Idk if I’m back on the accelerationist train or not yet. Not that I can vote in the States, so it doesn’t matter. Regardless, I feel like it would be hard for anyone that even slightly cares about the future to vote for either of these two earnestly. As a progressive, you’d have to weigh the pros and cons of the value of the Dems possibly reevaluating and restructuring if Trump gets back in, vs the absolute abysmal reactions and policies that Trump will cause if he does, especially outside the US. But then if you vote the Dems in again, the neo-nazis around the world will feel less empowered, and there will be less terrible decision making in the short term. All at the cost of Dems not having to change the status quo, and effectively being the lesser evil for the foreseeable future.
Actually, I don’t envy the American voter. And I certainly wouldn’t want to vote in this election.
Dude, fuck off. Your opinion doesn’t matter, and if it’s just that doing the best thing possible also sucks then it’s not useful. Yeah, the system needs to change eventually, but I’m happy to vote for the person who is doing more good than most US presidents in my memory. Biden isn’t who I’d choose, but he’s much better than just a supporter of genocide or whatever. Under his administration the other day the FTC just banned non-compete clauses for example. It’s all very quite, but the Biden administration has done much better than most US president.
Guy reiterated what any reasonably knowledgeable American voter already knows and almost equivocated over our choice like we actually have a choice. Well, we do… throw away votes by not voting or voting third party, voting for the trump disaster, or what constitutes our liberal party with Biden.
Unless you’re into fascism and a likely dictatorship, there’s really only one choice. The only people screaming about genocide and laying it at Biden’s feet are the same ones worshipping the military industrial complex.
Regardless, I feel like it would be hard for anyone that even slightly cares about the future to vote for either of these two earnestly…
Actually, I don’t envy the American voter. And I certainly wouldn’t want to vote in this election.
Yeah, this comment is a little more than just saying it sucks that we only have two choices. It’s pretty much saying voting won’t change anything, and they wouldn’t feel compelled to vote. I’m about as left as they come, but Biden has been fairly good as far as US presidents go (which isn’t very far in the past century or so). It’s a really easy choice to advocate for, especially when the other party says and does what they do.
I’m a true Leftist and it’s incredibly frustrating seeing so many Democrats that just went back to sleep during Biden’s presidency. People should be out in the streets protesting and fighting for a better future. They let Dems do basically nothing because “at least Biden’s not Trump.”
Most Americans just went back to sleep.
When Bill Clinton was in office in the 90’s, after the Democrats lost three presidential elections in a row to Republicans, he did not adopt socialist policies. Bill Clinton and Democratic party declared they would no longer fight Republicans on economic issues. The Democratic party shifted to the right, not the left, in response to losing elections. They opted to grab moderate voters from Republicans rather than try to win over more progressive voters.
If Democrats see moderates voting in the next election, but not progressives they will move to the right to grab those voters. They aren’t interested in chasing nonvoters or third party voters. So, the choice is not between averting fascism and driving the Democratic Party to the left. Those options are one in the same for progressives. The choice is between driving the Democratic Party to the left and averting fascism or allowing fascism to take hold in the US and allowing the Democratic Party to drift to the right. Of course if we lose our democracy, which way the Democrats shift isn’t going to matter, but I think it’s important to make this clear. There is nothing to be gained for progressives by not participating in elections, only things to lose.
This is a clear cut decision, but unfortunately people on the left are not framing it that way. We need to choose the option that delays fascism for another four years. We need time to give ourselves the opportunity to convince people that socialism is the answer to fixing our problems not blaming out groups. Considering the consequences of a fascist dictatorship in the US, voting is the thing everyone should want to do.
We need to choose the option that delays fascism for another four years.
And then in four years we need to choose that same option.
And four years after that.
And four years after that.
And four years after that.
Just like every presidential election I’ve voted in.
This is why they don’t need to worry about progressives. First, because the country isn’t progressive at all. And second because they can always just tell them that if they don’t vote they’re enabling fascism.
Since Bill Clinton until Trump the choices were between neoliberals and neoconservatives. Neoliberalism leads to fascism, so if we stick with neoliberalism it’s going to become harder and harder to delay fascism. We need socialist candidates like Bernie Sanders to win the presidency and Congress. But we’re stuck with the incumbent president for this election, which is typical of American politics. If our democracy lasts that long, we will have another shot at a progressive president in 2028.
Give the polling on progressive policies, it would seem the country’s population is more progressive overall than our elected representatives. Republicans are definitely overrepresented. That means it is essential that as many progressives vote as possible to give Democrats room to move the left. All the Democrats are interested is being where the Overton window is in order to gain the most votes. Progressives have to shift the Overton window to the left by voting Blue if we want to see change. edit: typos
And this makes sense. Because the election has shown that the nation is happy to vote the right wing Republicans into the government, not the lesser evil Democrats, so naturally the Democrats would have to shift towards the popular opinion a bit more, instead of radicalizing to the left.
You guys need ranked choice voting.
We need it so bad, but neither the Democrats nor the Republicans want it, so we’re fucked unless we revolt.
No progressive is voting earnestly for Biden, they just don’t want a fucking dictator dismantling the EPA and stacking the courts with more corrupt servants of the Federalist Society.
There are no pros for the Dems restructuring, they first of all won’t do it, and secondly we are running out of being able to vote at all. The next insurrection has better odds of success.
How is this even a conversation with anyone? We don’t like Biden, but he hasn’t led an insurrection. Do people want to continue having any choice at all?
Exactly.
Anyone not voting because they don’t like Biden very much is missing the whole picture. It can always get worse.
Idk if I’m back on the accelerationist train or not yet
Voting as Fire Extinguisher
by Kyle Tran Myhre
When the haunted house catches fire: a moment of indecision.
The house was, after all, built on bones, and blood, and bad intentions.
Everyone who enters the house feels that overwhelming dread, the evil that perhaps only fire can purge.
It’s tempting to just let it burn.
And then I remember: there are children inside.
Yes, I get that, but at what point do you start considering future children over the current children? Accelerationists are not deontologists, they are consequentialists. A child lost now is valued against the amount of children saved at some calculated point later.
No, the best way to convince an accelerationist that accelerationism is not the right play is to show that there will be no decently positive outcome. Which I’m inclined to agree with, since I can only imagine the continual election of populist figures such as Trump will only increase the divide between voters of the two parties. This’ll create more violence, possibly destabilize the US, and could destabilize large parts of the western world due to policy, military vacuum, and emboldening of alt right groups. Now measure all those consequences against the possibility of an improvement in the political system and multiply that by likelihood. This, to me, seems like a very low gain, for the high likelihood of increased losses. So it should be preferable for accelerationists to go with Biden, since he’s likely to bring about accelerationists goals too, but with less risk, but much slower.
Regardless, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s incredibly hard to vote earnestly rather than strategically.
Probably ninety percent of those would want to replace any relevant Democrat that made it on the ballet. Big deal. What a useless story.
What?
This is percentage of Biden voters…
The majority of people who would vote for him. Wishes there was any other option.
That’s a pretty big story
Anyone thinking about responding to this poster, please look at their post history so you know what you’re getting into with regard to ANYTHING even tangentially related to Biden.
True for the OP too. There’s definitely an element on some of the Lemmy communities that seems to exist only or at least primarily to push negative Biden prop (or barring that, anti-US prop in general). I checked Reddit recently for the first time in months (kind of like going to Walmart–avoid it like the plague, but sometimes you just can’t), and I was genuinely astonished at how little anti-Biden content was present by comparison.
I’m voting for Joe in November, and you should too. Joe’s administration killed non-competes, flipped the procedure for airline canceled and delayed flight refunds (i.e., pro-consumer), and pushed back the exempt employee loophole–and that’s just the news from this week. He’s an awesome president without even considering that the other side is composed entirely of criminals, Russian assets, and fascists.
It’s an important fact, but hardly a major or unique case. I know I’ve personally never felt like any of the candidates in any of the elections I remember were great, just “good enough” or “better than some of the alternatives,” I certainly would’ve replaced them if I could.
Looking at some recent primaries
Back in 2020, Biden only had 51.7% of the votes in the democratic primaries. That made him by far the biggest single candidate, but that also means that almost half of democrats would have probably been happy to replace them with one of the other 4 candidates if they could (though they would have disagreed on which of the 4.) Most of them would still go on to vote for biden despite him not being their first pick.
In 2016, trump won with 44.9%, again the biggest single candidate, but that means that 55.1% wanted not trump. Of course most of that majority still held their nose and voted for him in November, but the majority of them probably would have been happy to replace him at that time if they could.
2008 was really fucking close for the Democrats, Obama beat out Hillary with 48.1% of the vote to her 48%, and the remaining 3.9% voting for various other candidates, that means that the majority (51.9%) of people wanted a candidate other than Obama. Same year, McCain won his primary with 46.7%, so again the majority did not vote for him but for various other candidates.
And I think it’s pretty safe to say that in just about any election throughout history, voters would like to replace the opposing party’s candidate if they could, no surprise there.
A really big news story would be if the majority of the party not only would replace their candidate if they could, but were actually in agreement on who they would replace them with. If 6 in 10 Democrats said “We would like to replace Biden with this one specific other person that we all agreed on” then that would be big news.
Yeah, that’s the expected result for any party that isn’t a cult.
If 62% wanted to replace him with the same alternative candidate, that would be significant.
So there was just a burst of 11 upvotes for this story in 10 minutes, while during the same time period there were 3 downvotes.
I wonder if the same ratio will continue during the next 10-minute window or going forward; my bet is that the ratio will more or less reverse (or more), with downvotes dominating over time. What would cause an unusual number of people to all upvote this story all at once, right after it was posted?
Maybe I am wrong. Let’s see.
Edit: I am wrong, I think. Beyond that fact that this post obviously isn’t being downvoted heavily now that it’s established, I spent a while looking at this question, and I found some things that maybe looked hinky, but nothing outwardly and obviously suspicious. And you can’t really tell anything from the behavior right after a post – it’s all noise. After about 30-60 minutes, enough votes have been accumulated that you can say something about it, but before then, all bets are off.
I actually spent quite a while looking at it. Honestly, I found some things that I found a little suspicious, but nothing really all that compelling. I decided I was chasing ghosts and abandoned the analysis.
Since you asked, though, here’s what the ratio for this post looks like over time:
So, pretty much, exactly ordinary and as you’d expect it.
I mentioned some things I found a little suspicious – as an example, here’s the graph for this post which I also would have predicted to be a magnet for fake voting:
That one, to me, looks hinky. The slow dropoff after an initially elevated ratio looks like exactly what I’d expect if there was an organized effort right at the beginning to drop a bunch of fake upvotes. But… there could be a bunch of alternate explanations. It’s actually pretty difficult to get a prediction of what a “typical” post should look like, because there are a lot of variables and not a lot of data points (there aren’t that many posts that display the right combination of “controversial post” + “enough votes in total to get above the noise.”)
Like I say, I gave up the idea concluding that, on the balance, there’s at least not a strong indication that anyone is dropping fake votes in big batches.
I’ve been doing this for years and learned on Reddit what headlines get the most interactions. I’ve talked to you before about my Reddit account that I left during the API shutdown.
You can go look at my posts there too for more interaction data: https://www.reddit.com/u/return2ozma
It is well documented that many political-influence organizations have extensive social-media-fakery arms, and I’m absolutely certain that most of them have as their #1 priority from now until November to get Trump elected. And Trump is clearly a pile of elephant shit in human skin, so going after Biden for a variety of random bullshit (or just talking down the whole concept of democracy in general) is their best angle of attack.
It’s not self-evident that they’ve discovered Lemmy, but I feel confident at this point that they have. And if they have, it would be weird if they decided on posting only, that voting was a red line they didn’t want to cross.
It’s not self-evident that they’ve discovered Lemmy, but I feel confident at this point that they have.
Yes, how else can you explain the unpopularity of two pro-genocide candidates? Must be a conspiracy! Everyone loves Biden!
Honestly, just get yourself an account that allows you to see who votes and vote order, it will save you a lot of paranoia.
3 of the first 11 upvotes are people I recognise and have interacted with. It’s obviously not sockpuppets.
If the downvotes I can see, two of the first 3 are people I’ve recently interacted with as well.
I’m a non-US fediversian and I upvoted it because I thought the headline was funny and because I sympathise with Americans for having to choose between these two old men (who aren’t even Bernie Sanders, which would have been more understandable).
Just any kbin account will do it. The info is there in ActivityPub so sooner or later there will be a client that includes it, if there isn’t yet.
(My main’s at kbin.social but we are temporarily on read-only here at lemmy.world due to our servers going haywire, so to comment here I have to use my lemmy account).
No shit but also why the fuck didn’t we primary him?
All the way up till 2024 democrats were furiously protecting Biden. Shutting down any critism of him. Now it’s election time and all the discussions they refused to have for the last 3 years are at the forefront. Shame they waste their energy defending the presidential elect rather than vetting the better candidates. Like thats never blown up in their faces.
Well, I mean it’s a lot of effort rigging things so they don’t look completely janky. Debbie Whatsername-Smith was done worn out at the end of 2016 making sure it was Her Turn.
Watching the media lose its mind in 2020 when Bernie won Nevada, and candidates abandoning their campaigns like rats fleeing a sinking ship when he won California, really makes me think it was more than just DWS in 2016 fucking with things.
Also, whatever you do, don’t google “Shadow Inc Acronym Iowa Primary” or trust anything this news article says about the caucus process because its fine, everything is fine, democracy is actually very healthy and normal in this country, and anyone who says otherwise is a Russian bot.
Except for the fact, of course, that the Democrat primaries have never been more democratic. But let’s not let the facts or history get in the way of the narrative!
So you are admitting they were previously less democratic and could be more democratic?
Because no primary challenger has ever beaten an incumbent for president. It would be a waste of time and money.
62% of the voters seem to think it’s a worthwhile endeavor. You’re probably right in the sense that democrats couldnt find a progressive candidate if they came up and kicked them in the ass.
The last time the Democrats did that was Ted Kennedy challenging Carter. Even with a historically unpopular president and a well-known challenger he still lost.
I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but our government is dysfunctional and incumbents are not successfully primaried.
no primary challenger has ever beaten an incumbent for president
So, a bit of history.
https://time.com/5682760/incumbent-presidents-primary-challenges/
Before primary elections became the dominant way to pick a nominee, party leaders were more able to either shut down challengers or smoothly pass the nomination to someone else. Notably, four incumbents who were denied the nomination in the 19th century — John Tyler, Andrew Johnson and Chester A. Arthur — had been Vice Presidents who rose to the Presidency following the deaths of their predecessors, perhaps suggesting they’d never won their parties’ full support in the first place.
Then
In the 1952 Democratic Party presidential primaries, President Harry S. Truman was challenged by Senator Estes Kefauver. Truman lost the New Hampshire primary to Kefauver and dropped out of the race shortly after.
Also
TIME reported that McCarthy’s surprisingly strong showing in the New Hampshire primary was a statement that was “as much anti-Johnson as antiwar,” citing a NBC poll that found more than half of Democrats didn’t even know McCarthy’s position on Vietnam. Less than a week after New Hampshire, Attorney General Robert Kennedy jumped into the race. Then, on March 31, Johnson announced he wasn’t going to run for re-election.
As TIME reported in the April 12, 1968, article on Johnson dropping out, “So low had Johnson’s popularity sunk, said one Democratic official, that last-minute surveys before the Wisconsin primary gave him a humiliating 12% of the vote there.”
It should be noted that Ford nearly lost to Reagan in 1976
He racked up 1,187 delegates compared to Ronald Reagan’s 1,070, which was barely more than the 1,130 he needed to secure the nomination.
And Kennedy nearly beat Carter four years later
Carter won 36 primaries that year, but Kennedy’s 12 victories included important ones in New York and California, and he didn’t concede until Aug. 11, 1980, at the Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
In another historic race, William Taft was nearly edged out by Theodore Roosevelt, who went on to place second behind Woodrow Wilson in 1912. That gave Taft the dubious distinction of being the only incumbent to come in at third place in a general election.
Because causing division/voter apathy when facing a threat to democracy is a terrible idea
Democracy is perfectly fine until my candidate loses, at which point democracy is dead until late September when mid-terms start ramping up, and then suddenly democracy works again and we need to get ready to vote in 2026.
Seems like they’d have done better with 62% of the voting public behind them.
Trump faced an entire gaggle of conservative opponents and rarely failed to clear the 50% mark by state.
Biden’s biggest defeat was to the 20% of voters who cast spoiled ballots in Michigan. Marianna Williamson and Dean Phillips were barely acknowledged.
Even RFK Jr isn’t polling at better than 10%.
Who do these people actually want for the position?
RFK is a prop to give the illusion that Biden is more moderate than he really is.
Ever see a story in the sidebar, and know before clicking on it who posted it?
The Community Info. Depending on the website layout it is often displayed on the side of the screen, as a sidebar next to the main content. It usually has things like community rules. Some layouts and mobile apps refer to it as the sidebar, community description, or the community info.
It’s a tone thing.
There’s a few regular article posters than either post articles with a certain tone to the headline or they editorialize the post title to fit their narrative. It’s similar to how you can notice how somebody you’re familiar with writes and uses language and can identify potential alt/sock puppet accounts from them.
Due to this I’ve come to believe that these people are astro-turfers with a disengenous agenda.
