Trump has offered praise for West, calling him “one of my favorite candidates.” Another is Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Trump favors both for the same reason. “I like her very much. You know why? She takes 100% from them. He takes 100%.”
waiting until the usual lemmy suspects show up to be like “iM vOtInG tHiRd PaRtY tHeY aReNt SpOiLeR cAnDiDaTes” my guy the republicans have literally said out loud that they are supporting these spoiler candidates as spoilers, if you’re voting for them, you are voting for trump.
The “socialist” and “Green party” posters who somehow are shocked, shocked you would call them pro-Trump astroturf accounts, when every action they take coincidentally has the effect of helping Trump.
The real giveaway is their refusal to equally assess left and right-wing threats. When it comes to voting for a democrat, any imperfection is an absolute justification for voting third party. When someone points out Trump will get into office because of it and what that means to Gaza, green policies, etc, they gish gallop and strawman until the conversation is fully derailed.
My view as an anarchosocialist is that we have to do everything we can to get the best possible result every step of the way. We don’t live in a country in the US that allows us to vote any way but strategically. We must always be assessing what the best outcome we can get in any given situation is. Unfortunately in electoral politics that often means the most compromised candidate because anyone else will result in a regressive. The question becomes “what do we do after the election to press the government into actually representing us”
In a lot of ways I think that’s voting blue no matter who until the regressive party is made irrelevant. Once the regressive party is irrelevant we can start treating the dems as the regressives they truly are and working on getting election reform and ranked choice voting. We can’t get any of that if we allow for any room for a Donald Trump presidency. He wants to blow up the entire system and fill the power vacuum with his own self. For the rest of us who want to dismantle the entire system, the purpose is not to have a dictator, but rather to eliminate hierarchy. We are in an extremely dangerous position this year. If we’re ever going to disrupt the powers that be, we can’t ever allow for any kind of monarch as that’s a step 300 years backwards.
So my advice? Vote for Harris, and then take to the streets and protest the ways she doesn’t represent us. Palestine deserves to be free. Oppressed peoples deserve reparations. The cold war was a modern race to rape Africa a la the late 19th century and the peoples harmed in the mad scramble to see if capitalism or Bolshevism was more effective at spreading cannot recover until we fundamentally decolonize the world. The cost of the suffering we inflict doesn’t even need to be viewed abroad to be seen. Appalachian coal fields and fracking operations are acts of violence against the land and the people who live on it. Prison labor is a form of slavery and is only palatable to our modern sensibilities as we contrast it with the peculiar institution of chattel slavery instead of comparing it with the history of slavery throughout time. The only opportunities we afford native Americans to live on the land we stole from them is if they pay us in money whose value is rooted in the value of that very stolen land via the mortgage system.
Don’t let Donald Trump be president. Don’t let President Harris off the hook for the violence the position she is taking over is responsible for.
I’ll take that luxury gay space communism any time, but until then…
In a lot of ways I think that’s voting blue no matter who until the regressive party is made irrelevant.
That’s the same for me. One party there is an option for better in the future, the other… Will literally be burning that future in a fire.
I had almost forgotten reasonable anarchosocialists still exist on the internet.
Thank you.
It’s even more hilarious when I checked the profile of one of those high-volume “green party” posters and found them copy-pasting a bunch of overtly racist articles in the conservative comm. Almost like they forgot to switch alt accounts or something.
And have you ever noticed how it’s always one side denying who they’re promoting. I mean, how often do you see someone secretly propping up a Democratic candidate and deny it when called out on it? It’s almost as if they’re embarrassed to admit they like trump.
I’m pretty sure we can convince a significant portion of the MAGA crowd to vote third party, by informing them it’s impossible for Trump to win without a large turnout for third parties. 🤔
This article is full of gems, this is one of my favorites.
The next day, with the deadline to qualify for the Arizona ballot just hours away, Brett Johnson, a prominent Republican lawyer, and Amanda Reeve, a former GOP state lawmaker, made house visits to each as they tried to persuade both to sign new paperwork to serve as West electors.
Johnson and Reeve work for Snell & Wilmer, which has done $257,000 worth of business for the Republican National Committee over the past two years, campaign finance disclosures show.
Hamrick declined to comment on the role of Johnson and Reeve. They did not respond to requests for comment.
Edited with ‘helpful tip’ from @odelik@lemmy.today
Helpful tip:
For quotes you can use the following formatting:
> "The next day, with the deadline to qualify for the Arizona ballot just hours away, Brett Johnson, a prominent Republican lawyer, and Amanda Reeve, a former GOP...
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Which would produce
The next day, with the deadline to qualify for the Arizona ballot just hours away, Brett Johnson, a prominent Republican lawyer, and Amanda Reeve, a former GOP state lawmaker, made house visits to each as they tried to persuade both to sign new paperwork to serve as West electors.
Johnson and Reeve work for Snell & Wilmer, which has […]
Republicans know they cannot go above 46-47% in popular vote, and cannot win what is essentially a two-person race with that support. A Republican nominee has received above 48% only once after 1988 (GW Bush in 2004). Only way to win the EC without PV win is for third party candidates to get support in key battleground states like Nader in 2000 and Johnson-Stein in 2016.
Those of us that voted for Nader and Stein never would have voted for your shitty candidates. To begin with, your entire premise is based on the liberal ‘spoiler vote’ which is 100% myth. There could be zero third party candidates on the ballot and we still would not vote for a republican or a Democrat because we are not Republicans or Democrats.
Veritasium just explained some math about voting that covers quite a bit: https://youtu.be/qf7ws2DF-zk?si=R1wIgNC-Q4vsgVd8
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.
Continuing to vote for the duopoly, for the red fascist or the blue fascist, gets you the absolute worst outcome.
I’m sure Russia is, too. At this point, is there any difference between what the cons want and what Putin wants?
This will always stand out to me, in 2016 Trump Directs RNC to soften position on Ukraine support
And, of course, this:
Why are we not running RINO’s all over the place? Fuck these backwater toothless bigots. They need to be fucking dealt with.
MAGA types are the ‘fall in line’ type, so it’s really hard to run candidates that appeal to them. Their Preacher and AM Shock Jock tells them ‘vote for the Republican or the Devil wins and America dies’ and they don’t entertain anyone but the Republicans. It’d be wasted resources. It’s far more effective to appeal to moderates, because the GOP has basically forsaken that entire group of voters to entertain their MAGA base, and we have over 200 Republicans on our side saying “we don’t agree with the Dems on policy, but we’re still voting for them because we aren’t MAGAts.” That’s a more effective strategy, IMO, than trying to prop up Libertarians or Constitutionalists.
The way to deal with the ‘backwater toothless bigots’ is to turn out for November. Get your vote locked in, then do your damndest to get as many Left-Wingers to the polls as possible. I don’t care where you are. Turn out and vote. That’s how we fucking deal with them.
Because it costs money. It’s hard enough getting liberals to vote for one candidate, libs have an habit of seeing the flaws in the system and will vote Green Party or whatever as a protest vote, and these days it’s the candidate with the most money winning. So when you prop up a sabotage candidate you’re taking away from the candidate you actually need to win. Plus, Dems just kinda don’t like playing dirty like that.
