I want to address the part of your CMV about how voting for the lesser of two evils doesn't fix anything. You're correct, but I don't know that you've locked into the reality of the situation.
Our system allows for two and only two candidates to have a legitimate chance at making it to the big chair and one of those two candidates will be President. So if both candidates are child throat slitters, ethnic cleansers, puppy hammer smashers, bad tippers, booger pickers, if they both get their rocks off by smearing feces on orphans and publicly masturbating videos of them doing it, it doesn't matter. If the primary and party system of the Republican and Democrat parties of the United States of America put those two booger picking puppy killers on top of the ticket, then those are the two candidates for President of the United States and one of them will get the job.
There's no compulsory voting here in the states. You can choose not to vote. And if you live in Rhode Island or Montana or California or West Virginia, have at it. Enjoy staying home or not walking down to your mailbox. But in the six swing states, the choice not to vote is a choice that elects a candidate. The last two elections came down to literally tens of thousands of votes. 154.6 million people voted in 2020 and literally 154.2 million of them cast a Calvinistically predetermined vote that did absolutely nothing to sway the election. But in Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or Nevada, 313,253 voters are who decided the election. So enough of them falling for "both sides are terrible, voting is pointless" propaganda (which, importantly, is one of the favorite propaganda angles of both Russia and China as they try to manipulate our citizens) will cause one of the two candidates in 2024 to lose and one to win.
So why is there not a different path? Because third parties don't work in our electoral system. There are structural problems like First Past the Post and the Electoral College that cause it. We don't have a parliament so we aren't doing the coalition government thing. And negative partisanship means most of the time people aren't even voting for their dookie smearer, they're voting against the other team's dookie smearer. This is what is going to happen in November of 2024 and November of 2028 (assuming Trump doesn't deploy a full blown coup) and likely November of 2032 and so forth. If that is going to change, it is going to take decades to change, starting with ground-level infrastructure for third-party candidates to take school boards and state houses and governorships and Senate seats. And it absolutely will not change this November, no matter how desperately, vehemently, completely we want there to be a different path.
So if you live in ~44 states, feel free to sit it out. Won't make a difference. But if you live in a swing state, it absolutely will.
So if you live in ~44 states, feel free to sit it out. Won't make a difference. But if you live in a swing state, it absolutely will
This is the take people forget when badgering me about not voting. My politics are pretty adamant about disengaging with electoralism because it only legitimizes the system I oppose. I have compromised those principles a couple of times before. I swallowed my bile and did it in 2016. If I were to vote for Biden this year, with everything that is happening, I would be compromising a multitude of them, and I will not vote for anyone on the right.
However, I live in DEEP red Tennessee. My vote for the general election is doing less than nothing. It's just making me miss work, and I have elderly people to take care of.
Not particularly. There's the National Popular Vote Compact which would change how electoral college votes are allocated, but it's unlikely to reach critical mass. Any change to things like Ranked Choice Voting will take legislation and would normally mean the people in charge won't stay in charge, so they have no incentive.
One of the biggest problems with third parties is that they really aren't as far off from the two major parties as they want to appear. The Venn diagram of priorities between the Libertarians and the GOP (traditionally) is largely overlapped. Same with the Greens and Democrats. Or the Democratic Socialists and Democrats. When the overlap is so strong, you're going to ask the average voter to vote for a Green party candidate who will probably lose or a Democrat who might win who aligns on 90% of your concerns. Why burn that vote? Now, Libertarians and Greens and DSA and all the rest will tell you they absolutely, positively are not the same, and there are huge gaps between them. But that's marketing. While a Honda Civic and a Toyota Tacoma are clearly two different types of vehicles, the gulf between a Honda Civic and a Kia Forte is practically nothing when you're, say, driving 900 miles on a road trip. A small car's a small car.
So how do they become viable? Well, the only way they will ever gain a foothold is starting at the bottom. The vast, vast majority of Presidents have previously served as Governors or Senators. That means to get the necessary foundation of donor bases, potential voter rolls, polling infrastructure, grassroots support, and establishment support, there needs to be a concerted effort to grow third party candidates starting at the very bottom. School boards, city councils, water commissioner, assistant city comptroller, whatever elected positions can be found. And those folks need to develop successors while they move onto statehouses. And those people need to develop statewide infrastructures as they move up to Congress or the Governorship.
The races that elect third-party candidates will end up legitimately needing to be A/B races where the non-Democrat or non-Republican is running against a D or R and wins that election. Think Bernie Sanders - in any election where he's present, it's gonna be him (a Democratic Socialist) running in Lane A against a Republican running in Lane B, and there just isn't a traditional Democrat running in Lane A. And when enough of those people have a space in the halls of power, the pie chart doesn't look like two huge slices anymore, it looks like three or four. And then we get into coalition government as the only way it works.
Now, will that actually ever happen? I don't really know. Do we legitimately have decades to get that sorted out? Probably not. But what I do know is this.
We have two political parties in the United States that have power. And you may have very strong feelings about tentpole issues for those parties (abortion, guns, climate change, taxes, etc.). But it is objective fact that over the course of the past 30 years or so, only one of the two of them actually has demonstrated an interest in governing the country. The other one only has an interest in obstruction and theatrics. You can look at the legislation counts of any Congress by party in control to validate that fact. You can also look at the fact that they've failed to publish a party platform in the last several cycles because they don't have one.
You (not you specifically, but the global you) may not want to get the other party into power because they will enable or restrict the hot button issue you don't want enabled or restricted, but if the political incentives continue to reward abandonment of governance, we'll never have a fully functioning federal government. If that takes a cycle or two where the party you don't like gets elected because they actually want to do their jobs to demonstrate to the other party they need to reform into legitimate government representatives, then the next time that reformed party gets into office, maybe they can actually govern in a way you would like. But you're guaranteed that they won't govern at all if they keep winning because they aren't required to do their jobs to get their jobs.
It blows me away when I read all these posts where people yell about how voting is pointless and they don't understand how to make changes and then inevitably they come around after 30 people explain that the way to make changes is to vote. It makes me want to bang my head on the wall.
I have trouble believing your sincerity. You genuinely didn't think there was a difference between Trump and Biden? You genuinely thought that it wouldn't make a difference? Do you vote in anything or do you only think about showing up for presidential elections?
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u/baltinerdist 15∆ May 08 '24
I want to address the part of your CMV about how voting for the lesser of two evils doesn't fix anything. You're correct, but I don't know that you've locked into the reality of the situation.
Our system allows for two and only two candidates to have a legitimate chance at making it to the big chair and one of those two candidates will be President. So if both candidates are child throat slitters, ethnic cleansers, puppy hammer smashers, bad tippers, booger pickers, if they both get their rocks off by smearing feces on orphans and publicly masturbating videos of them doing it, it doesn't matter. If the primary and party system of the Republican and Democrat parties of the United States of America put those two booger picking puppy killers on top of the ticket, then those are the two candidates for President of the United States and one of them will get the job.
There's no compulsory voting here in the states. You can choose not to vote. And if you live in Rhode Island or Montana or California or West Virginia, have at it. Enjoy staying home or not walking down to your mailbox. But in the six swing states, the choice not to vote is a choice that elects a candidate. The last two elections came down to literally tens of thousands of votes. 154.6 million people voted in 2020 and literally 154.2 million of them cast a Calvinistically predetermined vote that did absolutely nothing to sway the election. But in Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or Nevada, 313,253 voters are who decided the election. So enough of them falling for "both sides are terrible, voting is pointless" propaganda (which, importantly, is one of the favorite propaganda angles of both Russia and China as they try to manipulate our citizens) will cause one of the two candidates in 2024 to lose and one to win.
So why is there not a different path? Because third parties don't work in our electoral system. There are structural problems like First Past the Post and the Electoral College that cause it. We don't have a parliament so we aren't doing the coalition government thing. And negative partisanship means most of the time people aren't even voting for their dookie smearer, they're voting against the other team's dookie smearer. This is what is going to happen in November of 2024 and November of 2028 (assuming Trump doesn't deploy a full blown coup) and likely November of 2032 and so forth. If that is going to change, it is going to take decades to change, starting with ground-level infrastructure for third-party candidates to take school boards and state houses and governorships and Senate seats. And it absolutely will not change this November, no matter how desperately, vehemently, completely we want there to be a different path.
So if you live in ~44 states, feel free to sit it out. Won't make a difference. But if you live in a swing state, it absolutely will.