I was shocked in the presidential debate that Harris gave staunch support for fracking. I was under the impression that democrats are against fracking, and remember people being critical of Fetterman for supporting it.
I also grew up in an area that was heavily impacted by the pollution from fracking. People who worked in the field were seen as failures of moral character who chose profits over the health of their children. How is it that both major parties are now in support of it? I feel like I must be missing a piece of the puzzle.
How big is that mass, really? Here on lemmy, a few hundreds or maybe thousands, globally? In 2016, Bernie running against a weak candidate in the more progressive party got 43% of the vote.
It does no good to falsely believe we have some critical mass of progressives when the data shows we don’t. Instead we need to continue grassroots work to keep expanding the progressive base, so someday your fantasy actually becomes true. It is not yet true though.
We gain nothing from denying reality.
That’s an interesting example, I’ll have to look it out and see if the context bears it out. I say that as although yes he might have only gotten 43%, the question is how many registered voters didn’t vote and how many eligible but unregistered voters there were.
Vermont has a fairly high voter turnout, but looking at Vermont’s Secretary of State 2016 had a voter turnout of 63% of Voting Age Population from census population. So that 185k of 505k thousands people who didn’t vote.
Also if I have the right numbers from Vermont’ SOS, that’s 43% of the state total 63% who voted.
I’ve read other demographic breakdowns on those who don’t vote which is worth looking into, but it’s hard for me to see someone say that there isn’t a mass when we have this huge population of American citizen who don’t vote. Something between 35-45% of the US just doesn’t. That’s a huge swath of disenfranchised people.
The “mass” is small and more importantly, located in safely blue states anyway. I’m extremely liberal and I accept that these presidential elections are never going to be about me. I still vote in them because I’m not a moron. But I put more of my energy into the Democratic primary, always trying to tug the D party left. And I focus on state county and city ballots where these ideas are much more in play.
That’s the adult move here. The teenager move is to vote 3rd party or not at all because the political world hasn’t rolled a red carpet out to your doorstep.
