
guys the point of this post is that kamala harris clearly did not have a big enough base to beat trump in 2024. if we want to have a democratic candidate that is able to appeal to enough republicans that they swing, it likely won’t be her. and unfort that’s how there’s a shot at getting another version of trump away from office
I’m with you on this. It’s really disappointing to see people cave and settle so easily. The primaries haven’t even begun and people are already shrugging and accepting whatever. They could push for more but, no. They preach about “electoral viability” and yet their prime candidate lost their last bid. That doesn’t scream viable. It’s indicative of the rot of the system. And it’s even more sad bc they’re not bleeding hearts or fervent libs they just accept what’s given and don’t fight this front
The vote blue no matter who people in this comment section who demand we continue putting up with democrats who don’t do anything to help us, the world, or really anyone and continue doing everything they can to maintain the status quo are going to kill this country Literally wake up people. “They aren’t Trump” is NOT good enough. They need to be GOOD candidates. We must DEMAND this going forward. Not just less bad. They must earn our votes by being votable. Just being a Democrat isn’t enough
Not voting is not and never will be an effective protest bc your vote doesn’t monetarily benefit anyone. It’s not like a strike or a fucking boycott. There is no universe in which enough people don’t vote so we get a new set of presidential candidates. That’s not how the system works. By not voting, you signal that you’re ok with either outcome, not that you hate both of them. End of story, full stop
it’s not wrong. but guess who’s president right now? someone who’s besties with netanyahu who literally got us into a war because he’s his little doggy. the democratic party, kamala, the establishment are all flawed. but caving to someone who’s objectively 10x worse has killed so many more Palestinians and Lebanese.
and also, the system can’t change on a term by term basis. you can’t just expect people to suddenly vote for leftist candidates and pray they’ll win like that. the country reforms slowly. if you protest by not voting you are literally letting the party thats so much worse win and that’s unforgivable in my opinion. keeping the right in control strays you further from ending genocide and actually makes it worse
She did have a choice. Keep supporting a genocide or resign. She made her choice, as did I when it came to viewing her in any positive light. When she was running for president she could’ve said she would end aide to Israel, she could’ve at the very least called it a genocide. She refused.
Well if it’s the only two options then yes, vote for the person who will do the least amount of damage. We’ve got a mf who is hellbent on killing anyone who isn’t rich, you can handle a Kamala presidency. You have enough privilege to be a single issue voter. The majority of us do not.
I voted for Harris in 2024. Her loss and the reaction to the defeat of the Dems in 2024 by many fellow Dems has me thinking I won’t vote for her again. And that’s not even taking into account the war crimes and human rights abuses that continue regardless of admin (when it doesn’t happen on our soil, it doesn’t matter is much apparently)
I agree they wouldn’t be the best option but I think Biden 2.0 just isn’t true. AOC at least cares a lot about the American people and while she backs ppl I definitely wouldn’t right now I just want someone who isn’t gonna run for a third term and doesn’t eat babies. It’s unfortunate that the bar is in literal hell but
I’m confused… the post didn’t indicate that OP refused to vote for Harris in the past or that they’d refuse to in the future. obviously it turns out you were right to presume that about OP, but all the post itself had expressed was disappointment with this candidacy announcement that being the case, why did you jump to such a hostile reply right out the gate? wouldn’t you prefer to see a better presidential candidate running on the dem side too?
Cmon now. We all know of the newsom rumor. Harris has been the question mark that we all don’t want to see. We’re tired of her milquetoast neolib bs and it’s disappointing to see her billed to us as “progress” when in reality she is still an agent of the very establishment that is hurting us
People have been dying. Now it’s just televised and politically salient and useful. I don’t expect them to fix this shit. Hell when Trump was caging kids and separating families, Biden didn’t exactly end that. And Roe v. Wade ended under that admin, bc the Supreme Court is rigged and has been. They won’t fix things. “less bad and less obvious” doesn’t really work esp when the bar continually falls lower
what you’re describing here is incrementalism, a theory that’s fundamentally incompatible with political ideologies any further-left than milquetoast liberalism look at how much backtracking has occurred in terms of political progress even just from the end of the Obama era until now. that’s roughly a decade. how many decades are you content to spend chanting “the country reforms slowly” while things keep getting worse? climate change says the clock is ticking
How privileged do you have to be to think like this? Like, seriously, do you live in a bunker or something where ICE (which Trump has made into a private army, unprecedented in the US but precedented in Germany) can’t get to you? Where the uptick in anti-trans violence doesn’t affect you? “Both parties are the same” shut up. You do not live in reality if you think like that.
Part of the reason Kamala lost the election was cus people didn’t vote for her or didn’t vote at all meaning Trump won by majority cus his voter showed up. The blood of those killed is partially on your hands. This could have been avoided, I don’t even like Kamala but she was the lesser of the two evils
AOC does real work for real people, Harris I can do without forever. AOC has declared war on data centers and where I'm living someone needs to pay attention. You have no idea how money is controlling the decisions as to where they're built or how large they are. If you don't understand please spend time in an area where a center is miles long; sit and listen to the fucking sound and investigate the water depletion and pollution. AOC gives a shit and works her ass off. Pay attention.
The DNC chair needs to be removed immediately before this process actually begins. The party is two million dollars in debt. If I didn't have to vote for a Dem, I wouldn't but here we are. David Hoag needs to step into leadership position now, Right now. Listen to Pod Save America with the clown in charge rn - fucking idiot.
Yeah that’s the part that baffles me the most. Like, not liking Harris I get, she’s not great. But AOC? Famously hated by the establishment, mentee of Bernie Sanders, that AOC? That’s what tipped me off that this was bait. It’s two non-white women, one of whom will piss people off because they’re complete opposite ends of the party. If the forum is leftist, Harris will, if the forum isn’t, AOC will.
she won't be elected. i want a democrat lightyears more than a republican, but we will lose if we try to use women of color as our candidates. it sucks and it's racist and it's misogynist, but even with her appealing to republican values the whole election, they wouldn't accept her. we need someone that the people who "don't do politics" would vote for
A refusal to vote is a vote for the winner. You have to compromise in a democracy, especially a republic. No one who “votes blue no matter who” is happy about this state of affairs. But voting blue is better than not voting. Go to protests, strike, boycott, do all of that! But at the ballot box, remember that not all evil is equal.
I am not refusing to vote. I vote third party. And friendly reminder, even if every person who voted third party (including right wing third parties) voted Democrat, Trump still would have won the last election cycle. Don’t let establishment Dems make third party voters the enemy to distract you from their failings and shortcomings
Voting third party IS refusing to vote. Russian asset Jill Stein is not an actual option, just extra ink on your ballot. You say that establishment dems make third party voters out to be the enemy? Don’t make me laugh. This shit is why some people think of you as the enemy. I prefer to think of you as well-meaning but naive.
Why didn’t we… do you not remember that there WASNT A PRIMARY? Do you not remember how THERE WAS NO PRO-GAZA CANDIDATE? I mind genocide, I’m just not in the business of saying “three genocides (Sudan, trans Americans, and Gaza) are preferable to one (Gaza)” They felt comfortable running Biden and Harris because they’re obsessed with the idea of reasoning with republicans, plain and simple.
Never said I voted for Jill either. She’s a grifter at best. You think I’m destroying the country while actively maintaining its a moral failure to not keep the very people insuring the systems keeping oppression alive in every capacity in office. What a joke. But yeah, I’m naive for simply not putting up with it anymore. Be the change you want to see. Can’t vote for establishment bullshit and expect change. Einstein defined that as insanity
No, republicans are responsible for this state of affairs. I voted for the candidate that was pro-less genocide. Better than doing nothing, unambiguously. Call me a utilitarian if you want, but I don’t think that you can argue that allowing Trump to come to power is better than doing the one step with no caveats that makes that harder.
I agree with you 100 percent. They choose nobody so the hateful filled conservative trumpies win bc they will always pick Trump and not waste their vote trying to pick the perfect candidate who never even lied as a child. Stg they are so useless. They have no right to complain about Trump if they are the reason he was allowed in office bc they didn’t vote for the democrat against him
They are real candidates. You just aren’t willing to support them because you fell for establishment propaganda to keep them in power. If you stopped telling people their vote didn’t matter if they voted third party imagine how many more would vote that way. If you supported them as valiantly as you supported democrats, financially too. It’s only unviable because you believe it to be. And you believe it to be because the top one percent that prefers blue to red told you so
Where the hell are you getting that second part from?!? YES, the US is complicit in a genocide in Palestine. I didn’t vote for that, NO ONE DID. I voted for the candidate that CALLED FOR A CEASEFIRE, the candidate that WASNT BRAGGING ABOUT HOW HE WANTED TO BULLDOZE THE GAZA STRIP AND REPLACE IT WITH A TRUMP RESORT. How many more Gazans would be alive today if Trump didnt win, and thus escalate the genocide? We’ll never know. We’ll never know how many could have been saved:
Yeah. Politician lies to journalist. I’ve lived in the Trump administration. Fr yall forget want her platforms in 2020 were. You have an image of Harris as someone who’s super centrist, when the reality is that she didn’t have any time during her 2024 run to set herself apart from Biden because HE DIDNT DROP OUT UNTIL SUPER FUCKING LATE
A “western liberal” in the colonial era is not the same as a modern “liberal” (our current era is “postcolonial” but that’s dumb because we obviously still live under colonialism, but that’s the terminology so I have to use it). Like, in that context a “liberal” is Hobbes or Locke, or maybe a French revolutionary (pre-Napoleonic era).
It goes without saying that both the parties fucking suck. A pro isreal group in the U.S. funds all major candidates from both parties to ensure that politicians will support isreal if/when that group needs them to, even and especially if isreal’s committing massive human rights violations that no one in their right mind would be ok with. This IS a problem. It should also go without saying that if both parties do this and we don’t have a viable 3rd party system, not voting doesn’t fix it
Idk maybe I’m not seeing the whole picture here, but i feel like, seeing as this is the way we operate right now, people should do whatever they can to damage control and push us towards a better future, including but not limited to voting? Like, there are not enough people right now to completely reform our electoral system and even if they were, they haven’t done it yet, so we should use this one to create change until they do
tbf I really don’t think anyone abstaining from voting is doing so with the belief that their choice is gonna fix anything, much less the whole system when people say “I refuse to support Harris” I don’t hear “… and that’s my solution!”, it sounds like fear & dismay rather than anything triumphant
like, we’re taught that under a democracy, voting is how we “use our voice” right? so in that capacity, though I understand what you’re saying, I still think there’s a solid logic behind not voting for a candidate whose policy stances fail to represent your interests in many or all departments. each vote communicates to a politician that the choices they present to the public have someone’s approval / backing—low voter turnout does send a message
People who are against electoralism don’t always want reform. They at least want substantial overhaul. They see our path as pretty inevitable unless bigger things change. Voting becomes pointless because the people who control both parties win regardless of the outcome. The underlying social politics which have been crafted by the parties as well as extragovernmental orgs and businesses over decades have produced where we are and we won’t change course unless we move away from that.
I suppose I can see that logic, but it feels like atp you’re not even trying anymore, unless you’re putting in the work to create that substantial overhaul. Like at that point, you’re prioritizing feeling morally superior for not “supporting” anything bad, not whether you’re facilitating anything good. Even if someone is trying to create that overhaul, I stand by that it hasn’t happened yet and while we don’t have much power, we have some, and not using that is making us more helpless
You know zilch about me other than the fact I laid criticism. And your first choice is the attack character of someone you don’t even know lol. For all I know you could be doing absolutely nothing. Voting is the lowest effort way to affect anything. Congrats on being a drop in the bucket lol
genuinely like pretending voting is a super important way to make change is kind of silly. i vote but it’s honestly just like a “eh i get off work to do it” thing. real change is made in your direct community. mutual aid and feeding your hungry neighbors is so much more important than voting rn lol
i would vote for the dem this run tho tbh. the third party votes won’t outnumber the dems or republicans and i live in springfield, oh and so many of my neighbors are being deported rn and while neither will be good and atrocity will happen no matter what, i can’t let my direct community suffer like this
oh man i knew it was bad but i just read the stats and that’s wild. i’m 23 and i did have a phase of not reading a whole book from like 14-17 and i was all the dumber for it. it’s like 50/50 w my friends on it they read or not which feels crazy. i know all of the “i can’t focus!” excuses(bc i made them) but like a lot of that literally does have to do with the fact that we are so wired on instant gratification now and whittled down our attention spans ourselves. shit is so grim
voting third party isn’t radical. i put my community members that are at risk first. there’s no good way to participate in american democracy, good work happens outside it. i vote in the interest of those around me because i know it doesn’t mean anything in the grand scheme and there’s no real point in not voting