You are never going to have a perfect candidate on every issue to represent everyone left of fascism in the US. And this line of "run a better candidate" just means you never actually cared in the first place. Enjoy the fascism from your high horse.
Just gutted by the amount of people that would rather watch the world burn than have to vote for someone that didn't match their 1 issue 100%, and knowing the alternative was 100% worse on all options.
Trump is going to have/help Israel just erase Gaza and the Palestinians as a people, there will be no need for any "solution". And this is apparently what all these people sitting out wanted in the end. Hope they enjoy the view from their high horse.
Have you learned nothing in the past 9 years? These people have been telling us who they are and what they plan to do, BELIEVE THEM! Giving them the benefit of the doubt or saying they are joking is just allowing them to continue to move the goal posts. We just gave the Presidency to a man that has been telling us he wants Nazi generals, cops to have a "purge day" of American citizens, wants to use the US military and National Guard against citizens and he 100% meant all of it. And we just granted him the power because the media and apologists continue to give these Fascist assholes cover.
/rant
Yes, keeping the power is the reason both sides do it. And even if a non partisan group were to approve them, the GOP has been messing with them to suppress minorities and then just dragging their feet in changing them, or changing but in the same bad way and then running out the clock until it's "too close to the election to change the maps now". Then if they change afterwards they already got what they wanted, and then just rinse and repeat next time.
Yep, it's called Gerrymandering.
Edit - The illegal part is when Republicans make less predominantly minority districts than they are required to by the Voting Rights Act.
You do have to look at the merch tables with a grain of salt though, as many of them know Trump is in a dementia spiral and losing his marbles. They also know that his rally goers will buy just about anything and are more than happy to pretend for their $$$.
I fear it starts with messing with vaccinations and we have long dead diseases come back, but then shifts to other things, like "you don't need those meds for depression because I'm not a Dr. but I know better than them and they are trying to poison you". Then they are sending people off to for profit torture "treatment" camps like the rich do for the "troubled kids" now.
In the end you have people in essentially old school psych facilities where they aren't really treated, they are just "out of the way", and when they die they put them in the mass grave out back.
Kinda sad to see Katie Porter at #1 with over $10m while the next closest candidate is just under $3m.
Edit - Having only known her for the charts she makes to school Republicans I had no idea she earned her law degree under Professor Warren (when she was teaching at Harvard), and was later given the position of monitor for a nationwide bank mortgage settlement by Harris when she was AG of CA. Small world.
I saw footage of him from his last rally and the contrast of his bright orange face to his tiny bright white hands was alarming.
Except he has more disdain for his supporters than anyone else, even the "radical left" that he puts on a show about disliking. But his cult are the ones he lies to, grifts away all their money on a deluge of just garbage with his "brand" on it, and just thinks they are the dumbest and most useless people. He has made comments about them not having lives and being unstable.
“I saw him when the cameras were off … Trump mocks his supporters. He calls them basement dwellers. On a hospital visit one time when people were dying in the ICU, he was mad that the cameras were not watching him.”
She continued: “He used to tell me: ‘It doesn’t matter what you say, Stephanie, say it enough and people will believe you.’”
-- Stephanie Grisham, Donald Trump’s former press secretary
Source: Trump calls his supporters ‘basement dwellers’, says former press secretary
I would challenge this thought that we need to wait for the DNC to change before we can stand up to fascism. Everyone left of Trump's fascist right GOP is essentially lumped together in the same bucket, and there is only one Dem Presidential nominee to represent that enormous amount of people with vastly different feelings and takes on things.
The ability for everyone in a group that large to feel 100% like they are getting everything they want in a candidate is really really small. The one thing that should be something everyone this side of fascism should be able to agree upon is democracy is something we should be looking to preserve no matter what. And we should look to elect candidates down ballot to help move the needle left (or maintain the "norm" or whatever your jam is) and help drive the change we would like to see long term. Waiting for the DNC to just up and change how you want isn't going to happen without a push from below by the people electing representatives set on making that change.
And seeing a candidate that doesn't 100% represent all your issues, or your one BIG issue, and sitting out the election (with that effect trickling down ballot) or doing a protest vote just hurts everyone. And now it means we are going to be pulled hard to the right and is going to take an enormous amount of work (years) just to get back to where we were, let alone where we want to be.