[Transcription]
tinymoves
to be honest it would make me a lot more comfortable if you guys would show a little concern about trump running for president again. Do not inbox me and say you don’t like joe biden omg i already know. but can we show a little concern. about donald trump. being the republican candidate for president. for the third election in a row.
parentheticalaside
Also maybe you can focus a little more on how Trump won’t stop fucking running and a little less on the incumbent president running for reelection once, which is the natural path that is not at all weird. Like, the fact that it’s these same two guys again is Trump’s fault, not Biden’s. What Biden
is doing is normal. What Trump is doing is very much not.
theroguefeminist
Going to come out here and say this: if you do not vote for Biden, you are voting for Trump. | literally do not care what horde of leftists with the memory span of a goldfish come for me for saying this. A third party vote is no vote. No vote is a vote for Trump. If you care at all about saving democracy in this country long enough to elect someone better than Biden, vote for Biden. Not voting for Biden is a vote for a dictator and a vote for the end of democracy. As bad as things are, we saw they can get so much worse. And | do not want to hear the same people saying not to vote for Biden crying when shit hits the fan if Trump wins.
If you care about trans people’s rights. If you care about abortion rights. If you care about immigrants’ rights. If you care about global warming. Literally any issue under the sun, will be made worse by Trump in every conceivable way imaginable.
| have a hard time fathoming how people are
still saying Trump and Biden are the same after everything that has happened. A quick Google
on Biden’s policies on every progressive issue vs Trump will tell you the opposite. Yeah, Biden is a shitty moderate liberal who supports Israel. So
is literally every single other US president that has ever fucking existed. Voting for a third party candidate will not help Palestine. It will literally only escalate things and make them even worse if Trump wins. In every conceivable way imaginable.
If you aren’t going to vote, then at least have the decency to stop pretending like what you are doing has any remotely positive impact. It does not. There is nothing virtuous or admirable about abstaining (and a third party vote is abstaining). We went through this in 2016. | thought people would have learned by now. But here we are again in 2024. If Trump wins, blood is on your hands and you didn’t do even the one easiest thing you could do to stop it from happening.
synnefa-kyria
The DNC was never going to nominate another primary candidate over the incumbent, the sitting president, who is in charge of the entire Democratic party.
| don’t think the sun shines out of Biden’s ass, guys, but please look at the bigger picture here.
Our presidential election is not ranked choice and is not won by a majority of over 50%. It is a two party system that is won by plurality; whoever gets the biggest slice of votes, even if it’s under 50%, is the winner and they take all. First the district, then the state, then the Electoral College. This is why third parties have little influence. This is why voting for them or not at all benefits the opposition. This is why Trump won in 2016.
A 2024 Trump victory is an not something we as a nation can bear - it’s bad for us, and it is unseeakabl bad for Palestine because Trump’s a far-right lunatic lacking morals and human compassion.
Not voting for Biden, third party or abstaining, will split the vote and cause a spoiler in favor
of Trump. See the 2000 Georee W Bush vs Al Gore election for reference. Take a long look at those razor thin mareins. Al Gore lost Florida
by 0.009%. Hell, walk down memory lane to the 2016 election. States where Trump won by a margin of 3% or less - Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin - would have won Hillary the Electoral College, 316 to 224,
We cannot fore et Russia’s war on Ukraine either. Do you honestly think Trump will want to continue US aid to Ukraine? Really? The
guy who’s all buddy-buddy with Putin and has Russia-supporting followers? He’s been vocal about his lack of enthusiasm for supporting Ukraine, and has threatened to hamstring NATO - Ukraine’s principal ally - should the situation escalate further.
Russia is angling towards a return of the Soviet Union’s former territory - look at Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia (the country). Appeasement is not an option - that’s a proven failure. A possible return to the Cold War status quo is horrifying, and there’s every reason to believe they won’t stop there, setting off a multitude of geopolitical tinder boxes. God above forbid any one of the parties involved sets off a nuclear bomb, tactical or ICBM.
24,670 notes
Realistically, no. Because it’s not a game of chance. Theoretically anyone could. Practically you live in a system where voting for small parties is punished by the lower of two evils losing votes and the greater of two evils not.
Following scenario: let’s imagine the Mildly Evil™ Party and the Very Evil™ Party had a votes split of 55:45. Mildly Evil™ would win. Now we introduce party C, that is neither. The party can either appeal primarily to Mildly Evil™ voters or Very Evil™ voters. Very Evil™ voters are currently, overall, not unhappy with their party/candidate, since they like how evil their party is, while Mildly Evil™ voters don’t like that their party is as evil as it currently is, so it’s safe to assume, it’s gonna be the Not Evil™ Party. Now, Very Evil™ voters are not significantly going to vote for the Not Evil™ Party. Maybe a little less than a tenth of them will. And maybe a little less than half of Mildly Evil™ voters might vote something else, thus the Not Evil™ Party. The result would be Not Evil™ with 30%, Mildly Evil™ with 30% and Very Evil™ with 40%. Very Evil™ wins, the rest lose. Only the one with the most votes can have power. Your votes for Not Evil™ made Very Evil™ gain that power. And that’s including the unrealistic notion, that you could get half of all Mildly Evil™ voters to vote for a new and unproven party at all.
Now, let’s take a better scenario based on different set of rules (aka the rules most other democratic countries live by, where parties need an absolute majority to govern): let’s take those three parties again and the same results, Not Evil™ with 30%, Mildly Evil™ with 30% and Very Evil™ with 40%. Now, Very Evil™ have the most votes but they don’t have the absolute majority, so they cannot rule alone. They’d have to find a partner. However both Mildly Evil™ and Not Evil™ would never work with them, because they are too evil for either. However, Mildly Evil™ is just about not evil enough, that Not Evil™ would consider working with them. Together they have 60% of votes and thus the absolute majority, forming the Almost Not Evil™ coalition for that term, building a foundation for Not Evil™ to grow until the next election.
This is the only way how voting for a small party can realistically work. Of course, usually there are more than three parties. Here in Germany, for example, there are more than a dozen, most of them too small to matter, thus there being a 5% hurdle for small parties, so the government is not so split it couldn’t function (that’s part of what killed the Weimar Republic and helped the Nazi Party to gain power in the 1930s). There are usually between 5-7 parties large enough enter the government and there are usually two to three parties in a governing coalition. It’s not a perfect solution but it gives smaller parties a fighting chance. In a system like the US, where a party just about needs to have a simple majority to win, not an absolute majority, smaller, independent parties almost never even have a chance.
It’s the same thing practically.
Here’s the current scenario: everyone is getting poor as fuck and a bunch of madmen are ruling the world and cycling in power. Nobody is happy with red or blue either
And unless you change the system that supports that you’ll be trapped with the same two flavors of madmen. And you obviously cannot change the system in the right direction if you cast your vote to either someone who would love to be dictator or to someone who is too small to even have a voice.
Since the civil war, there hasn’t been one president who wasn’t dem or rep. The only one coming somewhat close was Teddy Roosevelt who, in 1912, split the Republican Party into two, after not being nominated, founded the Progressive Party and subsequently lost the election for himself and the Republican Party. [Results: Woodrow Wilson (dem) 41%, Roosevelt (pro) 27%, William Howard Taft (rep) 23%]. Were the Republican party not split, they might have won. And Roosevelt was an established politician and ex president at the time. Like, you’d need someone like Obama to found a new party, be allowed to run for another term and not only beat the Democrats but also the Republicans in the actual election. That’s just not realistic, even if it were actually possible.