In the usa, refusing to vote for the lesser of two evils is effectively the same as voting for the greater of two evils. This includes voting third party and not voting at all.
So sure, do your protest vote so you can wear your sticker saying you voted while not even trying to make a difference.
I get flak for blaming voters for Harris losing the last election. They’re right to say she should have run a better campaign, I agree it sucked. There’s plenty of other completely valid complaints about the dnc as well, But status quo wasn’t good enough so we elected someone who committed treason live on tv. There’s enough blame to go around for everyone to be at fault.
part 2: because in the past hour I’ve thought of several ways in which my above post could easily be misunderstood.
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I’m mostly referring to the presidential election. In that race, third parties effectively don’t exist. However, in congressional elections, third parties do sometimes get seats. Also, the closer to local you get the more your individual vote can impact the result so absolutely vore 3rd party if there’s a candidate that’s worth a damn in those contexts.
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I would love for 3rd party candidates to be viable options. However, before that can happen, either the system needs to change, or the population needs to change. Ranked choice voting would be a major victory in moving the system in that direction, but we’d have to actually get there first. Order of operations matters. What do you want me to do? pretend that the system isn’t rigged seven different ways to favor the greater evil?
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Things weren’t always this shitty, and a lot of people are in denial about how bad it actually is. Before trump and maga took over the country, I’d have been voting for 3rd party too of I was politically literate enough at the time to do so.
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I understand why you want to vote 3rd party even though, no, especially because we live in such asinine times. Stick it to the man, fuck the republicans for being nazis, and fuck the democrats for completly failing to stop them. I agree with this sentiment. All of one side and most of the other deserves prison forever at best. But if you actually wanted to make a difference in the 2024 election, which I’ll take credit for naming The Last Election, then there was only one correct choice even though she sucked.
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I’m using the hypothetical you, not aiming at anyone specific. It’s just easier to frame my arguments that way sometimes. Most people in this community are actually quite sensible from what I can tell.
I could keep going, but I think this is already longer than anyone is willing to read.
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this implies that not voting does something else somehow
If parties seek to get votes, they must promote the wants of non-voters in an effort to entice them.
If they have votes guaranteed, they are free to chase the only others who currently don’t vote for them, that being those on the opposing side by promoting their wants.
But ultimately electorialism is a spectacle, and revolution is needed for genuine lasting change.
they don’t seek votes tho, they seek donor money. I agree electorialism is a farce, but to not vote is not a morally better option than to vote
Are you sure you phrased that comment the way you intended?
pretty sure
If parties seek to get votes, they must promote the wants of non-voters in an effort to entice them.
That’s not true. The Democrats don’t have to appeal to non voters. They’re perfectly free to be stupid instead, and you can’t stop them.
See, the problem with neutral voters is, you always trust other people to make intelligent decisions. That’s a very deadly mistake that has caused a lot of genocides throughout history. Us left voters acknowledge the simple truth that the Democrats are stupid, and we take their stupidity into account in our plans.
That’s a whole new sentiment not present in the graphic at all. Ballots have more options than “evil” and “lesser evil” — most of them have a couple of candidates raising awareness on single issues, a few almost certainly insane people, and one or two actually good candidates everyone thinks it would be a waste to vote for because they’re third party.
Here in Australia, we have ranked choice voting, so the third parties are capable of competing with the big ones. But I think this is an American meme, and the American electoral system makes it so that voting third party always harms your interests.
Tbf, if I vote R, it harms my interests, if I vote D, it harms my interests, and if I vote for the 3rd party candidate I like who won’t win it harms my interests, if I don’t vote it harms my interests…
That’s a mindset problem. You’re seeing the baseline as the government you want. And anything less than what you want as harm. You need to adjust your expectations. The baseline is the average most likely outcome. If you’re an optimist, that’s the Democrats winning and continuing to bomb the middle east, but investing more money in solar energy. If you’re a pessimist, it’s Trump cancelling elections, declaring martial law, and launching all the nukes. The truth is probably somewhere in between those two.
If your expectations are properly aligned, then the Democrats being ineffectual and largely chained to corporate interests, but having a few good intentions here and there, is an improvement in the state of affairs. We need to internalise the maxim, “beggars can’t be choosers”, and then go from there. We need to choose a government that is easier to influence through protest and civil disobedience, that destroys our communities slowly enough for us to improve our own lot.
Three years ago, we had the student encampments for Palestine. Today we have No Kings. The situation got worse and the overton window moved right. Leftists today are too busy doing damage control to push for actual good changes. We gotta lighten the load.
It definitely sucks. But there is one way for our interests to be hurt slightly less. And that is to make sure that Republicans don’t win wherever possible. And in between the elections we harass and primary every single one of the national establishment parties.
Maybe it’s because I’m an American, but I’ve never seen a third party candidate that wasn’t a lesser evil.
Honestly at the national level some of them are pretty decent sized evils in their own right. Knowing that at best they stand zero chance of having a positive impact on the election. Often running mostly just to raise money or their profile.
Jill Stein for instance sharing a table with that traitor Mike Flynn and Vladimir Putin. She knew exactly what she was doing and she got the result she wanted.
I feel good about saying Claudia de la Cruz would be a better president than Donald Trump, and that the DNC machinery is very clear on what kind of candidate they’d have to run to pull votes from the PSL’s voter base.
I feel good about saying Claudia de la Cruz would be a better president than Donald Trump,
A dead head of cabbage would be a better president than Donald Trump; we’re discussing candidates who are not just a lesser evil.
Oh sorry, I thought we were having a different conversation altogether – reasonable voting strategies for moving the overton window to the left
Ah, no, I just was talking about the general notion of voting for a lesser evil of some sort being necessary in most electoral systems.
Neutral voters are honestly gullible enough to think the liberals will go left to appeal to them. When history shows again and again, that liberals always think non voters are in the center. I can’t imagine having as much faith in the intelligence of liberals as Deceptichum does.
That’s why we’re so much further right today than in 1950. /s
For your point to stand, you’ll have to demonstrate that the political left has been pushing the “vote the lesser evil” line continuously since the 50s. I wasn’t there, but my impression of the 60s and 70s is arguing that one should vote the lesser evil was pretty unpopular, so I’m hesitant to take the shift in politics over that particular timescale as hard evidence against op’s original point.
I would argue pretty distinctly that every major presidential candidate in the Cold War era was very much a question of ‘lesser evils’, and that there was certainly no candidate that we would regard as good, considering we’re posting here, in Memes Of Production.
If the argument is not that the choice is between lesser evils, but that it is perceived as between lesser evils, than short of a poll I can’t scientifically prove the period envisioned politics in much the same way, but I can certainly drag out a very large number of quotes from prominent figures - both in politics and culture - which describe American politics in much the same ‘lesser evil’ way.
I doubt even many Republicans were voting for Nixon because they thought he was swell and trustworthy. But he was their, lesser evil.
The Nixon voters I’ve talked to really did believe he was a great candidate, and were deeply betrayed by the corruption because they had such high hopes, but it’s a real small sample size. I doubt there’s any way to conclusively prove it either way because voters aren’t a monolith — someone’s ideal candidate is someone else’s lesser evil. I just don’t think of the hippie movement as a bunch of “lesser evil” folks was more my line of thinking.
The Nixon voters I’ve talked to really did believe he was a great candidate, and were deeply betrayed by the corruption because they had such high hopes, but it’s a real small sample size.
Can’t speak as to any personal experience with Nixon voters myself, but “Tricky Dick” wasn’t a prominent pre presidency nickname of his for nothing. He didn’t even win a plurality of the popular vote in the '68 GOP primaries, despite half his competitors either dropping out or starting late.
I just don’t think of the hippie movement as a bunch of “lesser evil” folks was more my line of thinking.
I mean, the hippie movement were a very small group and largely disdained by leftist political junkies of the period. But more than that, do you think hippies who voted for, say, JFK, LBJ, or even McGovern, thought that those candidates’ positions on, say, drugs, were anything but a lesser evil?
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