This poster would have you believe that your vote cannot result in you getting the worst possible outcome. Allow me to make it clear that yes, you can screw yourself and those you care about if you make the wrong choice on your vote.
Let’s take a class of High School students. The class is pretty evenly divided between Jocks (49) and Nerds (51), and there’s an election for the SGA coming up. Looking at the numbers, it looks like the Nerds have a good chance of winning, by two votes, but let’s say that this isn’t as clear as the numbers show.
The candidates are pretty distasteful for a lot of students at the school. On the Nerds’ side is a geeky boy, with square glasses, buck teeth, and a taste for pocket protectors. This kid is stereotypical Nerd, with the personality to match. He’s vaguely unpalatable, being too much into D&D and video games, but he’s also really damn smart, and his platform are things the Nerds would really like – pushing the school to fund after-school activities like Book Swap, the D&D Club, Debate Team, Chess Club, and so on.
On the Jock’s side is a pretty blonde cheerleader, the Homecoming Queen and heart-throb for many a boy in that school. But she’s a massive jerk, with an entitlement streak a mile wide, known for throwing temper tantrum(p)s when she doesn’t get her way, and a platform that includes taking all the money that would have gone to the nerdy after-school activities and putting it into prom and sports.
Of course, this stereotypical school of the 1980s will use the voting system used by the USA back in the 1980s, the classic voting system of First Past the Post, where all the votes are counted, and at the end, the one with the most votes wins.
In a 49 to 51 election, it’s clear that the Nerds win by a squeaker, but that’s not how elections work in the USA, and Cheerleader has a secret weapon. Most of her friends are of course fellow cheerleaders, dance team members, and athletes. But counted among her number is a bookish girl who is good with her studies, someone that were you to glance at her, you’d assume she’s with the Nerds. But she and Cheerleader have known each other since they were toddlers, and while Bookish Girl is smart, she’s also desperate for attention and acceptance. Bookish Girl is Cheerleader’s key to victory.
Cheerleader and Bookish Girl sit down after school and go over strategy. It’s clear that the numbers don’t support Cheerleader. All 51 Nerds are pretty sweet on that whole “Nerd After School Activities” thing. But they aren’t all as firmly dedicated to voting. For one thing, Nerd Boy is not well liked, with no social skills what-so-ever. He’s the kind of guy that doesn’t get a girl easily, and is awkward around girls and does things that can easily be styled as being demeaning and degrading to girls. Nerds are also notoriously flakey when it comes to making appointments when those appointments collide with what they would rather be doing.
Bookish Girl suggests three strategies to Cheerleader. They are:
- Have one of Cheerleader’s groupies make an accusation against Nerd Boy that he inappropriately touched her. This should peel off two girls, who are known feminists.
- Set up a nerdy game on the day of the vote, drawing out a handful of gamers.
- Run Bookish Girl as a third party spoiler, who will say she stands for even more nerdy things so that she can peel off people who think Nerdy Boy can’t or won’t do the job.
Let’s say Election Day, 3 gamers skip out on the vote, one of the feminists stay home on the accusations, and the other, plus two more Nerds, vote for Bookish Girl. The tally of votes comes out to:
- 49 people vote for Cheerleader.
- 44 people vote for the Nerd Boy.
- 4 people do not vote.
- 3 people vote for the Bookish Girl.
Remember what the rules were? The one with the most votes wins. Those 7 kids ended up denying themselves and the 44 other kids the Nerd Boy’s platform. Hopefully they’ll enjoy the prom they’ll be excluded from and the constant bullying and teasing by the Jocks, because there will be no book club to go to, or D&D night to play in, or so on.
Really, all Cheerleader needed was for Bookish Girl to run, with a side dose of that other cheerleader’s accusation (let’s just call her Tara Reade…), and it’s 49 to 48 to 3, which is STILL a win for Team Jock. And that’s how narrow our elections are today.
You may think that Harris is a lockin to win, and you’re convinced by someone like this poster that you can vote third party. The problem is you can’t know how many Jocks and Nerds are in this school. Are there 55 Nerds and only 45 Jocks? Can you vote for the Bookish Girl over the Nerd Boy because Nerd Boy did something you don’t agree with in Junior High, or because he dissed your favourite pop culture icon, or he’s a GURPS player rather than a D&D player, or so on, and Bookish Girl is idealic? How will you feel when you wake up the next morning and come to school and see that Jocks won 45 to 44 to 11, and you and 10 other people are absolute dufuses who let the nerd activities go by the wayside?
And to make this REAL…how will you feel come the next morning if you wake up, see your State went to Trump, and thus gave Trump the 270 EVs he needed to win. Remember, Trump’s Jock-favoured activities can be read about in Project 2025…
In conclusion, you shouldn’t listen to dufuses like this poster. We saw what happened last time we let them poison our minds. Your vote CAN get you the absolute worst outcome, and the only people who want that to happen are accelerationists and Trump Plants. I’ll leave it to you to determine what THIS poster is.
your scenario does not mention the electoral college. american elections are not decided by the popular vote.
The Electoral College is a bit more advanced of a topic. You could say we’ve got 60 some-odd (accounting for Maine and Nebraska) separate classrooms each having their own election (using the same rules as the example above), with each election sending a certain number of voters for the winner to a school-wide election, where over half the total number of ‘delegates’ must vote for the winner or the school admin decides, but that example gets even more involved and easier to lose people with.
The bottom line is that every State is its own election. If voters do their job, and not get bogged down with what could go wrong, we might just get out of this with a serious win. It won’t be a clean win, and we won’t all get what we want, but at least, we’ll not get Project 2025!
Continuing to vote for the duopoly, for the red fascist or the blue fascist, gets you the absolute worst outcome.
I see the brigade is out, but not able to overcome the fact that not counting the poster’s own upvote, he’s downvoted two to one.
No. There is no such thing as a ‘Blue Fascist’. This is the kind of BS that I was calling out with the false accusations bit in my example. No. Democrats are not Fascist. They aren’t perfect but here’s the facts: Nobody is! But Team Trump sure the fuck is. And anyone trying to get you to vote third party in a bitterly divided country like the USA is merely trying to get you to throw away your votes so that their favourite side of the duopoly wins, or they’re too damn stupid to recognise that that’s all you can do voting third party.
I also notice that this poster didn’t address the meat of the illustration above. Can’t really, I guess!
Let’s also point out that as long as there is FPTP, even if Ms. Bookish Girl were to win more than 3 votes, she’d STILL suffer the same effects. Let’s say she’s a D&D nerd through and through. A GURPS GM and his two players could sink her as surely as her voters would sink Nerd Boy. Quite literally, your only path in the current system is to take over one of the two major parties and slowly, meticulously, difficultly, and methodically bend that party to being what you want, and you might fail at that because hey, guess what, you don’t always get what you want.
But if you let Trump and Project 2025 win, I promise you you’ll get what you DON’T want. Don’t let this jerk or idiot (because it must be one of the two) get you to vote for Project 2025 by voting third party.
Look at you assuming that project 2025 is not bipartisan. Its ideas have been around for decades and has always been bipartisan. Project 2025 is just its most current name.
