Seems like moderate liberals feel they are entitled to all votes to the left of them for their preferred candidates. I’ve never felt that way. If you can’t back the candidates I like, then you should vote for who you like better. Sure, if it’s a close election, know what you are contributing to, but your reasons for doing so may still be valid.
Think Bush vs. Gore vs. Nader. I think we can all agree that Gore would have been a better President, so Nader voters suck. Booooo!!! But if there’s no Bush, then the GOP is a much healthier, more electorally viable party, and the DLC dominates the Democratic Party. Voting for the lesser of two evils makes sense in the election you’re voting in, but may be a really terrible long term strategy because it entrenches that lesser evil at the expense of the good.
I could very well justify a vote for Trump as a “lesser of two evils” situation because court picks or something, but what happens to my party if Trump wins? What happens to the Democrats if Clinton wins? Now maybe Im outsmarting myself here, but it seems to me that a Clinton win is a win/win for me. It repudiates the Trump wing of the GOP, and rewards the DLC wing of the Democrats, and ensures the continued loyalty of minority voters to that wing of the Democratic Party.
Also, if I vote for Trump in 2016 and he wins, then I have to deal with Trump in 2020 as well. Whereas if he loses, I get another shot at getting a Republican more to my liking. Anyone who doesn’t understand that basic fact about Sanders and Stein voters is missing the obvious. In 2016, the progressives lost. In 2020, they are guaranteed to lose if Clinton is running for reelection. But if she loses in 2016, they got another shot in 2020.
George W. Bush got to the White House because Al Gore was a shitty candidate. NOTE: I think Al Gore would have been quite a good, perhaps excellent, President but he was a shitty candidate. He came off smug and pretentious and cocky throughout the entire campaign and pushed just a few too many working class people to vote against their own best interests because they thought Bush seemed more like “a regular guy like me.”
Never mind that he spent the campaign trying to distance himself from a very popular and successful President banking on the preposterous expectation that a greater portion of the electorate dislike blowjobs as opposed to those who like blowjobs.
Al Gore was so much more qualified for the office than George W. Bush that it is obscene that the election was so close. It never should have come down to just one swing State. Florida wouldn’t have mattered if he could have carried his home State - which his boss managed to win the previous two elections in a row. Hell, forget Tennessee’s 11 Electoral Votes since it’s gone consistently Republican in every subsequent election, Florida would not have mattered if he had taken New Hampshire’s four pathetic measly Electoral Votes- New Hampshire, which every Democrat has won since 1992 except Al Gore.
The 2000 Election never should have been close. The reason it came down to one Swing State was because Al Gore was a shitty candidate.
Damn right. Refusing to let Bill Clinton campaign for him was nuts. Had he targeted NH and TN, Florida may have been an interesting result but there would have been no need for a recount. Sometimes the best qualified are the worst candidates.
One can question a lot of decisions made in Al Gore’s two year campaign for office, or one can question why just a small fraction of 97,000 Green Party voters in Florida didn’t compromise a little bit in the voting booth. All it would have taken was 600 of them to change the outcome in Florida. Or, if about a third of the 22,000 Green Party voters in New Hampshire had compromised, same outcome.
But no, these voters preferred to cast their ballots for a ticket that could not possibly win. Sure, it’s easy to say that everyone running for an office ought to be a better candidate or a better leader. One can say that for literally every single election that has ever occurred in the world in our entire human history. But voters have a choice on whether to compromise and accept an okay candidate, or not. We see very clearly that Green Party voters made a decision in 2000, and the rest of us got stuck with a truly bad president, an idiotic war, and ruined economy.
Yes, the Greens that made up 50% of the Senate and nearly 50% of the House who voted for the Iraq War and everything else that Bush asked for without question, they really did screw over the country.
Wait, it wasn’t the Greens, it was The Democrats who made up 50% of the Senate and nearly 50% of the House who voted for the Iraq War and everything else that Bush asked for without question???
And it was the Greens that did more damage to this country than the Democrats?
Yes. By electing a President who wanted to go to war in Iraq for any or no reason at all. If Gore had been President, you think that the exact same Congress would have forced Gore to invade Iraq? Of course not.
The reason this re-hash is important is that a similar thing could happen in 2016: a fringe party complains that Clinton ought to be a better candidate, and rather than holding one’s nose and making sure a sub-optimal candidate is elected, they make sure a truly awful candidate is elected. And when Muslims are systematically discriminated against, I suppose these voters will blame everyone else, insisting that they voted to burn down banks, make solar power mandatory, and make Thanksgiving meatless as a protest against climate change. Or whatever Stein’s platform is this year.
She really is starting to seem more like a Bernie fangirl than a candidate with her own views. Every day she says something about how much she likes him, and wishes they would join forces. I agree that Bernie is a great guy, and wish that he had won the primaries. But Jill Stein is just riding his coat-tails, despite the fact that he lost.
There are more Bernie voters than Green voters, so it makes sense to spend most of her effort on wooing them.
Actually, every single candidate is trying to woo Bernie voters. Bernie Bros are the most sought after swing voters around in this cycle. It’s actually smart for them to hold out and see which candidate will cater to them. If they just declare for Clinton right away they’ll get ignored.
As I see it Jill Stein and Donald Trump are like 2 peas in a pod. Both are shockingly ignorant and both tread eagerly toward the same end: electing Republicans. I can’t tell the difference between the Green Party and the Republican Party. Thank God we have real choices like Hillary Clinton.
Like Donald Trump, Jill Stein supported Brexit, and like Donald Trump she stammered after the actual vote: Stein flip-flopped while Trump embarrassed himself and the US by not realizing that Scotland had voted to stay with the EU.
Bernie Sanders wants free college. Ok, that’s ambitious but not crazy: lots of countries do things that way. Jill Stein wants to cancel existing student loan debt. “The bailout for students can be accomplished through quantitative easing, the finance tool used to bail out the banks”. Um, wow. When the Fed bought treasuries and mortgage backed securities on the open market, they didn’t just forgive the debts. If they did the same with student loans, that would just mean that loan payments would be made to the Fed rather than a private bank. That’s Trump-level confusion, sort of like the orange one’s blovating about federal debt.
Jill Stein doesn’t like GMOs. Ookay. She wants a moratorium on GMOs and pesticides"until they are proven safe". Or maybe until we figure out what’s going on, like Trump says about his Muslim ban.
Stein wants to cut military spending by at least 50%. No word on the timeline. She wants to, “…close the 700+ foreign military bases that are turning our republic into a bankrupt empire,” sharing the ignorance with Donald Trump regarding Japan et al’s financial support for most of the costs of these bases.
I will admit that Stein has more political experience than Donald Trump. She was elected Town Meeting Representative of Lexington, MA in both 2005 and 2008. In 2005 she received 539 votes which was less than 21% of the total but enough to give her a seat. Lexington has a population of 31,394.
This fall, support the pro-sanity agenda. Vote Hillary Clinton or Gary Johnson. The election is too important to waste your vote on Stein or Trump.
I think throwing your vote away on a 3rd party is a wasted vote. I will say that at least Johnson has held elected office and has distanced himself from some of the nuttiness usually associated with the Libertarians while Stein seems to have doubled down with the anti-Gmo/Monsanto nuttiness associated with the fringe left.
One difference I’m clearly seeing between the Greens and the Democrats is that the Greens just adopt whatever lefty fad is hot, regardless of the science.