I still feel like the dnc is going to lean heavy into Buttigieg. He’s young, an eloquent speaker, a sharp debater. He clearly is down to play ball with the dnc establishment as they want him to (stepped aside for Biden to get a cabinet position) , and they hope that he’s baggage free enough (Kamala and her Marijuana prosecutions) that progressives will vote for him. Yes, he’s gay, and the hardcore magats won’t like that, but I think older suburban voters would rather have someone sane that’s gay than insane and straight.
Really, how do we get viable third parties? How do we change the voting system to not have " spoiler candidates "? The binary is rotting us.
How? Probably not via voting in 2028 or holding a sign. As in, not within the pre-existing failing/failed system. This one isn’t gonna recover.
After the people are in charge of the smouldering ashes, you can start from scratch! The one upside. Assuming USA doesn’t just submit passively and end up like Russia with a broken people for centuries, which is what I’m expecting.
Copy Canadians. Including the limits on campaign length, so your news cycle isn’t so endlessly exhausting. No wonder 1/3rd have totally tuned out. IMO scrap FPTP like we didn’t have the balls to do.
I guess that’s the crux of the question: does it really require smoldering ashes to get this done? Entrenched power is obviously tough times, but within the system we currently have what are the possibilities?
1.) Federally and statewide, you’ve got to vote for the party that isn’t making Ranked Choice or Star voting illegal, for starters.
2.) Locally, third parties have to actually run local candidates. They are a vanity party otherwise.
If you can’t manage those two things, math & chaos theory guarantees that you’ll never have a 3rd party.
You go out and work in the primaries.
Look at AOC. The guy she ousted was a mainstay of the NY Democratic Party for decades.
If you wait until the general election you get no input.
But that’s not the end of it as this still maintains the binary. First, what are the measures for getting third parties on the ballot? Second, how do we get rid of the fptp system so that we can actually vote for candidates we like, rather than the lesser of two evils?
Edit: I responded too quickly at work, and fixed it up later.
Not by going directly for a moonshot at the presidency. You spend years getting people involved in local politics, then work your way up. State and local governments have power, even if it’s “boring”.
That or a coup or other violent, abrupt, wildcards.
Local government isn’t boring. It’s infuriating. It’s like if you gave the worst HOAs a police force.
Whatever it is, most people don’t engage with it.
I tried to and then realized that they can’t actually help with the main things I want changed, and that they’re just sad little kings of sad little hills.
how do we get viable third parties?
By having a third party that’s willing to put in the work and do things the right way.
So, instead of having a do-nothing candidate like Jill Stein who shows up right before every election, then disappears again after only obtaining a half of a single percent of the total votes, we’d have to have a third party that started focusing on winning local/state elections. That would allow them to start having more than ZERO members in the houses of Congress, which is currently the case. And once they have members in Congress, from various districts around the country, then they’d have a real chance at running a presidential candidate who can win.
Make no mistake. Anyone that currently votes for a 3rd party candidate for president is an utter fool. And there are A LOT of them on Lemmy. A 3rd party cannot win. They are nowhere near winning. Because they haven’t put in the work to create a coalition to actually start having a presence in our government.
Don’t neglect that Stein was a Russian plant to spoil the election. Follow the money and Stein’s activities pre and post election.
Have you considered just having like a local group organized around something like pro-labor or just the community in general.
Elect officers or organize how you think best. Call meeting invite guess to speak to issues you all like. When elections come around try to solicit questions to all the campaigns. Have the organization vote as a group on who to endorse or not at all.
If it’s worth the effort, work the campaigns for the folks you all endorse.
More people did that stuff then starting a third party in state would be easy. From there you go forward. If you do well or brand then you may have others in their region wanting to do the same. National two parties are federations of these groups with more binding Charters.
Many States have these hurdles for recognized political parties but they can’t stop folks from just organizing how they want.
What you need is a Bernie Sanders funding his own political party, then recruit the AOC and likes. Then they constantly for 20 years present on themselves and refuse to compromise with Democrats and call them on their bullshit whatsoever.
But idk why they didn’t do it sad for you
If you don’t like trump and you didn’t vote, then you’re to blame.
My country has compulsory voting so nobody has an excuse
Is you didn’t vote for Harris, you’re to blame.
No, it’s the Republicans who are to blame. The Democratic leadership is to blame for not putting up a candidate or policies that the voters wanted.
It’s always amazing to me that people will blame the people who couldn’t stomach to vote for the Democrats, rather than getting mad at the Democratic leadership for being so awful that people can’t stomach to vote for them.
Yeah I agree. I see a lot of folks out here victim blaming rather than critiquing the folks with the most power.
True! One is an ocean of random people with their own beliefs, reasons and personal choices. The other is an institution. An organization with a plan. A plan they wrote themselves. A plan they get detailed statistics and polling data on. A plan in which they saw what they needed to do to win and chose not to, effectively betting on anti trump sentiment to keep them from doing the thing parties in their position are supposed to do. Concede to the people and make concessions. Instead they said “status quo, steady as she goes” mid genocide, mid rent crisis, post covid and they lost that bet. No one is to blame other than the gamblers who played power politics and lost to fascists.
The people are not an organized voting block able to strategically maneuver their votes. That’s what a party is for. That’s it’s whole purpose. And the Democrats failed as a party in that election due to their inability to stop committing a genocide, to stop pandering to mid right voters via radio silence on trans issues and active abandonment of immigrants via the adoption of 2016 trump immigration policy.
I mean come the fuck on, she was talking about FINISHING THE FUCKING WALL, the thing we all agreed was the dumbest thing ever. What do you want when the party runs someone like that?
I get you people who wanna blame the leftist in your life or on the Internet you saw saying they wouldn’t be voting. I get that you blame them. But you should blame the party who thought they could win without conceding anything whatsoever to any of the marginalized groups who had no other choice. They learned that there in fact was a 3rd choice and now we all suffer the Democrats incompetence
“They will put up x candidates I dislike”
Vote in the fucking primaries then, holy shit. Make a progressive win the primaries for the love of God please
Back in the day, Abraham Lincoln did not vow to end slavery if elected.
Frederick Douglas worked for Lincoln, because Lincoln was the best candidate.
Get ready for the next DNC nominee no longer being the “lesser evil”!
Aoc said she would stay in the HOUSE, felt like she could do more there than the presidency, or governership.
Friendly reminder that the goal behind posting memes like this is to instill a sense of cynicism and discourage political participation from people who hold progressive values. A key indicator here is the use of the nefarious-but-nebulous “they” which is commonly used in antisemitic-coded “globalist” or “cabal” conspiracy theories.
Democracy in America is unequal and unfair but the “deep state” the way conspiracy theorist portray it is simply not real.
This isn’t trying to discourage people from voting, it’s trying to send a warning: “If you keep putting in terrible candidates and running on terrible policies, you are going to keep getting shitty turnouts”
Accusing OP of posting crypto-antisemitism for using the word “they” in the title of a post that has an extremely clear, literally labeled target (the DNC, if you look at the second panel) feels extremely disingenuous.
It also has nothing to do with discouraging political participation, but rather encouraging more active political participation in processes outside of simply voting intermittently. When both choices offered are dogshit, or no choice is presented in the first place, the point isn’t to say “all hope is lost give up” but rather “this is broken in a way that voting will not fix.”
When the DNC is actively doing things such as obfuscating the very clear decline of the sitting president in order to bypass the primary process and install Harris, or ratfucking someone like Bernie via super delegates, media control, and so on in '16, this was not done by some “nefarious-but-nebulous they”. It’s very explicitly the DNC. Harris was one of the least popular candidates in '20, one of the first to drop from the race, and her term as vice president did very little to ingratiate her to those she ostensibly represents.
Whatever it is that needs to happen in order for people to get the sort of representation and principled opposition to fascism that most of them actually want, the DNC itself is obviously highly resistant or outright incapable of providing it. Voting alone will not fix this.
(edited '16 to '20 for the Harris primary drop out, realized I’d gotten dates mixed up and double checked afterwards to confirm)
You overcooked this one dawg. Just an easy dunk on the incompetence of the DNC.
Ah, the classic “Dems would have won if they ran to the left” + “Left-wingers couldn’t have ushered in the fascist; we’re too small to make a difference!”
Okay but the point is they should’ve been able to run a wet paper bag against Trump and win.
Dems chose someone worse than a wet paper bag.
It wasn’t the wrong candidate, it was the wrong campaign.
The Dems stood in front of an electorate crippled by 4 years of rising cost of living and said “Look how good the economy is! GDP is up! Employment is up!” The electorate said “We can’t afford eggs,” and the Dems said “Shut the fuck up our economy is great how dare you say otherwise you worthless peasant!”
The Dems never stopped to consider that high GDP is meaningless if all the money ends up in the hands of billionaires and high employment is meaningless if everyone is working three jobs to make rent. Biden refused to allow any daylight between himself and Kamala on any issue, so they ended up just presenting a new wrapper on the same shit sandwich.
Trump meanwhile said “I hear you, everything is too expensive. I’ll solve it by blaming immigrants and doing some magic involving something called tariffs that I promise will make everything cheaper.” Now, none of that is actually a solution, but that didn’t matter, because when you yell “Help, I’m drowning!” and one person says “No you’re not”, while the other says “Yes you are and it’s because of brown people…” you don’t really listen to anything past the “Yes you are,” because the point is they apparently want to help you and the other person doesn’t. Trump didn’t need to have workable solutions, because the Dems forfeited the entire contest before it even started. Trump just had to show up and sit in the chair.
I dunno. Pretty sure a wet paper bag would have been better than a felon rapist traitor who’s shitting on our Constitution and tanking our economy.
🔴
We have two corporate parties, the status quo and the controlled opposition. They occasionally switch labels but until we get the corporate out, we will never have a real choice.
Silly to think our votes will ever count again
If the fascists truly believed your votes don’t/won’t count in the future, they wouldn’t be working so hard to take away voting rights.
I think we’re dangerously close to a point where voting won’t matter, but we’re not there yet. Look at the Wisconsin Supreme Court race a few weeks ago. Elon Musk got involved and personally spent more than $25 million to try to buy the race. He was directly paying off voters to vote for the Republican. There was nearly $100 million spent on the race, an overwhelming majority of which was spent by/for the Republican.
Yet the Democrat won with like 10 percentage points more of the vote. She blew the Musk funded fascist out of the water. It wasn’t even close.
If voting really didn’t matter at all, do you really think that would have been the outcome?
If voting really didn’t matter at all, would they be actively trying to strip voting rights away from women right now?
Don’t fall for the fascist propaganda. Voting still matters. It’s not the only thing that matters. We should all be way more engaged in politics than merely voting. But voting still matters, too.
All good points. I hope you’re right but our civil rights are being stripped very fast
We can’t put up another woman for a decade or two at least. This country is too misogynistic to elect a woman.
I’m not sure that’s true. While yes, America does have a sexist problem, Hillary won the popular vote.
I think the DNC just keeps putting up bad candidates, some of whom happen to be women
You mean Hilary. This is clearly the chance to beat that dead horse again!
