I swallowed my misgivings and voted Democrat, just like I’ve done at each election since I turned 18, but handwaving away valid criticisms is not how you get people to side with you. Pressure needs to be put on the democrats to be better, too.
I’m 100% for valid criticisms—I don’t even consider myself a Democrat and I have no compunctions about criticizing them when I think they are wrong. But I’m pretty sure that meme is directed at those who withheld their vote.
It would be in theory, but mostly it’s just spread around as how any protest against Israel cost the democrats the US election (despite how it was considered widely unpopular to support Israel’s genocide by most democrats).
Then maybe Harris and her team should have listened to some feedback about their widely unpopular stance that seemed to somewhat equate them with the Republicans during an election which they absolutely couldn’t afford to be seen as remotely similar to republicans.
Democrats are pragmatically there for the money. They aren’t comically evil, but they are corrupt. They will throw an election before they ever give up AIPAC money and count on the next election swinging back to them. They get to sit back and watch the republicans be the bad guys and stir shit up for a few years. Then, when they get back in power, they fix the things that’s don’t make them money and look like he good guys but conveniently leave the unpopular policy the republicans enacted that makes them money and they don’t have to look like the bad guys. They just look incompetent. But they aren’t. This is all very purposeful. They love this dynamic. They benifit from it.
The democrats as they are for sure need to go. But we need to be more pragmatic ourselves about removing them instead of throwing elections to the republicans hoping it will teach the Democrats a lesson. Because it won’t. We need to focus on getting a foothold and changing the party. And that means turning out to vote in every election no matter what. Vote third party. Vote write in. Vote whatever. But sitting out of elections to teach democrats a lesson just isn’t going to do anything. It’s just throwing away the small amount of political capital most people have. If we don’t vote now its either corporate feudalism or civil war in the future.
No, they were never going to do that. They’ve already said that they learned their lesson, and in 2026, they’re gonna double down on the losing strategy that they’ve been running since Clinton was in office and run on building the wall on the Mexican border and deporting immigrants to court the moderate Republican vote that doesn’t exist and never would vote for them even if it did.
By the Presidential election, it’s already years too late to force them to actually do good things. Protest votes and withholding your vote have done nothing to stop the slide that led to Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney in tow in the 16 years that I’ve been voting. If you want change, it’s only going to come by threatening the position of the people in charge of the party and replacing the old guard with people like AOC. Whoever gets elected President does neither of those things. Unless Krasnov declares the Democratic Party a terrorist organization and has them all arrested as political prisoners. But then we won’t have to worry about voting ever again, just like he promised.
Firstly, we can dismiss the notion that the candidate can’t be moved. The citation for that is Biden in 2020, who effectively campaigned during the primary as a moderate Republican, and until the southern states which we’re never going to go blue anyways weighed in, was getting his ass handed to him. The Sunday before Super Tuesday, the rat-fuckening, Oblivious Warren. All that old history.
And then something remarkable happened. Biden opened the doors to the tent and invited the progressive wing of the party in. He handed the Bernie-crats the platform and said “have at it hoss”. And it worked. Instead of disenfranchising the activist base, he embraced them, or at least, extended an olive branch by giving them the platform, without which he assuredly would have lost.
So: Candidates can be moved.
Second:
By the Presidential election, it’s already years too late to force them to actually do good things. Protest votes and withholding your vote have done nothing to stop the slide that led to Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney in tow in the 16 years that I’ve been voting.
Again. And I’m singling you out because you responded and well, here we are. This is an obtuse, bordering on bad faith interpretation of the argument being made. You aren’t arguing with me. You are arguing with the millions of voters who stayed home for Kamala but showed up for Biden. And you moralizing about an objectively misguided application of strategic voting didn’t/ doesn’t/ won’t/ change their votes. When your “strategic voting” strategy results in losing you the election, explain to me how and why its strategic?
You don’t/ can’t move millions of voters to a new position. Or at least it hasn’t been shown to be possible (2016, 2024). Asking voters to “vote against” instead of “voting for” doesn’t work and we now have so many receipts, that they will write text books on the matter. What can be done, is that the candidate can be moved. Its also been shown through an evidentiary process to work.
To summarize, candidates can be moved. Biden moved and won an election because of it. When you moralize about your own, demonstrated-to-be-wrong conception of strategic voting, you aren’t arguing with me, you are arguing with the literally millions of people left on the table by the Democrats. A strategy that when examined before hand will clearly lose, the insistence of then implementing it becomes a “burn the world down” moralization to wash your own hands: Democratic voters who reliably show up, but did not, because the DNC got a hall pass from those making the exact arguments you are making here. They did not need to respond to criticism because this argument you are making shielded them. And it cost us all, practically everything.
Further evidence that the democrats can be moved if we don’t let them maintain the delusion they can win while trying to be republicans: The entire party told Biden to drop out when it was clear he had no path to victory.
Sadly Kamala was allowed to believe she could win while embracing the same policies and messaging that killed the Biden campaign. Instead of screaming at the party to campaign on overwhelmingly popular left policy necessary to win the election and use every power at the democrat’s disposal to accomplish it, blue MAGA told anyone pointing out that we’re headed back towards the waterfall to shut up and paddle harder.
If you look carefully, you’ll find statements about how “neither option affects [this particular thing] but we have the best chance of fixing it after the election if we still have a country”.
It was never handwaved. It was the least-worse option with some kind of hope given that issue and a thousand others. How many times this has fucking been fucking explained and not fucking understood.
I’m not American so nobody got my vote, but seems to me like the issue is with the swathes of people choosing facism rather than progressives who chose not to vote.
Choosing how to act in a world like ours is tricky, anyone following a sense of right and wrong (even if I disagree with their judgement) instead of fear, hate, greed or whatever gets a gold star in my book.
Inaction is still a choice, though. I totally understand the sentiment behind that choice and even agree that we shouldn’t be forced to choose genocide, but the alternative that we got is a man who not only wants the same genocide, but wants to accelerate it, put American boots on the ground to assist in it, and then turn the bloodied ground into resorts while also wanting to worsen life across the globe. So, by refusing to act, they didn’t oppose that man getting into power. They cared so much about genocide that, ironically, they enabled making that genocide worse by not acting against that possibility.
The biggest issue, though, is with the people who couldn’t be bothered enough to vote. Some, what, 40% of Americans never vote? Of course, there’s plenty there who can’t due to things like gerrymandering, but there’s a huge swathe of white suburbanites who simply prefer the status quo to actually improving things.
There are no mental gymnastics, and unless you’ve been absent in the debate since it began in 2023, it’s been one conversation regarding the direction of the Democratic party, with effectively two camps.
The first camp, effectively taking the party line and acting as cheerleaders of the DNC, have taken a “No critisism of the Democratic Party is acceptable; voters need to move to the positions of the DNC” approach.
The second camp took a “The DNC needs to be better and acknowledge it’s shortcomings, and make changes when necessary. The DNC needs to align itself with DNC voters and the party base.”
The first camp, for the first 8 months of 2024, insisted we had to run Joe Biden. That there were no other possibilities, options, or potential outcomes. They defended the approach the DNC took to the primary process, which was by any measure, the least democratic primary they party had ever held.
The second camp raged at the preposterous farce which was the DNC primary. They pointed out that Bidens poll numbers were so bad he basically had no chance of winning. That by insisting on this losing strategy we were losing critical time.
Bans were made, here, regarding this debate. And the first camp was wrong. There was another way possible.
After the candidates were swapped the first camp further insured that people just needed to move to where the DNC was, after taking effectively a pro genocide, Republican lite campaign philosophy as an outcome of the convention.
The second camp pointed out that this would lose the DNC the election, that we needed our focus to be on moving the candidate to a more popular, more electable position.
The first camp won the argument and lost us all the war, because their fundamental belief in what is being argued and whom they are arguing with is wrong. The first camp is responsible for the millions of votes difference between Kamala and Biden, because they insisted on this losing strategy.
I’m sure the first camp exists, but you should not imply that everyone who voted Democrat and wanted people to vote Democrat was that. I did that, and I encourage everyone to criticize their horrible decisions and actions, of which there are depressingly many.
I’d love it if we pressured them to not be quite as horrible, but at the same time I did not want the Republican party to win control because I knew they’d be worse for people in almost every way. And now, as a trans person, I have to worry about what I won’t be allowed to do anymore, or how they’ll try to make my life worse just for existing. Sending a signal or whatever you think Democrats losing does does not justify the new shit minorities will face now.
Sending a signal or whatever you think Democrats losing does does not justify the new shit minorities will face now.
I just want to point out, that you are making this about me as the rhetorician, when I haven’t even weighed in with my position. Its not me you are arguing with when it comes to the application of strategy; its the millions of voters for whom them sacrificing their ideals to get a milquetoast Democrat, pro-genoicde, draconian border policy, democrat into office doesn’t work.
This is about a basic understanding of how the table is set, and no amount of willing the environment one finds themselves in changes that. Its like '16 Hillary supporters whining about winning the popular vote. The people who were out their using the argument of “strategic voting” to shield the candidates deeply unpopular positions among democratic voters did real significant harm this election cycle. If your strategy doesn’t or can’t result in a specific outcome, can we really call it strategic?
My point is that the chiding of voters for not doing the job of the candidate is a way of morally washing ones hands of a strategy that genuinely hurt the candidates ability to get elected.
Does that give anyone an excuse for helping elect a fascist, racist, xenophobic, physchopath who is in the pocket of a foreign enemy leader by not voting for Kamala?? Fuck no. You’re out of your mind.
within the context of federal elections as operated in 2024, it’s certainly not the fucking fault of the people who were able to recognize that letting Putin’s puppet in the office of the president for a second time to subsequently leave Ukraine to fend for itself and to ensure a genocide in Palestine was the worse of the 2 possible outcomes.
Giving in and voting center left establishment to ensure a win is a much better poison than what we have now. anyone who says otherwise is trying to “morally wash their hands” of the blood that’s being spilled in Ukraine and Gaza and domestically.
The people who didn’t vote because the DNC chose an establishment dem to replace Biden are narcissistic or stupid.
Trans people, gay people, immigrants, women, elderly people on social security fixed income, 1000s of workers in industries who will face layoffs in the face of these tariffs, farmers who are losing 2 billion (40% of the food USAID gives out comes from purchases from us farmers) in USAID food purchases per year, children whose education will be forever altered will all be much happier knowing those self righteous progressives stuck to their guns and didn’t compromise their morals as they get persecuted under this administration.
WELL FUCKING DONE GUYS. Don’t break your arms jacking yourselves off.
I swallowed my misgivings and voted Democrat, just like I’ve done at each election since I turned 18, but handwaving away valid criticisms is not how you get people to side with you. Pressure needs to be put on the democrats to be better, too.
I’m 100% for valid criticisms—I don’t even consider myself a Democrat and I have no compunctions about criticizing them when I think they are wrong. But I’m pretty sure that meme is directed at those who withheld their vote.
It would be in theory, but mostly it’s just spread around as how any protest against Israel cost the democrats the US election (despite how it was considered widely unpopular to support Israel’s genocide by most democrats).
Unfortunately it may have.
A lot of voters are stupid. They see Israel=Bad, Biden/Kamala = pro-Israel, they stay home.
Then maybe Harris and her team should have listened to some feedback about their widely unpopular stance that seemed to somewhat equate them with the Republicans during an election which they absolutely couldn’t afford to be seen as remotely similar to republicans.
Democrats are pragmatically there for the money. They aren’t comically evil, but they are corrupt. They will throw an election before they ever give up AIPAC money and count on the next election swinging back to them. They get to sit back and watch the republicans be the bad guys and stir shit up for a few years. Then, when they get back in power, they fix the things that’s don’t make them money and look like he good guys but conveniently leave the unpopular policy the republicans enacted that makes them money and they don’t have to look like the bad guys. They just look incompetent. But they aren’t. This is all very purposeful. They love this dynamic. They benifit from it.
The democrats as they are for sure need to go. But we need to be more pragmatic ourselves about removing them instead of throwing elections to the republicans hoping it will teach the Democrats a lesson. Because it won’t. We need to focus on getting a foothold and changing the party. And that means turning out to vote in every election no matter what. Vote third party. Vote write in. Vote whatever. But sitting out of elections to teach democrats a lesson just isn’t going to do anything. It’s just throwing away the small amount of political capital most people have. If we don’t vote now its either corporate feudalism or civil war in the future.
Shielding the Democrats from the pressure to adopt more popular positions lost this election.
No, they were never going to do that. They’ve already said that they learned their lesson, and in 2026, they’re gonna double down on the losing strategy that they’ve been running since Clinton was in office and run on building the wall on the Mexican border and deporting immigrants to court the moderate Republican vote that doesn’t exist and never would vote for them even if it did.
By the Presidential election, it’s already years too late to force them to actually do good things. Protest votes and withholding your vote have done nothing to stop the slide that led to Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney in tow in the 16 years that I’ve been voting. If you want change, it’s only going to come by threatening the position of the people in charge of the party and replacing the old guard with people like AOC. Whoever gets elected President does neither of those things. Unless Krasnov declares the Democratic Party a terrorist organization and has them all arrested as political prisoners. But then we won’t have to worry about voting ever again, just like he promised.
A few things.
Firstly, we can dismiss the notion that the candidate can’t be moved. The citation for that is Biden in 2020, who effectively campaigned during the primary as a moderate Republican, and until the southern states which we’re never going to go blue anyways weighed in, was getting his ass handed to him. The Sunday before Super Tuesday, the rat-fuckening, Oblivious Warren. All that old history.
And then something remarkable happened. Biden opened the doors to the tent and invited the progressive wing of the party in. He handed the Bernie-crats the platform and said “have at it hoss”. And it worked. Instead of disenfranchising the activist base, he embraced them, or at least, extended an olive branch by giving them the platform, without which he assuredly would have lost.
So: Candidates can be moved.
Second:
Again. And I’m singling you out because you responded and well, here we are. This is an obtuse, bordering on bad faith interpretation of the argument being made. You aren’t arguing with me. You are arguing with the millions of voters who stayed home for Kamala but showed up for Biden. And you moralizing about an objectively misguided application of strategic voting didn’t/ doesn’t/ won’t/ change their votes. When your “strategic voting” strategy results in losing you the election, explain to me how and why its strategic?
You don’t/ can’t move millions of voters to a new position. Or at least it hasn’t been shown to be possible (2016, 2024). Asking voters to “vote against” instead of “voting for” doesn’t work and we now have so many receipts, that they will write text books on the matter. What can be done, is that the candidate can be moved. Its also been shown through an evidentiary process to work.
To summarize, candidates can be moved. Biden moved and won an election because of it. When you moralize about your own, demonstrated-to-be-wrong conception of strategic voting, you aren’t arguing with me, you are arguing with the literally millions of people left on the table by the Democrats. A strategy that when examined before hand will clearly lose, the insistence of then implementing it becomes a “burn the world down” moralization to wash your own hands: Democratic voters who reliably show up, but did not, because the DNC got a hall pass from those making the exact arguments you are making here. They did not need to respond to criticism because this argument you are making shielded them. And it cost us all, practically everything.
Further evidence that the democrats can be moved if we don’t let them maintain the delusion they can win while trying to be republicans: The entire party told Biden to drop out when it was clear he had no path to victory.
Sadly Kamala was allowed to believe she could win while embracing the same policies and messaging that killed the Biden campaign. Instead of screaming at the party to campaign on overwhelmingly popular left policy necessary to win the election and use every power at the democrat’s disposal to accomplish it, blue MAGA told anyone pointing out that we’re headed back towards the waterfall to shut up and paddle harder.
Are you actually trying to argue Biden would have won? Extra large oof.
If you look carefully, you’ll find statements about how “neither option affects [this particular thing] but we have the best chance of fixing it after the election if we still have a country”.
It was never handwaved. It was the least-worse option with some kind of hope given that issue and a thousand others. How many times this has fucking been fucking explained and not fucking understood.
I’m not American so nobody got my vote, but seems to me like the issue is with the swathes of people choosing facism rather than progressives who chose not to vote.
Choosing how to act in a world like ours is tricky, anyone following a sense of right and wrong (even if I disagree with their judgement) instead of fear, hate, greed or whatever gets a gold star in my book.
Inaction is still a choice, though. I totally understand the sentiment behind that choice and even agree that we shouldn’t be forced to choose genocide, but the alternative that we got is a man who not only wants the same genocide, but wants to accelerate it, put American boots on the ground to assist in it, and then turn the bloodied ground into resorts while also wanting to worsen life across the globe. So, by refusing to act, they didn’t oppose that man getting into power. They cared so much about genocide that, ironically, they enabled making that genocide worse by not acting against that possibility.
The biggest issue, though, is with the people who couldn’t be bothered enough to vote. Some, what, 40% of Americans never vote? Of course, there’s plenty there who can’t due to things like gerrymandering, but there’s a huge swathe of white suburbanites who simply prefer the status quo to actually improving things.
Ahh. This bullshit trope from the class of people basically responsible for Trump winning the 2024 election.
Sorry, did you just blame the people who didn’t vote for Trump for being responsible for Trump being president? Interesting mental gymnastics there…
There are no mental gymnastics, and unless you’ve been absent in the debate since it began in 2023, it’s been one conversation regarding the direction of the Democratic party, with effectively two camps.
The first camp, effectively taking the party line and acting as cheerleaders of the DNC, have taken a “No critisism of the Democratic Party is acceptable; voters need to move to the positions of the DNC” approach.
The second camp took a “The DNC needs to be better and acknowledge it’s shortcomings, and make changes when necessary. The DNC needs to align itself with DNC voters and the party base.”
The first camp, for the first 8 months of 2024, insisted we had to run Joe Biden. That there were no other possibilities, options, or potential outcomes. They defended the approach the DNC took to the primary process, which was by any measure, the least democratic primary they party had ever held.
The second camp raged at the preposterous farce which was the DNC primary. They pointed out that Bidens poll numbers were so bad he basically had no chance of winning. That by insisting on this losing strategy we were losing critical time.
Bans were made, here, regarding this debate. And the first camp was wrong. There was another way possible.
After the candidates were swapped the first camp further insured that people just needed to move to where the DNC was, after taking effectively a pro genocide, Republican lite campaign philosophy as an outcome of the convention.
The second camp pointed out that this would lose the DNC the election, that we needed our focus to be on moving the candidate to a more popular, more electable position.
The first camp won the argument and lost us all the war, because their fundamental belief in what is being argued and whom they are arguing with is wrong. The first camp is responsible for the millions of votes difference between Kamala and Biden, because they insisted on this losing strategy.
I’m sure the first camp exists, but you should not imply that everyone who voted Democrat and wanted people to vote Democrat was that. I did that, and I encourage everyone to criticize their horrible decisions and actions, of which there are depressingly many.
I’d love it if we pressured them to not be quite as horrible, but at the same time I did not want the Republican party to win control because I knew they’d be worse for people in almost every way. And now, as a trans person, I have to worry about what I won’t be allowed to do anymore, or how they’ll try to make my life worse just for existing. Sending a signal or whatever you think Democrats losing does does not justify the new shit minorities will face now.
I just want to point out, that you are making this about me as the rhetorician, when I haven’t even weighed in with my position. Its not me you are arguing with when it comes to the application of strategy; its the millions of voters for whom them sacrificing their ideals to get a milquetoast Democrat, pro-genoicde, draconian border policy, democrat into office doesn’t work.
This is about a basic understanding of how the table is set, and no amount of willing the environment one finds themselves in changes that. Its like '16 Hillary supporters whining about winning the popular vote. The people who were out their using the argument of “strategic voting” to shield the candidates deeply unpopular positions among democratic voters did real significant harm this election cycle. If your strategy doesn’t or can’t result in a specific outcome, can we really call it strategic?
My point is that the chiding of voters for not doing the job of the candidate is a way of morally washing ones hands of a strategy that genuinely hurt the candidates ability to get elected.
This is fucking despicable.
We have a 2 party system. Does that suck? Yes.
Should we fight to change it? Yes.
Does that give anyone an excuse for helping elect a fascist, racist, xenophobic, physchopath who is in the pocket of a foreign enemy leader by not voting for Kamala?? Fuck no. You’re out of your mind.
within the context of federal elections as operated in 2024, it’s certainly not the fucking fault of the people who were able to recognize that letting Putin’s puppet in the office of the president for a second time to subsequently leave Ukraine to fend for itself and to ensure a genocide in Palestine was the worse of the 2 possible outcomes.
Giving in and voting center left establishment to ensure a win is a much better poison than what we have now. anyone who says otherwise is trying to “morally wash their hands” of the blood that’s being spilled in Ukraine and Gaza and domestically.
The people who didn’t vote because the DNC chose an establishment dem to replace Biden are narcissistic or stupid.
Trans people, gay people, immigrants, women, elderly people on social security fixed income, 1000s of workers in industries who will face layoffs in the face of these tariffs, farmers who are losing 2 billion (40% of the food USAID gives out comes from purchases from us farmers) in USAID food purchases per year, children whose education will be forever altered will all be much happier knowing those self righteous progressives stuck to their guns and didn’t compromise their morals as they get persecuted under this administration.
WELL FUCKING DONE GUYS. Don’t break your arms jacking yourselves off.
Your comment’s downvotes = how many profoundly stupid people who STILL haven’t learned from their mistake there are out there.
At the time I read your comment.