Doesn’t matter what the headlines or the opinion polls say. Vote like democracy depends on it!
I voted for that bowl of tapioca once and I’ll do it again.
I’ll likely vote someone else in the primaries though.
Maybe their strategy for getting votes could be something better than “the other guy is worse”.
Would I be a bad person if I said I don’t want to vote for either of the evils, and I’m going to vote for Williamson? Or West? I genuinely feel guilty voting for either side and I hate that feeling.
EDIT: Ok then, I will do the right thing, not for Biden’s sake, or that asshole Drumpf, but for us, the american people who are caught in the middle of this shit. Thanks to everyone who chimed in.
As someone who voted third party in the 2016 election, take it from me that you will feel more guilty if you know your vote could have helped prevent the fascist party from gaining power. The presidency is not the office to try to vote on morals, save that for state and local elections that decide things like state benefits programs, distributions of funds, and public works. The federal government is where you will want to vote for the people who are protecting your right to vote in the first place, and that is done by ensuring that the fascist party can’t get a majority or otherwise control a branch of the government.
If the Supreme Court were made up different, maybe, but ending up with an R president just gives them room to pack more courts and see a whole bunch more rights get removed.
My problem is that since the first time I’ve been able to vote, the Democratic party has shown they don’t care about who the people may want. They will actively suppress whoever isn’t their chosen one. And there are cases where they fund ads for their crazy opposition instead of building a meaningful case for their candidate. I voted for Biden originally, and I will not vote for Trump now, but I need more than “vote for me because I’m not the other guy”, especially the second time around. If Trump wins, it’s because the Democratic party shot themselves in the foot. Party cohesion is made by leaders who listen to their constituents.
To who? The convicted felon? Or maybe it’s that Florida governor who is pissed off the largest Media company in the world?
Of course they could lose them. They are senile and old. They probably lose all sorts of shit
The government would work a lot better if all the old fucks stopped trying to make everything a petty competition with winners and losers.
As opposed to all the Republicans trying to make it a competition with only losers.
I think they are all equally as stupid and self centered, regardless of which side they are on. The only difference is that the stupidity of Republicans happens to hurt the working class more often than not.
The “Biden sucks” narrative is a little out of control at the moment. I hope his team pivots to highlight all of his successes around the time Trump is getting tossed in prison. That should hopefully be enough juxtaposition for even the most terminally online idiots in this country to not vote for the meme candidate again.
Part of the problem also is that centrist Dem voters are single issue queens and will refuse to turn out if they don’t get their way on certain issues, and a lot of them are drawing lines in the sand over Israel/Palestine right now. In case anybody hasn’t be paying attention, let me assure you, Trump will not end the war in the middle east. If anything, he will accelerate it. If you’re unhappy about Biden supporting Israel but calling for an end to hostilities, boy are you going to be upset if Trump takes the White House and endorses full-on genocide of Muslims in the west bank and complete Russian supremacy in Ukraine.
This mentality of picking between worst options isn’t very appealing. Better y’all vote for some third party (even if they don’t win as whole)
that’s almost the worst thing you can do in a two party system, short of not voting at all. It sucks that the system only really allows two parties but throwing away your vote on a third party is not the way to fix it
Why it is a two party system?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_splitting
Our election system is inherently biased against 3rd party candidates. So we’re stuck with two parties.
And money’s involvement in politics just exacerbates everything.
Appealing? No.
Necessary? Depends what the issues are and how they impact you.
It comes down to game theory. Voting against the lesser evil is advantageous to you because if they win, things will be slightly less bad. If you throw your hands up and say it doesn’t matter, you’re not giving any disadvantage to the greater evil.
Biden could have done what’s best for the country and been a one term president. I’ll still vote for him but not because he’s some amazing leader or anything.
So they did it to themselves if they lose.
I see that point of view. Out of curiosity, though, do you think there’s an obvious next in line on the bench? The only person I can think of as a no brainer for electability is Michelle Obama.
Edit: I’m confused as to why my comment has been so controversial. I think it’s because people are misreading my claim. I am saying that Michelle Obama is obviously one of the most electable alternatives to Biden. The polling corroborates this. She is well liked and has 100% name recognition. Seriously, even if you hate her, as an objective empirical fact, she is obviously one of the top contenders for electability.
I am not claiming that she is likely to run or that she wants to run, etc.
At the beginning of his term, I’d have said they were lining up Harris; black, woman, young, and they made her highly visible in the first few months. I thought for sure they were going to spend 4 years lining her up for 2024. Biden would gracefully bow out citing his age, ride the 1/2 term election cycle, and badaboom: first female president.
And then she faded away. I don’t know what happened; she didn’t poll well, or do well, or polling showed D chances sank without an old white guy in front… but it makes me kinda sad, because I thought it was a good strategy, and it’d be nice to have a run of diversity in the White House.
They made her visible with shit no-win issues. She was put on securing voting rights, fixing the border, and recently solving gun violence. Meanwhile the big spend-money bill passes and she’s no where to be seen. I also thought the intention was for her to inherit from Biden, but then they kind of just screwed her over and over.
Imagine thinking that Trump is in any way, shape, or form, better for you and your family than Biden.
Conservatives and Republicans: hate working class people, hate people that rent, hate minorities including women, want to privatize every last piece of American society so you’ll have to subscribe to your alarm clock and appliances.
I don’t understand how they can possibly put Biden forward again. He’s well past losing his marbles. Way too old to run imo. It’s disgraceful.
Isn’t Trump in the same boat? Trump’s 77, Biden’s 81. One may easily argue they’re both much too old to be running.
Ah yes, the obligatory “the other guy is worse” post. We know the other guy is worse. That doesn’t mean democrats shouldn’t pick better candidates.
Well besides being old he’s not really doing so bad tbh. Who else would you put up for election? Jon Stewart?
I like presidents who aren’t pedophiles.
So you won’t vote for Trump the pedophile. Got it.
A criticism of Biden isn’t praise for Trump, no matter how many times you people try to gaslight yourselves into believing otherwise. Yeah, Trump is a pedophile too, point being?
So I’m supposed to vote for the genocide supplier?
want to privatize every last piece of American society
And Democrats are not doing this?
Like it or not we are stuck with a two party system. As fucking awful as Biden is, and he is, Biden is the lesser of two evils by far. And that applies to democrats/republicans as a whole.
Both parties/candidates are to some degree cool with genocide and privatization, but only one of the two stands out as the worst, and the worst by a lot.
Don’t like it? Vote for local candidates/congressional candidates in primaries that will fix the two party problem. But in the mean time the better presidential option will be anything with a D next to their name.
I will not vote for the party of genocide supply. Aka the dems.
Local candidates are not going fix the two party system. That’s a national issue.
I don’t know the solution, but buying into the Dems bullshit “lesser of Two evils” AGAIN is not it.
Have fun being the same chump you were 8 years ago.
You want to ever vote again? Then take a long, hard look at what each party is trying to do about voting rights. If you want to stop genocide, a Republican in office is the worst-case scenario for you; and there is a non-zero chance that voting against Democrats in 2024 means that 2024 will be our last real election ever, after which the genocide would come across the ocean.
Think about the worst case scenarios here—in case of a blue wave, the worst case is another four years of lackluster governance and pretending to keep our hands clean of the worst stuff happening in the world, while winking at corporate greed and doing nothing about climate change. Not a great outcome.
In case of a red wave, we don’t have to guess about the worst case, because Trump is telling us what he’ll do: make anything but Christianity illegal, militarize the borders to turn away refugees, curtail the first amendment, hand Ukraine over to Russia, help Israel glass Palestine, make it harder (impossible if he can manage it) for people to vote against him, try to get an extra four years as penance for what he sees as a “stolen” election, retaliate against anyone trying to hold him accountable for his crimes, roll back environmental protections that will make climate change irreversible, nominate perhaps another SCOTUS justice who’s even more unhinged than the other three he installed, and vague threats of violence toward everyone who isn’t straight and cis. That is all stuff that he has promised to do at his rallies. And all of that isn’t even touching on the financial disaster that his tax policies actually unleashed between 2016-2020, and the regular horror of mass shootings and white supremacy that goes up under every pro-gun president, but Trump in particular. Not a survivable outcome.
This isn’t a normal election. Giving Trump (or, at this point, any Republican) a chance is off the table. He’s shown us and told us what he’ll do if he gets the White House again. If you want to vote third party to send a message, you have to contend with the possibility that there won’t be anyone left to hear it in 2028. Yes, people’s lives are on the line. So don’t let Republicans have the chance to step across that line.
Replace evey year you listed with 2012.
And replace trump with George w Bush.
These were the same arguments being made by Dems back then. I voted. And we still have genocide supply. The genocide we have now is unacceptable. Just because there is potential for it to get worse don’t mean I should accept they situation we have now.
Biden cut check to Israel with a smile on his face. So will the republican party and so will future democrats. None of them will be getting my vote.
You’re a genocide apologist when you vote blue.
I will not vote for the party of genocide supply. Aka the dems.
They’re both supporting the ongoing genocide. This isn’t helpful for deciding who to vote for.
Local candidates are not going fix the two party system. That’s a national issue.
Which is why I specified local/congressional. It’s going to take all levels of government to unfuck us from a two party system.
I don’t know the solution, but buying into the Dems bullshit “lesser of Two evils” AGAIN is not it.
Only one of these choices is actively trying to turn our country into a theocratic hell hole.
The “lesser of two evils” is fucking awful, but it’s true.
Have fun being the same chump you were 8 years ago.
If you can’t talk about politics without resorting to personal insults then you must know how weak your argument is.
They’re both supporting the ongoing genocide. This isn’t helpful for deciding who to vote for.
You are the one deciding between the two only, not me. I will vote for a candidate that has a platform I can support and nothing else.
It’s going to take all levels of government to unfuck us from a two party system.
The dems continue to get elected because of the Two party system. They aren’t going to change it.
Let me know when it does tho…
Only one of these choices is actively trying to turn our country into a theocratic hell hole.
Yes, and the other will happily participate in genocide, be unable to create real change in Any area I care about and then pretend they are the party of moral superiority.
You vote blue you will still have red on your hands.
So sad that after so many failings, they still cannot learn! Do what’s right, not what’s personally profitable, you scumbags.
Do you want trump? This is how we get trump.
Wake up call for who? Will the Democrats ever wake up and give their base something to vote for, instead of “hey, the other guys’s worse, whaddya gonna do?”.
What the hell are you talking about???
The dems have absolutely given us things to vote for: infrastructure act, record low unemployment, union support with the pres visiting the picket line for the first time ever, we have the best inflation rate across all of the G7.
Yeah it’s not enough but that’s on the contrarians more than anything else.
The fuck you talking about
They’re repeating right wing propaganda, that’s what’s up.
Sorry, they are not repeating right wing propaganda. They are going outside and having yellow, asparagus smelling, liquid fall on them. Then everywhere they go Democrats are telling them it’s not piss.
I mean generally speaking, if you think the infrastructure bill, inflation reduction act, and billions in student loan forgiveness aren’t “something to vote for”, one of two things are true. Either you’re utterly delusional, or you’re a Republican.
I mean, who else but a conservative could look at these and say they aren’t accomplishments?
Mmmm, no. I heard that Biden and his ultra-centrist party have done nothing to stop deforestation in the Messia region of Mozambique. I’d rather have Trump and vote my conscience than allow globalists like Biden to ruin the Earth.
(just in case… /s)
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I think they do: https://www.whitehouse.gov/therecord/
I just think the Dems suck at advertising it. Hell, I think Biden is trying for at least some student debt relief.
He’s currently failing to handle the current most pressing international issue in a way that satisfies his voter base, though.
A question to American Lemmy users: from what I can tell you are Democrats for the vast majority : would you consider voting for a Republican president if you aligned with his ideas, or if the Democrat candidate was an unredeemable piece of shit? The two party system makes zero sense to me because it doesn’t seem, at first glance, that they’re a huge overlap, people are not willing to go to the other side often, it seems. … what’s the point of having debates and stuff then?
Before the Tea Party movement in the Republican party, yes I definitely could have been convinced to vote for a Republican candidate. I was actually intending to vote for John McCain for president because at that time in history, both parties really did still have their crazy branches, but the relatively rational adults who knew how to compromise for the good of the country still ran the show, and I was genuinely concerned that Obama didn’t have enough political experience to be president.
Then McCain nominated Sarah Palin for his Vice President. That was such a pandering, cowardly, caving to the will of the utterly ignorant, insane extremists in the Republican party move that I voted for Obama. And then the entire Republican party got so mad that a black guy was president that they collectively lost their whole fucking minds.
Republicans no longer want to govern. They want to break things and stay in power and that’s it. That’s their entire platform. There’s nothing to debate because they literally aren’t even trying to DO anything useful. Their entire political position right now is “do the opposite of what Democrats want.” They have nothing to vote FOR. People who vote Republican right now are doing so only because they’re voting against the bogeymen in their own heads.
That was John McCain’s single greatest mistake. Actually I’d bet it was the national GOP party that forced it. In any case, I really thought that they believed they found the magic sauce and could get both the Tea Party yahoos and the establishment as well.
Within the Democratic party, there’s debate about how to handle climate change. There are people who advocate for slow, cautious changes and still see fossil fuels having a small role to play in the future. There are others within the Democratic party that want more drastic action, and make a huge government spending program to try to rapidly move the US energy to renewables (even naming it after one of the biggest US government programs made during the depression). That’s normal politics. And it’s all within the Democratic party.
The GOP mostly deny climate change exists. A few GOP members suggest that climate change is happening, but is a natural event not caused by man.
The recent house drama from the speakership battle was caused because 10 nutjobs didn’t want to fund any social programs and wouldn’t approve the budget. Most GOP compromised and made a TEMPORARY budget proposal that the Democratic reps would vote for. This caused the hardliners to remove the speaker. Because he had the audacity to compromise on a TEMPORARY budget.
Removing policy aside and just looking at behavior, many GOP members do not believe in compromising to get things done. There’s attempts to not hold elected officials accountable (unless they are from the other party). It’s very little cooperation and more retaliation.
A single GOP senator didn’t like that the US military would reimburse a servicemember’s travel for medical care if they lived in a state where some reproductive treatments weren’t available. This one senator has single-handedly denied 360 military promotions and nominations to military positions. The Senate has historically tried to make it where being the minority party still had some power, so the rules let this happen (the other GOP senators on this committee weren’t blocking, just the one guy).
The Democratic senators became so fed up they decided to change the rules to prevent a single committee member from blocking promotions. While most GOP senators publicly condemn this guy, many said this rule change was too much. So it looks like the rule change vote will be along party lines, although the #1 GOP senator has said it might be necessary to vote through to get the military back on track.
The last GOP senator really known for being reasonable and wanting to work collaboratively (McCain) died. He was respected by both parties until Trump came along, and now the GOP don’t really hold his legacy in high regard.
Sorry, a lot longer than I intended, but it’s a pattern showing no desire to try to govern effectively. Putting all issues of policy aside, I think it’s a bad idea to vote for the GOP.
The only issue with that summary is that the people who voted to remove the representative willing to compromise were the GOP nutjobs AND the entirety of the 208 DNC representatives that were present. While I’m sure they had some political reason (aside from the popcorn moments), they showed that they, too, weren’t going to help someone willing to compromise.
In what world did Democrats owe McCarthy anything? He backtracked on the debt limit deal he personally negotiated in the summer to try and appease the nutjobs, and on his commitment to require a vote by the full House of Representatives before launching an impeachment inquiry into Biden, proving himself unreliable, untrustworthy, and a slave to the whims of the extremist fringe in his caucus. He publicly stated that he did not want house Democrats to help him keep the speakership, never reached out to them once in the leadup to his ouster, and offered zero concessions to entice Democrats to vote for him. So why in the world is it Democrats’ fault that they didn’t vote for a backstabbing, untrustworthy, extremist lunatic that spit on them publicly and gave them nothing to entice their vote?
I’m sick and tired of the rhetoric that since Democrats are the responsible adults in the room, they have to bear responsibility for not bailing the GOP out of their own messes. How about we hold McCarthy responsible for not keeping his caucus under control, or the right wing nutjobs for voting like they have full control of the government instead of being the fringe of the fringe in a party that controls a single chamber in Congress?
As a gay person, let me rephrase your question:
Would you consider voting for the party of people who have always dedicated themselves to hating you and making you suffer as much as they can get away with legally?
So, the issue we see is that the republican party has often run democrats, and then had them flip to republican after election.
I don’t trust most democrats either at this point.
American politics didn’t used to be the polarized team sport it is now.
We’re seeing the ultimate culmination of the Southern Strategy: Get with the preachers who run those “god says hate the blacks” churches that the South is full of, pay them to say “God says vote the Republicans in so we can use the government to take it out on the blacks.” Fast forward 60 years, and take a look around.
One thing to note is for all our partisan noise, the USA is a nation of centrists. If either party would put up a candidate that didn’t pander to the extremes of their party they’d win in a landslide, but that doesn’t make for very good down ticket fundraising and that’s what it’s all about.
No Democrat or Republican gives any shit about the actual country. All they’re interested in doing is making themselves rich.
Right now? Absolutely fucking not. In the past? No, probably not.
People who go online on sites like Lemmy to discuss politics are usually strongly in favor of one party over the other. However, not everyone who votes in elections is like that. There are many moderate or swing voters. Presidential elections in particular are decided by a few key swing states. There is also an expectation that the Congress and the Courts could be a check on each other and on the President, so sometimes people vote for a candidate that they don’t fully agree with. Debates aren’t always about which candidate or party has a more agreeable stance on the issues, but rather which issues are the most important.
There are no real moderates and swing voters are those who don’t pay enough attention to what’s going on to have an opinion on it. In reality, swing voters are ignorant.
There IS some degree of factionalism within the two party system. It is much more pronounced in the Democratic Party. Ever since Reagan in 1980, the Republican Party’s factionalism became severely diminished. The Libertarians are kind of their most loosely held affiliation.
The primary system is largely designed help direct and influence the political platforms of the two parties. The two parties have made some significant pivots and switches over its history.
But far more importantly however: What has really happened is the Citizens United and lesser known Speechnow decisions by the US Supreme Court effectively legalized corporate buyout of the American electoral system.
And now we got fascists.
I would absolutely vote Republican if they were just a bit to the left on abortions, education, and unions. Actually unions and teamsters would totally support Republicans if they weren’t openly hostile to them.
Right now they’re just different flavors of big government endlessly growing and I really think some libertarians need some wins to shake them up.
I agree, but want to add that we would need actual libertarians, not fascists calling themselves as such
The ones who actually run for office are less fascist and more incapable of actually running anything.
Do you have some examples? The term libertarian seems to me to have been hijacked by the far right for the most part, and I’d like to see there’s real libertarians out there
