2020 was… truly unique. It was so hard to stay away from doom scrolling, and I (and many others) were pretty disillusioned by the sad fact that so much of our country legitimately supported the Orange Man. I didn’t get a wink of sleep the night of the election because I genuinely considered it to be a make or break decision for America.
My point is that looking back on it, in the end the only real difference I made was at the ballet box. This year I’m going for the Head-in-the-Sand approach. I’m done with the political memes. Done with the Twitter screenshots. It just riles me up and this year I’m gonna do my best to fight that.
If Trump is the Republican nominee I would vote for Biden even if he was dead.
None of them this time around. Christie is a moderate, but he will be out pretty soon. I’m surprised he’s hung on this long, although I’m happy that he has because he and Hutchinson are the only ones with the guts to tell the truth about Trump. Hutchinson hasn’t been polling high enough to be in the debates, but at least he’s on the sidelines saying Trump is trash.
Out of the declared candidates, my preference would probably be Christie or Haley as the nominee. I still wouldn’t vote for them, but they would be better than the others if the Republicans somehow win.
Overall, it’s a pretty piss poor field on both sides. If Biden was 15 years younger I would consider it a pretty solid ticket.
I hope Antony Blinken eventually runs. For me, he’s the brightest star in a pretty solid administration. Best Secretary of State in decades.
best take. Dems don’t follow Biden religiously. He’s just better than the godawful alternatives that are on the otherside.
I will stay informed on the issues, but unless the GOP does a 180 on about most of their platform I’m kinda forced to vote Dem (Stop denying climate change, stop trying to de-humanize LGBTQ, stop the culture war shit, come up with a real gun control plan, those would be a start). Hooray 2 party system.
I just turn off the news now, all sources are meant to keep us angry in an “us vs them” situation and never really talk about the real issues, so instead of it just flare up my anxiety and anger I’m just going to keep my headphones on and play games. Someone ping me if suddenly the GOP decides to be pro-humanity again and I need to reconsider my vote.
I hate that I’ve been forced into this same position, I always thought I was open-minded and didn’t follow parties, but when the choice is a literal fascist trying to tear American democracy apart with the worst takes on every position and a generic semi-left-leaning politician trying to maintain the status quo… I guess I’ll just stick with generic status quo, that’s pretty much the only rational choice for a sane individual. Even just sitting out the election isn’t an ethical choice, that’s surrendering to fascism.
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It’s not a question of policy. Republicans literally killed people last election trying to overthrow democracy.
Not that I even like democrats, but anyone who votes red after Jan 6th is fundamentally an enemy of democracy.
Voting is the least you can do, so I will choose to vote against Capitalists and not for genocide. If you can’t even do that bare minimum, you don’t deserve democracy.
Agreed. So don’t vote to make things slightly less worse, vote to make things better!
It can be easy to feel like a drop of water in a large ocean when it comes to national elections. But you should also vote in your county and state elections; you can probably make more of a difference there.
I’m not saying “don’t vote in the national election”, but just know that there are other elections to vote in, and thry are just as important as the nationals.
Yah I can vote for the red mayor who wants more cops or the blue mayor who wants more cops. Freedom rings!
Unless you’re in a big big city, mayoral and council races can actually have a lot of diversity in terms of political outlooks. Never forget that a town elected a dog as mayor. Nobody that pure would ever make it to federal office.
There certainly are places like that. I’d vote for a dog over any of our candidates in the last local election. Or anyone running on banning the damn roadside signs. Alternatively, the candidates themselves have to pluck them out from along the highway on ramps and whatever other places they’ve been planted the night of the election and before the morning light.
Our local election was bupkis. The red one won because the blue one won last time and nothing changed and people are still unhappy. The mayoral race prior went about the same way, but the blue one won because the red one in the office did nothing differently and no one was happy.
You understand that “voting for a dog” for mayor is just Conservatism right? You know make the government small enough to drown in a bathtub, Reagan etc?
Vermont, my former residence, has a republican governor that’s been repeatedly reelected who the country at large considers a RINO. Non-federal level parties may differ significantly from their national stances.
It’s actually the same in BC, Canada where I emigrated… the BC Liberals were partially anti-choice and deeply religious (so closer to the CPC than LPC), as such they recently rebranded to “BC Unity Party”… did they check that their new name didn’t acronym to BCUP? No, they did not.
Voting straight Democrat. The republican party is the biggest threat to the US right now.
This is the argument every single election. Every time, for decades, and yet things get continually worse.
I’d argue the belief that voting for an establishment party is any kind of a long-term solution is the biggest threat. By all means do it if it’ll help a little in the short term, but the ship’s still sinking.
While I agree in my dislike for the current Republican Party, the attitude of blindly voting for your team because the other is evil is exactly what my (late) fox-addicted grandfather used to uphold. I loved the man, but I think we ought to do better and do the hard work of researching every candidate and choosing the best, be it democrat, republican, or independent.
Gave you and upvote to get you back off zero and agree with your general sentiment.
But - the elections since Trump took the ROC convention have all been different - we must get rid of all the R’s we can no matter what at the local, state and national level as soon as possible now that the have proven to be an existential threat to democracy itself.
Well I won’t be voting for the fascist party…
Which one? The Democratic Party has been supporting genocide. It’s well past time we recognized that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are both fascist and reject them accordingly.
I get the concept. I do. And I wrestle with the notion myself, as I’m an anarchist (you and I don’t agree on a few things, lemmygrad friend).
But I don’t subscribe to the notion that not voting as a principled abstainer is a righteous act…I don’t think. Because I do agree, of course. The democrats are capitalist, war-mongering shitheels. They aren’t “good” or just or righteous by any stretch of the imagination. They destroy the environment and will kill us if we challenge the status quo of lte stage consumer capitalism. I have no illusions about this.
But doing nothing in the face of a Republican Party that is hellbent on wiping trans people from the face of the earth, strapping us all to the whipping chair until they can establish a Christofascist nightmare in which we are all beaten into straight, white submission is…not a heroic act. Because, yeah, the democrats support Israel, they are neoliberal capitalist pigs. They boost police budgets whenever they can, they take obscene amounts of money from special interests and work for them, not for us. But the republicans do all the same shit PLUS hating trans and gay people and pass laws that make it so they can lock you away for protesting and they are clearly more “business friendly” because they can be open about it while the democrats have to do slightly less because their rhetoric and their base don’t approve like Republican voters do.
My point is, there are two terrible options. Yes, we are in agreement. And yes, electoralism is bullshit, incrementalism will get us nowhere. But hierarchy is bullshit. Capitalism is bullshit. These things will exist until some insanely devastating event upturns the way the world has run for a long time.
Not voting won’t change these realities. VOTING won’t change them. But all the people that are hurt by an emboldened xenophobe and vicious bigot WILL be hurt. Actual, measurable hurt. PLUS the Palestinian people you’re basing your position on will continue to be killed. Because the US supports Israel. Not the democrats or republicans, but the US.
Not voting against a party that is openly using REAL LIFE fascist methods and speech so you can maintain your perceived purity isn’t noble.
We can all hate capitalism. But we’re stuck with it right now. We can all hate electoralism. But we’re stuck with it right now. Capitalism kills way more people than the genocide currently happening in Palestine. But you’re way more involved with it than you would be in electoralism by casting one vote.
These things are truths right now. You’d do a lot more good (or at least contribute A LOT less hurt) by abstaining from capitalism than you would abstaining from electoralism. We can all be principled. But all-or-nothing-ism that is rampant on “the left” (read: in modern people with principles and humanity and half a brain) isn’t noble because it helps. It’s perceived as noble because you can say, “pfft. I didn’t _____.” You’re not helping anymore but yourself.
Engage in praxis. Fight for your beliefs. But when your abstinence will be weaponized by insanely powerful and horrible people, and leveraged against minority groups, your “purity” is nothing but self-aggrandizement.
Not voting against anti-trans Christian fascist bigots is a huge show of privilege.
Amerika as an empire deserves to die. I will not pencil-whip your colonizers or genociders without them giving up said colonialism and genocide first, and verifiably, long-term at that. I will not stand alongside that and tarnish my community’s history misleading that way; and I don’t care how many people try to couch it in “but what about your (white) countrymen?!”
If they cosign the Democrat Party’s genocides, if they back the colonizing invaders, then fuck them. They are emphatically not my ‘countrymen’, especially not my allies, and can only be seen as weak links that deserve to go with the nation in the same fire.
We may as well be two entirely different nations at this point with how much enmity I see in your party of colonizers.
Fuck off.
We don’t like that we are only allowed to have two choices.
The problem is that a moderately small number of people and corporations who combined have more money than god have decided it’s a great idea to execute regulatory capture of the entire US government.
I just hope guillotine season starts before the world catches on fire.
We don’t like that we are only allowed to have two choices.
You chose it and chastised someone for telling you to stop choosing it lmao
