I found Saturday’s marches to be incredibly moving, and encouraging. But I’m troubled by this thought:
Millions of women (and men, of course) got up and took the streets on Saturday. But 30 million women voted for Trump. So why should we care about the marches?
I’ve got 2 half-formed counter-arguments…
Depth of passion. It takes a lot more conviction to march than it does to punch a ballot.
In 1972, Nixon won in a landslide; 2 years later he was out on his ass. Sometimes it takes a while for the voting public to catch up.
We need both. We need people to march and protest in solidarity with causes they mutually believe in to bring causes to the attention of officials and the voting populace at large. But then those people, along with the people who didn’t come out to march, need to vote.
The issue with just protesting is that protests can be more easily ignored than a majority vote. The issue with just voting is that you are missing opportunities to gather support for your cause. Passion is useless without action, though action can be less effective without passion.
A friend took me to the protest. It seemed scatterbrained at first, but the obvious point became clear- women, minorities, non standard gender types all feel threatened. I thought it was an overall positive that everybody was getting together to share some support. It was more like a really big meeting than anything.
I don’t think people on the right should be scared. What I saw was not at all hateful or violent, just a lot of scared people.
We should not care. When power goes to those who can get people in the streets instead of votes then we have stopped being a democracy.
A march can be a focal point where media attention is gained so a movement can try to sell themselves to the voters but otherwise marches are pointless.
The title seems to suggest some conclusions can be made as to whether the marchers voted. Trump said something along the same lines.
For all we know, the majority of marchers voted against Trump. If non-voters marched, well, let’s hope they woke up and will not make that same mistake in 2 years.
True. I will also provide a standard reminder that it is statistically certain, even being generous in my Bayesian assumptions, that tens of thousands, if not more than a hundred thousand, of the people who marched on Sunday did not bother to vote, and if they had, Donald Trump might not be President.
I will also provide my personal opinion that every single one of those people should be profoundly ashamed of themselves, and they need to look in the mirror and ask themselves what the hell they were thinking.
Agreed. It’s amazing how short our memories are. Marchers in the streets got votes for women, the British out of India, civil rights for African-Americans, and ended the war in Vietnam.
My point (perhaps not elegantly expressed in the title) isn’t whether or not the same people who were marching were also voters. The point is that: is the meaning of the march countered/off-set/check-mated by the numbers of people who voted for contradictory policies?
I’m going with a model here based on some solid truths and a few assumptions.
Assume all marchers were eligible voters. (This is not literally true, but close enough. Hack off a small percentage if you want for children, visitors, and felons, it won’t make much of a difference.)
Of all eligible voters, approximately 42 percent did not bother to vote. Therefore, were the marchers drawn randomly from the population, the chances all voted would be effectively zero.
We can of course safely assume the marchers aren’t randomly chosen, but are self-selected. A person who goes to the trouble of attending a protest march is probably likelier to vote than someone who does not. Therefore, the percentage of marchers who did not vote was almost certainly not 42%. However, it’s extraordinarily unlikely it was zero percent; even if you’re quite generous, it was probably somewhere in the middle of zero and 42. Not all non-voters are totally apathetic.
Reverend King understood this and it is why he marched. He was very media savvy. That is why his marchers were all well dressed and peaceful. They wanted to present their best face in order to make the sale while the media was watching. Do you think King would have let a pop star talk about blowing up the white house at one of his marches?
There were likely 500,000 in Washington DC, and 200,000 here in the SF Bay Area (multiple sites). I don’t think it’s a stretch to get to “millions” worldwide.
“likely 500,000” and “200,000”?
“I don’t think it’s a stretch”?*
There are over 25,000 cities in the U.S.A… Some of them had staged protests. Which one’s? Maybe it’s a secret? How many people actually appeared at last Saturdays no-pro-life-women-allowed-at-the-woman’s-march march? That seems to be a secret, also.
It’s “likely” that your claims may just be a stretch made by the LSM, or by the no-pro-life-women-allowed-at-the-woman’s-march march leadership?
I wonder how many no-pro-life-women-allowed-at-the-woman’s-march marchers talked about blowing up the Whitehouse?
