels frustrating, but that is just the effective political reality that you are living in.
LM fucking AO, thank you for being the representative example for my original point.
everyone here has had this (unnecessarily, condescendingly) explained to them by thousands of finger-wagging democrats already
Dems have built their whole message around "Hey, at least we're not Republicans," which isn't actually a unique message, which INVITES third parties to siphon votes because hey, they're not Republicans either
If they had a cohesive identity and goal other than "Be Not Republican," maybe it wouldn't be so easy for third parties to capture tens of thousands of votes at a time
Blaming people with no institutional power instead of the people with a fuckload of it is... Very dumb
But why blame the racists when you can blame the real monsters, idealists
The racists depend on the idealists being suckers to stay in power.
They don't "depend" on the 2% of the vote that gets siphoned off, they "depend" on the fucking 48% they get
Goodness you are being willfully silly
No I am not. Swing states are called swing states for a reason. Does my vote in Tennessee effectively matter? No. I am confident Tennessee is going to reliably vote Republican by a huge margin. But look at states like Texas, Arizona, Georgia, and Florida this year.
Races are being decided by just tens of thousands of votes, even less. There are places where the margins are razor thin and everything matters from voter suppression, to non-voters, to third party voters. There's not much you can do about the first one, except elect Democrats. And the latter two don't help with that either.
So yes. Republicans absolutely love third party candidates that bleed idealistic votes away from Democrats because they aren't perfect enough.
I'd rather yell and scream and protest in the streets against voter id laws and GOP election fuckery than waste the slightest breath complaining about 3rd party votes.
I dunno seems if those are democratic voters then the democrats should work hard on getting them. They work real hard to get republicans to vote for them.
By blaming third-parties for the loss of a candidate that didn't represent their interests to elect a different candidate that also didn't represent their interest is a good way to prop up the Democrats' continued refusal to seriously give a shit about marginalized people. They don't have to when marginalized folks continually get told that advocating for themselves is destroying the country.
I dunno seems if those are democratic voters then the democrats should work hard on getting them. They work real hard to get republicans to vote for them.
At some point people have to take it upon their selves to look further than the end of their own nose when it comes to the reality of their government and who does what when they get into power.
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GustavFriend of GoatsSomewhere in the OzarksRegistered Userregular
For the record I voted entirely down ballot Democrat. And Id wager probably a lot of folks bristling did too. Not all but yeah. This isn’t just third party voters criticizing here.
I dunno seems if those are democratic voters then the democrats should work hard on getting them. They work real hard to get republicans to vote for them.
At some point people have to take it upon their selves to look further than the end of their own nose when it comes to the reality of their government and who does what when they get into power.
This reeks of the "just wait your turn" argument and fuck everything about that
I dunno seems if those are democratic voters then the democrats should work hard on getting them. They work real hard to get republicans to vote for them.
At some point people have to take it upon their selves to look further than the end of their own nose when it comes to the reality of their government and who does what when they get into power.
You realize that talking down to marginalized folk about how they need to hold their nose and vote for the candidate you find personally acceptable is a real shitty thing to do, right?
I don't know you or your life circumstances super well, but I'm pretty sure telling other folks that they should vote for candidates who don't represent their interests because you find the alternative distasteful is not how our democracy is supposed to function.
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Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
edited November 2018
100% of the time, my response to a third party splitting the vote is going to be "shit, I guess the democrat should have worked harder at courting those voters"
I dunno seems if those are democratic voters then the democrats should work hard on getting them. They work real hard to get republicans to vote for them.
At some point people have to take it upon their selves to look further than the end of their own nose when it comes to the reality of their government and who does what when they get into power.
So are they idealist or cynical? Whatever fits to attack them in the moment I suppose.
Remember when a bunch of typically-conservative Latinx voters turned out for Obama, for the Greater Good, and then he deported more people than any president in history
Dang these minorities and their stubborn refusal to see the big picture
I don't know at all, because I was born a lucky bastard, but I'm guessing that the difference between living in some Conservative bible belt red state nightmare if you're gay or black or in a tribe or trans or want an abortion or whatever under Hillary, and living in the same place under Trump, is pretty minimal i.e hellish either way.
So is it any wonder that people say "nah I'll not vote for anyone who is prepared to perpetuate this shit, I'll vote for some who promises a flaming sword of justice, and then at least maybe next time someone who can win will think there might be votes in drawing their own equivalent, or even better, genuinely already be waving theirs around." You're not going to get people in that situation to vote for a different stripe of neoliberal just so middle class white people can feel happier about who is in the Oval Office, and why should you?
Remember when a bunch of typically-conservative Latinx voters turned out for Obama, for the Greater Good, and then he deported more people than any president in history
Dang these minorities and their stubborn refusal to see the big picture
Gotta look beyond your own nose to watch your cousin get deported!
I dunno seems if those are democratic voters then the democrats should work hard on getting them. They work real hard to get republicans to vote for them.
At some point people have to take it upon their selves to look further than the end of their own nose when it comes to the reality of their government and who does what when they get into power.
So are they idealist or cynical? Whatever fits to attack them in the moment I suppose.
I didn't mean to imply cynicism. Just shortsightedness.
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GustavFriend of GoatsSomewhere in the OzarksRegistered Userregular
I’m also not sure I buy the premise that third party voters would reliably vote Dem.
Thing is l, I totally get tactical voting. If people said "not a fan of the Dems but fuuuuuck Trump" then that's defensible too. You gotta do what you think is right. That said, this isn't the be all and end all of voting options, and people who don't do that aren't responsible for the Republicans winning if they aren't voting GOP.
And if it's shortsightedness then what, exactly, is the long term plan?
Hold your nose and vote for the dems always... so that the dems learn the valuable lesson of "hey we must be doing everything perfectly, after all we won!"
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And they will lose until our system changes. They aren't the best candidate because they will lose. Their stances are basically immaterial until they can manage a W.
It's why ranked choice voting is absolutely the best improvement we can make to our system as a whole. I think it definitely results in third parties being able to put up Ws more frequently because I think more people would put them at the top of the list with a major party candidate second.
i think people who voted for trump probably bear more responsibility here than third party voters
The racists depend on the idealists being suckers to stay in power.
Putting aside the rest of your post and the fact I think Jill Stein and Gary Johnson are terrible politicians; this is objectively not true.
People voting third party are not the reason we have Trump in office, and it's absolutely not fair to blame them for all the fucked up nonsense this administration has gotten up to; we have Trump in office because the DNC mishandled the entire election cycle, Hillary's campaign made crucial mistakes in where to make their case in an ill-advised attempt to run up the score, and because the Democrats continued to alienate their base while relying on Trump's ineptitude to deliver them the White House. Not to mention the fact that the Electoral College is an outdated mess that actively undermines our democracy.
If you ignore tacit mistakes the Democrats made in 2016 and refuse to engage with long-term systemic problems in America related to how our political parties try to make their cases for election, then you might have a case that it's all a third party candidate's fault. And even then, it's still kind of a bullshit argument.
PSN: Robo_Wizard1
They don't "depend" on the 2% of the vote that gets siphoned off, they "depend" on the fucking 48% they get
Goodness you are being willfully silly
Maybe democrats should have made more people want to vote for them
PSN: Robo_Wizard1
I'm not saying third party votes didn't make the difference; I'm saying that even if they did, placing the entirety of the blame for our current political reality on people voting for third party candidates while ignoring larger systemic issues is irresponsible, if not outright childish.
It’s a clarification of a much broader point and absolutely not wrong.
I can understand the concern about splitting the anti-fascist vote but there are other extremely practical concerns as well, like the Dems blithely assuming that anyone to the left of the GOP will hold their nose and vote for them so they don't need to progress their politics etc.
That's a big concern which has led to things like Pelosi quoting Reagan in her acceptance speech and saying they have to work with Trump because what're you gonna do, vote for someone else?
It's not just about this one election and its not a simple game. The Democrat party needs to earn your vote through good policy and leadership too, not sit on its laurels as the Next Worse Option. If you can vote to push them left to pick you up next time, that's a viable tactic.
The people on the further left, often the most vulnerable onea, are not interested in propping up Blue corporate Imperial America over Red Corporate Imperial America, they want another option. And they live the shit day in day out, these people are tough. Would you suck up four years of Trump to get in a genuine leftist or keep the neoliberal two party system going? Some people say "fuck it I'm going for the former" and that's a fair way to play.
everyone here has had this (unnecessarily, condescendingly) explained to them by thousands of finger-wagging democrats already
If they had a cohesive identity and goal other than "Be Not Republican," maybe it wouldn't be so easy for third parties to capture tens of thousands of votes at a time
Blaming people with no institutional power instead of the people with a fuckload of it is... Very dumb
I realize I'm not going to convince anyone who reliably votes third party because I know its really insulting and infuriating to hear.
No I am not. Swing states are called swing states for a reason. Does my vote in Tennessee effectively matter? No. I am confident Tennessee is going to reliably vote Republican by a huge margin. But look at states like Texas, Arizona, Georgia, and Florida this year.
Races are being decided by just tens of thousands of votes, even less. There are places where the margins are razor thin and everything matters from voter suppression, to non-voters, to third party voters. There's not much you can do about the first one, except elect Democrats. And the latter two don't help with that either.
So yes. Republicans absolutely love third party candidates that bleed idealistic votes away from Democrats because they aren't perfect enough.
At some point people have to take it upon their selves to look further than the end of their own nose when it comes to the reality of their government and who does what when they get into power.
This reeks of the "just wait your turn" argument and fuck everything about that
You realize that talking down to marginalized folk about how they need to hold their nose and vote for the candidate you find personally acceptable is a real shitty thing to do, right?
I don't know you or your life circumstances super well, but I'm pretty sure telling other folks that they should vote for candidates who don't represent their interests because you find the alternative distasteful is not how our democracy is supposed to function.
since that is their job after all
So are they idealist or cynical? Whatever fits to attack them in the moment I suppose.
Dang these minorities and their stubborn refusal to see the big picture
So is it any wonder that people say "nah I'll not vote for anyone who is prepared to perpetuate this shit, I'll vote for some who promises a flaming sword of justice, and then at least maybe next time someone who can win will think there might be votes in drawing their own equivalent, or even better, genuinely already be waving theirs around." You're not going to get people in that situation to vote for a different stripe of neoliberal just so middle class white people can feel happier about who is in the Oval Office, and why should you?
Gotta look beyond your own nose to watch your cousin get deported!
Better quote Reagan I guess
PSN: Robo_Wizard1
I didn't mean to imply cynicism. Just shortsightedness.
Hold your nose and vote for the dems always... so that the dems learn the valuable lesson of "hey we must be doing everything perfectly, after all we won!"
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