this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
49 points (100.0% liked)
Politics
10181 readers
184 users here now
In-depth political discussion from around the world; if it's a political happening, you can post it here.
Guidelines for submissions:
- Where possible, post the original source of information.
- If there is a paywall, you can use alternative sources or provide an archive.today, 12ft.io, etc. link in the body.
- Do not editorialize titles. Preserve the original title when possible; edits for clarity are fine.
- Do not post ragebait or shock stories. These will be removed.
- Do not post tabloid or blogspam stories. These will be removed.
- Social media should be a source of last resort.
These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Actually, write-ins are a thing, so you literally can vote for anyone else than him and Trump.
This rhetoric that a vote for someone who represents you is a waste if they do not have a realistic chance to win, would equally apply to an unequal match-up of Dem vs Rep, but it's never deployed that way; it's only used to argue against smaller candidates. You never see people arguing that Democrats should have voted for a Reagan because a vote for Mondale, who had a 0% chance to win (he only won one state- his home state of Minnesota), was "a waste".
Voting has to be about political representation, otherwise Democracy is just a veneer for selecting a plutocrat or oligarch to be the new figurehead for a while. Half of Trump's appeal was his (fake) rhetoric that he wasn't that, which Republican voters actually acknowledged they'd been selecting for years. Too many Democrats have yet to admit this to themselves about our party-preferred candidates. Obama won with record numbers, both terms, because he wasn't this.
Obama was one of those '0% chance' candidates early in the primaries according to political pundits in 2008, too.
No one has a chance to win until people actually vote for them.
The problem is that this specific election is an election that will decide if we become a Hungrian illiberal democracy or continue being able to vote. If you don’t vote for Biden, and yes this is true, Trump will win because anyone slightly in his direction will vote for him. There will be no write in campaign for Romney. You can’t have change in a system that has had Project 2025 fully implemented.
That was also the rationale last time. It's still going to be the argument next election. And the one after that. It's not specific to this election at all. After Trump, there's always going to be a DeSantis or Ramaswamy waiting in the wings, because we're not doing anything about the root cause, which is Republican voters. Trump didn't make Republicans racist religious nutjobs, he just showed them that they can choose their candidates over the RNC, and the DNC is terrified we'll figure that out too.
Republicans being a threat to democracy is the new eternal argument that the DNC will make in order to goad you into only voting for their candidates, because they have the money to ensure that their candidates will always have the biggest campaign warchests, the most name recognition, and the most impressive political resumes, and thus will always be "the best candidates to defeat [insert name](R)".
On paper, Obama had no chance in hell (and DNC lapdog pundits made a point of saying as much, loudly, when he started his campaign). In reality, he got more votes than any Democrat president before him (and more than Hillary, after him).
Just because something is true for a long time doesn’t make it false. Just because you see a train moving doesn’t mean it’s going to stop if you just stand on the tracks
Did I ever suggest that Republicans aren't destroying democracy? The problem is that the DNC is intentionally setting themselves up as the only alternative choice, which is also destroying democracy.
Democracy is the ability of the voters to direct the government, and they are intentionally quashing that in favor of their political picks.
"Vote for us, or we let them hurt you (while we work to make sure you can't vote for anyone else)" isn't a political pitch in a democracy, it's racketeering.
If Democrat politicians actually believed that the US was going to turn into a dictatorship under Trump, they would be doing much more than just hyping up Biden, because if Trump became a dictator, they would all be first against the wall.
But they're literally doing nothing other than telling people to vote for them. Why? Because they don't actually believe it, they just know that you do, and they're more than happy to have you come on here and try to browbeat others into giving them another term of paychecks.
That's why they were more concerned with winning the primary than actually putting up a strong candidate against Trump; actual progressives are a threat to their gravy train, while Republicans just want to ride it with them.