No. It is the responsibility of every voter to fucking VOTE. Vote for somebody, vote against somebody. Don’t give a shit, but you have to vote. It’s not about the candidates, it’s about the fact that you’re an American goddamn citizen. You want the freedom? Pony up the effort or STFU and don’t bitch when they take the freedom away from you.
Yup, the fact that almost 30 million people who voted for Obama in 2008 stayed home in 2010 was the fault of the voters, not the fault of democrats for being so inept, corporate and centrist that people didn’t feel motivated to vote.
Then again, the total turnout wasn’t much different from past midterms. In presidential elections, about 50-55% of people vote. In midterms about 37% vote.
However in 2008 there were 70 million Obama voters, 60 million McCain voters. In 2010 there were 40 million democratic voters, 50 million republican voters. If you assume the voters from each party voted for the respective nominee, that means 30 million Obama voters stayed home vs 10 million McCain voters.
Give people a reason to vote.
But but Digital it’s not my fault! The candidate did not come and force me to find out what the his positions were and what the other side’s were, and and was not exciting and fun to listen to! And there’s a new season of Jessica Jones just released and catching up on Mort and Ricky eps! Anyway my vote doesn’t matter, the election is never decided by just the one vote. Really I voted for the President and what do I have to show for it? Like one vote in a House race matters. I got things to do. Don’t blame me for my being apathetic other than for President. Not my job, not my responsibility …
Gee, Officer DigC, we’re very upset
We never have the candidates every voter oughta get …
Brian I know you know better than this. If you want your views to be pandered to then you need to be a group that votes and votes reliably. If you do not vote and vote reliably, meaning including at midterms, then your views will be marginalized and your desires unable to be actualized whether you get the President you want or not.
Good on camille for working to get candidates she can support at all levels on the ballot, winning primaries, and winning elections. And shame on all those who sit on their asses at midterms and then go on complaining about the results and blaming others for not inspiring them enough. The good of the country is not a good enough reason to vote, not when I have something more entertaining to do!
Hey, I vote. I bet I’ve voted more in the past 25 years than most anyone in this thread. We have both open primaries and odd-year state elections, plus the Presidential primary is broken out separately, so I vote nine times in a typical four-year cycle. I research everyone down to county school board candidates.
I’ve also, in various years, phone-banked for ballot issues, shuttled people to polls, and served as an election officer, which is a low-paying 15-hour day. I uphold the goddamn small-D democratic process.
But if you want me to vote for your Party, your candidate, you have to give me somebody I can respect. I take this shit seriously; my vote must be earned.
They already have one, if that is not enough it is entirely on them.
- Momentum is not a thing.
- All votes count equally.
- Clinton is extremely likely to enter the convention having received significantly more votes and significantly more pledged delegates than Sanders, and that’s why she’s going to get the nomination. The superdelegates aren’t going to be the deciders. I certainly hope that Sanders’s voters are adult enough at that point to show up in November, but based on what I’m hearing from them, I’m not counting on it.
Great. And then what?
I mean, sure. Millennials suck. Kids these days won’t vote like they should. They’re lazy and irresponsible and stupid. And that noise they listen to, that hippity hop, you call that music?
So now what? Is the idea that if we yell at millennials enough, if we blame them enough, if we call them enough names, THAT’s what will get them motivated to participate in politics?
Frank and Sanders are both progressive. Frank’s approach is, I’ll stipulate, more successful at getting bills passed. Sanders’s approach is more effective at getting young people energized about politics.
If the problem is that young people aren’t sufficiently energized about politics, what the hell is Frank doing? Shouldn’t he be applauding these newly-active youth and looking for ways to steer their energy into a long-term movement, rather than disparaging them and telling them they have no idea what they’re doing?
Stipulate they have no idea what they’re doing. Frank’s approach is still terrible.
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Psychology is a large part of getting your supporters out and the perception of momentum does seem to have impact on behaviors. It is not of course a deciding factor
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Nope. Caucus votes and low turnout primary votes count more. And later voting states get more delegates per unit population than earlier voting states in trade off for the decision often already being made by then. As highly improbable as it may be for Sanders to catch up in pledged delegates, catching up in actual popular vote is even more improbable.
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I think most will. Judging by the most vocal is not a reliable technique.
And then nothing. If people want things to change the change has to happen in them first. It usually does by growing up and realizing things don’t happen in big revolutions and presidents are not kings or super heroes. There is no solution to this until people realize their mentality is the problem.
The subject of discussion is getting younger voters persistently energized enough to be engaged even during midterm elections and in the ongoing slog that is the never-ending and by necessity imperfect political process, because that is of course how actual change happens.
You think Sanders approach will be effective at accomplishing that? I’ll be happy enough if they stay just engaged for the rest of the presidential year cycle!
I’m with Dig here. Their lack of understanding of the problem impacts me to be sure, but fixing it is a job for their own generation to fix.
And then those nonvoters complain about how the government never gets anything they want done. Hypocritical.
So here’s the thing. In general, I like Sanders’s ideas, but I appreciate Clinton’s practicality.
Except here. Certain Clinton supporters–I’m looking at you, Barney Frank–have more-or-less correct ideas about voter turnout, but a completely idealistic and impractical approach to getting something done. DigitalC, your “and then nothing” is a prime example. Sanders has definitively shown that young voters are persuadable and have energy. For Democratic luminaries to then throw up then hands and abdicate all responsibility for engaging in persuasive action is appalling. Elections are important and have consequences; be a goddamned pragmatist about it, quit insulting younger folks, instead find ways to involve younger folks and respect their participation in the process.
Or you can be a wild-eyed purist who refuses to do anything except yell at kids to get off your lawn, so to speak. Your choice.
I guess if I don’t take my children for regular medical care and something bad happens to them, it’s not my fault. The doctor didn’t do enough to entice me to bring them in.
No he hasn’t. He has shown they might show up in presidential elections, but we knew that already. Elections ARE important and have consequences, that is more than enough reason enough for anyone who cares about the political process to show up more than once every four years. That you still insist that young voter apathy in off years is something that anyone but themselves can fix or that anyone but them is to blame is part of the problem. Put on your big boy/girl pants on and fucking vote, that is the one and only solution.
So here’s the thing to me … and I wonder what you think about it as a teacher.
Sometimes the answer for irresponsible behavior by others is not to take on the responsibility for it yourself. It is often tempting to but it rarely actually works.
This is a problem for their generation to solve for themselves. I actually have some confidence in their ability to do so once they recognize that it is a problem and no confidence that anyone else can solve it for them without their owning it. They are adults now. I do not believe that thinking we need to solve, or can solve, their problem for them is respecting them at all. They can and only they can. I do not believe that being afraid to identify what they are doing as being a problem lest they get miffed is demonstrating any respect either.
In any case what Sanders is doing to date is not solving the problem; it is exploitation of the once every four year involvement peak and nothing more.
It’s important in the sense that there’s still one more race in November, and Clinton won’t be able to win that race if the party is fractured. That’s why how she wins kinda does matter. If she can claim an outright victory based on the election results, that’s probably something voters at the convention could accept. But if Hillary has to rely on super delegates to close the gap, then Sanders voters (understandably, I think) will want to know why those super delegates shift to Clinton, assuming that Sanders finishes the race stronger. This argument becomes much stronger if Sanders can win in Pennsylvania, which is a swing state (Sanders could claim wins in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania). And it’s also strong if he can complete the sweep on the West Coast by winning California. Sanders would have a strong case to have super delegates. Assuming Hillary were to need super delegates to finish off Sanders at a time when Sanders could be racking up win after win…that would almost certainly disgust the Sanders crowd to the point of not supporting her in the general.
You seem to be saying that the candidate with fewer pledged delegates, with a bigger margin of loss than that in the popular vote, who solidly lost the key swing states of Ohio, Virginia, and Florida, who demonstrated a relative lack of support among Black and Hispanic voters, should be given the nomination by superdelegates shifting to him because his relatively stronger (Whiter) states came closer to the finish and because he narrowly won Michigan (not a likely tipping point state) and, presumptively in the hypothetical, won Wisconsin and Pennsylvania?
No. I do not concur that Sanders supporters would stay home against Trump because the superdelegates did not give their preferred candidate the win when he lost in pledged delegates and, by a larger margin, the popular vote.
I think most of them would find the concept of the superdelegates swinging an election away from how the popular vote came out (even more than the pledged delegate count) to be objectionable.
I agree with all of this and really have been wondering if the Sanders campaign (which is helmed, oddly enough, by the ultimate political hack, Tad Devine) is risking damaging its brand with this desperate ploy for superdelegates. It is so unlikely to work, and goes foursquare against what progressives believe (as evidenced by the various petitions going around). If it were more likely to work, at least, the bald hypocrisy would be more explicable.
I doubt whether Frank’s GOTV advice is limited to yelling at millennials. Hell, I don’t think Frank even mentioned millennials.
The Dems have to do 2 things. One, they have to retain their infrastructure into the next midterm: camille makes a good point. But two, jaw-jaw will also play a role. It is ridiculous to get voting-angry every 4 years. If you’re that engaged, you should vote every election.
I think progressives need to listen to Frank, if only because he practiced guerilla warfare on their behalf for decades. Shifting attention to the midterms isn’t a bad thing. Heck, we’re going to need more of that if we want to motivate the Dems to keep their apparatus intact.
As for the attack Frank made on Sanders in 1992, give me a break. That was an example of push-back. If you have to go back that far to get something bad on Sanders, you probably don’t have much to work with. I looked up Sanders in Frank’s autobiography and couldn’t find an entry in his index. Which is both bad and good I suppose.
Also, one dirty secret is that folks who are ideologically close in Washington often don’t get along that well. Because they compete for the same group of supporters. And getting attacked by someone across the aisle doesn’t hurt you that much. Getting attacked by your political look-alikes is much worse. Gore and Bradley had a tense relationship at times as well. Cite on general point: Frank’s autobio.
He talked serious smack about Sanders in both 1992 and 2016. How much more do you need? Are we missing the lovey-dovey interregnum of the early aughts? :dubious: