Lately I’ve been thinking about elections in general, and US Presidential elections in particular, and whether any of us should get the candidate we want. I include the exchange above because it captures both ends of the spectrum and I don’t intend it as a criticism of either poster.
Considering that the 2024 US Presidential election received ~152M votes and represented a population of ~340M, it seems by the very nature of compromise that none of us should get the candidate we want. Each candidate has opinions on dozens of non-binary positions, a multitude of personality traits, 35+ years of personal history, and a potential list of cabinet members and key staff. No one candidate is going to tick all of your boxes – every election is going to be about who ticks the most.
Certainly all 152M voters don’t want uniquely different candidates. There is a lot of overlap between the clumps of voters, but as your positions move away from the mainstream it is reasonable to expect each candidate will tick fewer of your boxes.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I should always feel a little bit disappointed with my candidate, especially since I am on the edge of the political spectrum, but I am interested in hearing other perspectives.
In the last forty years we’ve created a system of campaigning and candidate promotion where the option in viable candidates is almost always “the lesser of two evils”, and what it has gotten us is progressively worse candidates with often very little daylight between their effective policy positions (even as they harp on ‘culture wars’ nonsense), sliding inexorably away from government serving working class people and toward an increasingly authoritarian state. If “elections are about choosing the lesser evil” then maybe we need a bigger change than just a new slate of candidates mouthing variations of the same tired slogans and backed by the same corporate masters and dark money. How to get that change? I don’t know, but it’s not exactly a new problem:
There are a great many issues and a lot of possible ways to approach each one. So I do not expect to agree with any candidate on everything. But if I though the candidate was evil, I would not vote for them.
Every U.S. president, to some degree, exceeds their authority. So I agree with this:
This is lamentable, but, if I can put the special case of Donald Trump aside, it is more a defect in the U.S. Constitution than anything evil about the individual holding office..
Good people don’t want power over other people, so it’s always going to be a choice between evils because if they weren’t evil, they wouldn’t be running.
And I’ll say that never in my life have I supported a politician; I’ve only ever voted against, never for anyone. Nor have I ever felt represented at all by any of them; it’s all about damage control.
No matter how good or how bad both candidates are in absolute terms, all voting is in relative terms. One candidate is better than the other. Vote for that one. That’s all there is to it. If you feel that one candidate is just barely slightly better, vote for that one. If you feel that one candidate is unimaginably far above the other, vote for that one. If you feel that one candidate is great but the other is even better, vote for that one. If you feel that one candidate is abysmally horrible and the other is just really bad, vote for that one.
The problem with that thinking is is that it can wind up sounding pretty much like this.
“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see…"
“You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?”
“No,” said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, “nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”
“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”
“I did,” said Ford. “It is.”
“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t people get rid of the lizards?”
“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”
“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”
“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”
“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”
“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in.”
The basic problem is with our two party system and primaries, you end up getting someone good for Republicans running against someone good for Democrats because someone good for America dropped out after the second state.
All American history is about voting for the lesser of two evils. That there was ever a period of time when the superior candidate was obvious is ahistorical. Lincoln was an unknown with no real qualifications, FDR was considered a lightweight. Grant and Eisenhower won because they were generals. Nobody has a clue about a president until they’re tested in office.
For most eras voting for a party’s candidate was the sensible, even rational decision. Parties were known and well understood; their positions open, familiar, and tested.
That continues today. The “evils” of each party are embedded firmly in the belief structures of the vast majority of Americans. Candidates below the office of president will vote their party rather than their convictions, assuming they have any. Primaries are obviously different, but voting by any other consideration for actual office is a bizarre misstep close to 100% of the time.
No; the Republicans have been blatantly evil, irrational and destructive since at least Reagan. The problem isn’t that it’s not been obvious, it’s that people voted for the obviously far worse candidate anyway out a mix of stupidity and malice.
One might ask during a primary season “Which of the candidates that are actually running would you vote for?” to which the answer is almost always someone who is not running because they know they have no chance of winning the general.
The issue is that the GOP ran a child molester, rapist, felon, dementia patient, malignant narcissist, traitor, fascist, corrupt moron and he got 77 million votes.
The democrats ran a candidate who wasn’t 100% perfect, only 90% perfect, so they only got 75 million votes instead of the 80 million votes they needed.
I’m going to argue somewhat against the idea that one should always choose the lesser evil.
In general, most of the time, you should choose the lesser evil, yes. But there are times when this gets taken so far that picking the lesser evil becomes a hindrance to progress. If the lesser-evil political party knows that they are always guaranteed X number of votes no matter how corrupt, lazy or deaf they are, they have zero incentive to improve or put forth any effort. The nation then gets stuck in limbo.
And at a certain point, “lesser evil” can be so evil as to make the difference really meaningless. If voters in Germany had to choose between a “Let’s kill 6 million Jews” Nazi Party and a “Let’s kill 5 million Jews” Not-so-Nazi Party, voting for the lesser evil is hardly making for much of a better place. At a certain point, you have to put your foot down as a voter, choose third party as the moral choice, and say “No, I’m not voting for a Holocaust, period.”
I’m not saying the Democrats are at the point of being that evil, of course. But - at a certain point, lesser-evil is almost as bad as full-evil.
On the other hand as we are now seeing, trying to punish them for that by voting for the “greater evil” means that the greater evil will try to destroy democracy entirely and stay in power permanently.
EDIT: Also, if both sides are Nazi-grade evil? That just means you are screwed no matter what you do.
What happens when you vote for the 3rd party and make it easier for the ‘lets kill 6 million Jews’ party to win? What responsibility do the people who sit out or vote third party have in that situation?
Also how do you get to the situation where your only choices are to kill 6 million Jews or 5 million Jews?
It is true that politicians and parties take voters for granted if they know they are going to show up to vote, and going to vote for them. They focus on voters who may not show up, or swing voters. However that is where primaries are important, primaries are where you can pick the candidate you want, which sends a message to the main party itself.
I agree. I live in a multi-party parliamentary democracy with a proportional voting mechanic. We never hear this “lesser of two evils” stuff. It simply isn’t part of the political dialog. Our people vote for, period.
As long as you have two dominant parties with a winner-takes-most result, you will be voting against as much as if not more than voting for.
It seems that a lot of voters saw Joe Biden enthusiastically continuing to send weapons and aid to Israel while ineffectually ‘protesting’ the actions of the Netanyahu regime in Gaza (which are now broadly condemned by the international community as genocide), and then saw Kamala Harris refuse to really address the issue when she stepped up to the plate, and decided “Nah, can’t support the ‘lesser of two evils’ if its still war crimes and child mass murder even on the ‘lesser’ side.” (It isn’t clear that taking a stand against Israel’s bombing and famine campaign in Gaza would have helped Harris and might have actively lost voters with funding pulled back and AIPAC campaigning against her, but not taking more than the milquetoast statement about Palestinians needing "dignity, security, freedom and self determination,” lost her a lot of votes among progressives and the Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese expat communities.)
But really, the larger problem (beyond an effectively two party system which often excludes major viewpoints of the electorate) is that more than 77 million voters saw naked autocratic ambition with fascist trappings who has already once engaged in an insurrection to avoid leaving office and said, “Please, sir, may I have another?” When a mass of voters want fascism, they’re going to get fascism, and the rest of us are along for the ride.
