But you don’t know as a starting point why individual people aren’t voting for the Democratic in a particular election.
They could be working class people who just aren’t allowed time off of work because their boss is a giant right wing, vote suppressing asshole – but these voters would for sure vote for lefties to restore union power if they didn’t have so many mouths to feed in their home. (In other words, what D’s insist is the model of every non-voter in the country.)
Or, they could be crazies who always vote for the Lizard People in every election that they can, unless it is too cold and wet to head to the polls.
Oak is clearly neither one… but he’s closer to the second than the first. That doesn’t equal 5/16ths of a vote for Trump or whatever.
The first case is clearly a -1 for Clinton (or whomever), the second case means zero for Clinton and Trump no matter what.
THey count for half a shit. See my example above, with 1,000 voters. In an election decided by a single vote, one switched vote would reverse the outcome. Two third-party votes could reverse it.
I certainly don’t think I’m entitled to your vote, I don’t even think that concept is coherent.
I know you don’t see voting the way I do. I’ve laid out a variety of reasons why I believe it’s a better approach to voting, and I’m not clear on WHY you disagree. What’s the advantage to your model, wherein people “earn” votes but are not “entitled” to votes, over my model, where your vote-casting is an attempt to make the world better?
Your contrived scenario doesn’t actually show anything. I could make up a scenario in which 65,000,000 Marxists parachute into all 50 states and become citizens, thereby handing AOC the presidency. Doesn’t mean I’ve proven anything.
The bottom lines remains: low turnout elections tend to favor Republicans. It would be better, in my opinion, if voters on the fence would vote Democratic. But if an individual voter who is disengaged fails to vote or vote for a third party, there’s no way to know whether that vote actually helps Trump, because there’s no reliable way to know what that voter would have done if they had actually made some use of their vote.
What? It was an example, meant to illustrate how the math works. How third party votes affect elections isn’t really a debatable point: the math is the math. If you think there’s a mathematical principle demonstrated by your example, please elaborate, but otherwise your analogy isn’t analogous to my analogy :).
Absolutely, which is why I keep saying that you need to include a comparison. With the correct comparison (to which candidate the person would’ve voted for had they stuck to voting for a possibly-winning candidate), you can figure out who was helped and who was harmed by their decision instead to go third-party.
I would not have voted for Trump or Hillary. I will not vote for Trump or a Dem nominee that wants to ban guns or require registration. If someone waves a magic wand to eliminate a third party/write in option, I’ll stay home.
If they determine that an on the fencer is only a 30% chance to go their way then by not voting you are doing their bidding. Who we are is irrelevant to the algorithms. If you’re you, they don’t want you to vote, or if you do, they want 3rd party. The way they know who you are is by facebook et al, and not things you might assert about yourself as an individual. They don’t care if you are anything else.
You seem to believe that voting for the least objectionable electable candidate makes the world better instead of just worse slower. Some of us believe that its better to vote for someone who would make the world better not just bad slower even if that person may have a much harder time getting elected.
I don’t understand how you could not have a candidate earn your vote. Maybe you don’t assign points or something but you must use some mental rubric to determine who is making the world bad at a slower pace even if its a dumb as is a person a Dem then yes.
There is a genre of online centrism that insists the left must cater to their desires and then avoids laying out the common ground in favor of mocking leftists for not catering to certain of their desires. This seems to be one of those cases.
Personally I am skeptical about how much moderation we’re going to see from someone who is such a self-described absolutist on anything, but sometimes I’m wrong. Where’s the post number where you described Democrat positions that you can live with, apart from total capitulation on guns?
OK, thank you for that, I was mistaken about your intent and I apologize for it.
FWIW I’m not a fan of 2nd amendment absolutism, I am sympathetic to people who had losses to gun violence, but think that anti-gun absolutism is too politically costly and starves other progressive initiatives that could have a much larger net positive benefit for society (for example healthcare, electoral reform, etc).
This thread expresses the assymetrical quality of the system we have. It is up to dems to earn the right to have our permission to save us from a mad president. Whereas all cons need to do is suppress turnout, and keep faith with firearms. And this message is coming from an undecided totally objective potential voter too.
Republicans don’t even need to obey the rule of law. Why did dems get the job of cleaning up after this? And why do they have to submit a perfect resume to be qualified?
When the opposition party is breaking the law and contemptuous of it, (see McGahn decision) the question posed in the OP becomes absurd and not a little provocative.
I disagree. My analogy is also meant to illustrate how the math works. If 65 million left wingers parachute into the country, AOC is our next President. I don’t see how you can argue with this.
But you are making the mistake of assuming that non-voters have a binary choice: Clinton or Trump. In reality, many Americans who feel estranged from the political system might vote for Gary Johnson, Mickey Mouse, or might not cast a vote for President at all. It isn’t correct to say that those individuals - who will never have cast a vote for Clinton - are responsible for Trump winning the election. They are really just totally removed from the process.
Now, let’s say in 2016 turnout was 20 million higher than it was. I have zero doubt that would have turned the tide for Clinton. But for those 20 million who didn’t vote, that doesn’t mean that they all implicitly voted for Trump. Some of the 20 million would have voted for Trump, some would not have wasted their vote, and a good share would have voted for Clinton. But nobody can equate an individual nonvoter’s behavior to a vote for Trump for failing to vote for Clinton.
Let me change the analogy: you’re counting cards at blackjack and come to an extremely favorable count. You should bet heavily because the next many cards will tend to be in your favor. But that doesn’t mean that the count allows you to predict what the next card out of the shoe will be - it could be the ten that you expect, but could be a low number, and it could be that yellow plastic card that dealers use to know when to reshuffle. In reality, Oak is that next card — even though you know that a preponderance of the remaining cards will break in your favor.
But the elections strategies of any party are supposed to be about the aggregate of opinion and influence and not special cases. The data is getting more and more accurate so that the strategies involve discouraging voters and disenfranchising them too. Other behaviors than just voters voting for their guy are being sought.
If there is no meaning at all for a 3rd party vote, to a major party candidate, then what is a “spoiler”?
The problem here is not the general proposition that more people should vote. Of course they should. And I believe that would also help defeat this terrible hate spiral of the Republican Party.
But the OP has been criticized multiple times as implicitly voting for Trump. That’s an unfair and inaccurate attack.
It was in response to a request though, to ask why one should vote dem in 2020, after 3 years of tirnp madness, from a firearms essentialist. The OP is putting us through our paces.
Sander’s is more moderate on some issues like SS expansion and M4A than democrats and republicans whos position are so far right they push sanders into the middle yet treat his proposals as radical leftist positions. It’s not radical, or leftist, to advocate for Fire departments to be publicly controlled. Same applies to healthcare.
Sanders wasn’t as tough on guns as many of the centrist liberals are in the DNC. He wants common sense gun control, cracking down on boyfriend loophole, and passing background checks on peer to peer sells. His position has admittedly shifted and he’s a bit tougher on them now but his positions on guns aren’t idiotic soundbites like Beto’s “We’re gonna take ur ARs”. Like most of his proposals, theyre much more nuanced than that.
IIRC Sanders advocated against gun licenses in the past because they would disproportionately effect the poor and minorities. Better not to bring this up during the election though, it wont come off positive unless u explain the nuance behind the position.
Sanders has already said he will write an executive order that will federally legalize marijuana. He also wants to decriminalize all recreational drugs, and drop charges against drug offenders.
Contrast this to biden, who thinks weed is still a gateway drug, and refuses to federally legalize it, while likely supporting many right winged proposals and policies that will be thrown around if he were president.
Then, in that case, you’ve failed at civics and I think you’re kind of a jerk for that. You don’t understand how voting and civic engagement works in this country, and you’re unwilling to do the bare fucking minimum to prevent the single worst president in modern history from getting a second term.
Yeah. You don’t see voting the way we do. And you’re wrong. And that’s not really okay after so many people have explained it to you, given how dire the stakes are.