Bonus question: How many troll accounts do you thing will stop posting too?
Yep.
Third party voter here. I don’t expect any third party candidate to win. My home state of Connecticut is solidly blue. All of our electoral votes WILL go to Harris, no vote of mine could change that even if I wanted it to, which I don’t. I am no fan of Trump.
I vote for whichever third party looks likely to get the most total votes, because of a third party can drum up 5% of the total national popular vote they get a lot more federal election funds in the next election.
My voting priority is for next cycle, to get a third party on the debate stage. That’s what I’m voting for.
Whatever you think you will achieve will be reversed by the spoiler effect, as others said, unless you get people in positions of power where they can help change FPTP voting system to something else nothing will change. until then 3rd party candidates will be nothing else than useful idiots to try to siphon votes from one of the sides
How about getting one single third party candidate elected to a city council, as a mayor, as a judge, a state legislator, to congress? You know, positions that can actually affect change, instead of wasting your vote and time on doomed bids for the presidency.
You’re ignoring the thing about federal election funds. Is attempting that goal a “waste?” By that logic, in a solidly blue state, voting for any major party candidate is also a waste because you as an individual can’t impact the outcome.
That’s how and when to vote for third party.
No one going to suddenly become a third party president, especially if there isn’t anyone else in government that’s the same party.
The question isn’t “Will the third party voters stop commenting after Nov. 6?”
The question is “Which side will blame third party voters for the shitty campaign their candidate ran?”.
And both are going to ignore that they literally spent most (or all) of election season running a candidate that was obviously cognitively impaired.
Considering RFK dropped his campaign to join Trump when polls showed he was siphoning votes from Trump this is just a bad take.
Before this election cycle, I was thinking of americans as nice people, victim of a fucked-up country.
Now I realize, nah, they are just fucked up people themselves.
They are too cowardy to fight against fascism, so they accept extermination in foreign land as a necessary evil. An acceptable collateral that we should stop worrying about.
If the tables turns one day, if I have to pick between fighting fascism here and americans getting exterminated, well… I hope you have a place to hide ahah
Some of us are being dragged kicking and screaming into fascism. Some of us refuse to vote for the perpetuators of a genocide and therefore have no voice. Some of us will be fired from our jobs (or banned from various communities across the web including Lemmy) for speaking up about the genocide.
What a childish take. Once you grow up, you’ll understand what nuance is. Maybe when your parents make you get a job, you’ll understand how hard it is to work full time to pay bills and protest a government with a militarized police force at the same time.
Once day you’ll be a big boy, I promise 👍
[x] doubt
The accounts already banned for trolling lol
Almost 40 times now! Talk about having nothing better to do lmao
Voting for a third party in a majoritarian electoral system is functionally the same as abstaining. A majoritarian system is intended to produce a binary choice. And this situation is not “undemocratic” if the two parties are internally democratic, with factions and primaries and so on.
Here in Europe we have mostly PR systems with lots of parties in the final round - and we still have voters who whine that nothing’s good enough for them. Here they sometimes campaign for official recognition of blank votes, as if that would solve anything.
Personally I’m in favor of the proposition by which, if you abstain or vote blank, your name gets put onto a special lottery ballot and you risk finding yourself personally elected. Seems appropriate. After all, apparently these people think they can do better than everyone else.
Ballot access and federal funding are tied to federal elections, so it’s functionally something. Ballot access is actually useful to states.
Yes, someone else made that point and I conceded it. Unfortunately the constructive bit of this discussion got drowned out by a couple of activist types who preferred to sling mud and ad hominen insults.
Percentage of votes for a given party can affect debate and ballot access, and federal funding. So it’s not worthless, it just isn’t deciding the president.
Yes, good point. Effectively, what I argued only applies to swing states. Completely agree that people should always vote anyway, for the reasons you outline.
Even if everything you wrote is true, none of it applies to the United States because we have the electoral college. Sorry, but it’s not Europe, and we have our own weird system.
The electoral college does invalidate my argument about third parties. To vote for a third party in the US electoral system is effectively to surrender one’s vote to other voters.
You’re not mentioning the biggest reason for this: First Past the Post.
We have two corrupt parties in the US. A literal sham of a democracy. The UK has FPTP too and it shows. They’ll lose NHS pretty soon because of it.
I did mention it, “majoritarian” means FPTP.
My point is that this system is not necessarily undemocratic, and indeed that it can even be too democratic. It all depends on the internal setup of the two parties. The Republican party is definitely a “sham of a democracy” in that it has too much of it. In Sweden no Trump figure can take over the government because the parties will stop him. In the USA in the past, the Republican party would have served the same purpose.
They’re both sham parties you strangely disingenuous fascist
The internal setup of the two parties is that
THEY ARE PRIVATE ORGANIZATIONS THAT ARE NOT SUBJECT TO FEDERAL ELECTION LAWS AND THEREFORE THEIR PRIMARIES ARE ACTUALLY LITERALLY ANTI-DEMOCRATIC SHAMS THAT PRETEND TO BE UNBIASED WHILE ADMITTING TO BEING BIASED IN LEGAL PROCEEDINGS WHERE THEIR INTEGRITY WAS CALLED INTO QUESTION.
They are an anti-democratic sham.
We saw that twice with how the Democrats treated Bernie. And when the DNC was sued for it, they argued publicly in court in Florida that it’s their right to rig primaries.
✊🏼 The situation we are in today was influenced and pushed so hard by the Clintons that I’m tempted to start a tour where we drive by the Clinton mansion and show people the family that did the most damage to the working class in the United States. To me, it’s almost unfathomable how much better a country we’d have been without rampant neoliberalism. Manufacturing would still be here, Temu wouldn’t exist, global warming wouldn’t be even remotely as bad as it is since we had a whole government intent on shipping everything from China for the past 30 years, unions would still exist, college would be covered by taxes, we’d have Single Payer, etc.
If you haven’t heard about it, look into the DLC. They were formed with the purpose of pushing the DNC (the de-facto “left wing” of the FPTP US political system) to the right.
It’s no coincidence that their archives were sealed and locked up into the Clinton Foundation archives.
Thank you for the reply and the info. I’ll read up on them.
The two parties aren’t democratic though. More so the Democrats who have a primary where the party still ultimately decides the winner with super delegates.
This is where is gets more complicated. To pol-sci specialists of authoritarian breakdown, American parties are in fact too democratic. The smoke-filled-room elitism of super delegates, and so on, has historically been a very good way to stop demagogues gaming the system. The essential reason you guys are having to suffer Trump is that the Republican party couldn’t stop him. The party had become an empty shell, a brand waiting to be taken over by whatever unscrupulous demagogue could win its primary. The Democrats, with their supposedly undemocratic super-delegates, are at this point America’s only genuine political party. It’s not a bug that the DNC leadership can assert a direction as you suggest, it’s a feature.
Populist candidates only succeed when there is massive discontent among voters. If either party had attempted to work for their voters he would be irrelevant. Arguing the people that caused the problem need more power is a non starter for me.
Trump became the GOP nominee in 2016 because the Clinton campaign claimed colluded to elevate him to the nomination in a “pied piper” strategy, because they believed he was the only candidate Clinton could beat.
The Dems continue this strategy still. They dump millions into the primary campaigns for far-right lunatics, because they don’t believe they can beat or differentiate themselves moderate republicans. And it’s not like this is a conspiracy- they openly defend this strategy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/12/democrats-interfere-republican-primaries/
Trump became the GOP nominee in 2016 because the Clinton campaign claimed colluded to elevate him to the nomination
This is conspiracism. Sure, it was convenient for the Democrats, but Trump did not get where he is “because” of Democrats. Trump became the nominee because the Republicans were a hollowed out party with nobody in charge and a voter base that become radicalized and completely unmoored from the official free-market ideology. The Democrats had nothing to do with that.
As for interfering in Republican campaigns since then, yeah sure, and it’s even a strategy that worked somewhat. I agree it’s cynical and risky and generally a bad idea.
It’s really pathetic bootlicking of the ‘party elites,’ and obscenely undemocratic, to insist that there needs to be someone “in charge” to overrule the democratic choices of the party base.
The “democratic choices of the party base” is precisely why you’ve got Trump on the ballot. Democracy is a good thing but you can have too much of a good thing. America’s founders understood this. They thought the electoral college would be the filter to prevent authoritarian populists getting into power. In the end it was the parties that ended up serving this purpose, until the Republican party broke. So, yes, I absolutely do think you would be better off as a country if your political system had an elitist mechanism to stop would-be dictators getting their hands on power.
I’m loving the lack of self-awareness. Trying to play both sides as if y’all love democracy, but losing your minds when anyone suggests any government that isn’t an oligarchy.
Either an astroturfer or bootlicker.
This person is such a fascist that they’re pretending anti-democratic cheating is a “feature of democracy”.
Chill. Your arguments would be more persuasive that way.
These aren’t arguments. They’re facts.
You’re the one that is loudly cheering for election fraud and calling it “too democratic”.
Telling me (a leftist that watched both parties get taken over by corporatists/fascists BECAUSE the DNC literally stepped in to artificially subvert the will of the voters in 2016, which allowed Trump to win easily) that the crimes that they committed were “too democratic” is enough to stoke the fires of rage against you for the rest of my life.
Please stop insulting me and accusing me of things I didn’t say. Thank you.
The Democrats, with their supposedly undemocratic super-delegates, are at this point America’s only genuine political party. It’s not a bug that the DNC leadership can assert a direction as you suggest, it’s a feature.
You literally said these things. Stop trolling.
That last paragraph doesn’t work in a secret ballot system.
It would require a separate nominative register for the blank votes, sure. But the whiners complain that they are unheard. This solves that. If you want your “no preference” added up and counted, then sure, but you have to be ready to be elected yourself. Seems fair to me. Democracy does not work without participation. People who opt out are effectively voting against democracy and they should own that fact.
There is absolutely no situation in which I would be okay with one of these people being in a leadership position. They’ve proven that they can’t be bothered to do the basic citizen’s duty of caring about politics enough to cast a vote at all, and you want to put them in charge of operating the government? No.
So at what point does low turnout become a problem, and how would you propose to fix that? The system we have depends on people voting and running for election. For every additional person who opts out, the legitimacy of the elected politicians falls, the scope of what they can get done is narrowed, and the relative voice of those who do vote becomes louder - these people typically being richer and more powerful already. It’s a problem. Forcing citizens to take responsibility is one solution.
They will move the goalposts to whatever the issue of the day is. “Buh, buh… Gaza!”
I think a good measure of whether something is moral is to imagine everyone doing it and consider if it would make the world a better or worse place.
In the U.S., most people probably don’t vote for a third party because they assume no one else will, so they worry their vote will be wasted. It’s a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma: if you vote and no one else does, you lose, but if everyone voted, everyone would benefit.
So, if someone does choose to vote third party, was it the right thing to do? Well, what if every voter acted this way? There’s a good chance the third party could win, and while it’s debatable, it’s reasonable to assume they might be a better choice than the other two.
Ranked-choice voting would solve this issue, by the way.
Yeah, but then, if, say 20% of voters in swing states voted third party, it would let the greater evil in, this being the very immoral choice.
Surely a more relevant measure is what can I do that will do the most good. Voting for someone who is better than the other realistic option, this keeping extremists out of power feels like a more moral option than making a pointless vote.
say 20% of voters in swing states voted third party, it would let the greater evil in
Not in the case of ranked choice voting. If the 3rd party candidate doesn’t win the vote goes to the number two choice.
Also, sometimes the lesser evil is still evil. Imagine if the vote was between Trump and literal Hitler.
RCV doesn’t “solve” the issue though. The fact that third party candidates can sway elections to the least preferred candidate is known as the “Spoiler effect”, and RCV is also subject to it.
RCV seems to be objectively better than plurality (what we use now), but it and any other ranking-based voting system are still subject to spoilers. One thing that can actually “solve” the issue though is rating-based systems, like Approval Voting, Score Voting, or STAR voting.
Yeah, but ranked choice isn’t in operation, so you’ve got to make the better choice for right now.
Also, in that case Trump would be the better option. I would hope that in a scenario where the republicans had nominated Hitler that the democrats could do better than Trump but if they couldn’t, then yes, voting for Trump in that scenario would be r the right thing to do as voting for, say, Bernie Sanders I. that scenario would let, you know, Hitler become the President.
As a non-US citizen, I’m getting the impression that a big number of left-wing voters are voting for Kamala not because she’s so great, but because she’s not Trump. Similarly, a ton of republicans are voting for Trump because they consider it a vote for the party, not for the candidate, and they sure are not going to vote for a democrat because (insert stereotypical grievances about liberals.)
To me, it seem reasonable to assume, that given the chance, there would be a ton of people on both sides that would rather give their vote to almost anyone else but either of these two, but they don’t because they know that a 3rd party can’t win and this would just risk the greater or two evils winning.
Why I referenced the prisoner’s dilemma is because I mostly see this as a coordination problem. What if instead of tactical voting, everyone just voted for the candidate they actually consider the best one? It’s not at all obvious to me that this would still mean that either of the two main candidates would win. This could very well give rise to a 3rd party.
Also, to return to my original point; it doesn’t seem immoral to me to vote for 3rd party even if that causes Trump to win by one vote. You did the right thing, rest of the people didn’t. If everyone acted like you, it seems to be that this would, in fact, lead to him not winning.
The outcome of your actions isn’t in a theoretical world.
You absolutely would be behaving unethically In that scenario, because you took an action that you knew, with absolute certainty, could only result in either no impact at all, or in making a monster president. There is no theoretical outcome where your action is capable of doing good, and there is a potential outcome where you action does extreme harm.
One party favors RCV much more than the other. I know who I’m voting for.
No. They will continue to ramble on and on about how “both parties are the same”, and bitch about the person who won. A 3rd party can never win in the USA without changing the electoral system.
I sure as fuck hope we end up with the president who will make those cosplaying MAGAs continue to whine.
This is the most succinct answer.
A phenomenon easily fixed by being intelligent enough to understand democracy and the argument against a 2 party system
…yes, and then they will pay attention in another 3 1/2 years…
Only if the money from Russia and/or China and/or Iran dries up.
They usually disappear and come back to blend in by either taking credit for a good win, or a victim to a loss.
Russia still has a war to win. It will not stop.
I voted third party for my congressional rep. I have the privilege of living in a solid blue district and I did it is a protest, but also because I like the candidate more than the blue candidate. I voted for my favored candidate in the primary, but she lost to a heavily AIPAC funded candidate. I disagree with Israel’s actions and the amount of foreign money in domestic elections. I’ve told very few people this, whether in person or online - more than anything I want it to represent statistical dissent. I would never consider my vote if there were an even remote possibility of the right winger taking the seat.
Foreign money in US elections is illegal. Is AIPAC money coming from Israel? Seems doubtful, as a lot of money flows from the US to Israel already.
Foreign money in US elections used to be illegal. A law that isn’t getting enforced isn’t a real law.
American jews give aipac a veneer but make no mistake it is a foreign agent.
That is true. I say this because there is money that flows in through intermediaries(though still illegal, undoubtedly happens), but I also incorrectly conflated monetary support for foreign interests with money from foreign entities - my apology.
Yes, just like the few two times.
Bonus: they are all troll accounts
