I think we (or at least I) want everyone on the left or left-leaning in America to say that they can’t wait to vote for whomever the Democrats nominate to oppose Trump, since he is doing so much harm to America and Americans, and that while you may prefer certain Democratic candidates and not be terribly fond of others, you still recognize that all of them are nigh-infinitely better than Trump, and thus you’ll be excited to vote for them (or against Trump, however you’d prefer to view it).
Will you feel extra pure? Make sure you announce it on social media as well.
You don’t understand. It’s very important that you vote for her to get the all important popular vote so when Trump wins the Dems can say he didn’t really win.
No, it really isn’t.
There is quite a bit to be said for having a mandate, and having the support of the people, but it would take quite a willful and deliberate misrepresentation of that to imply that anyone said he didn’t really win.
You guys like to use sports analogies, so here’s one for you. World Series, team A scores 32 runs over 7 games, team B scores only 15 runs, but due to the way those scores come out, team B wins 4 of those games, and A only wins 3.
Team B is crowned the winner and goes to disneyland. Yay. But then, fans of Team B claim that Team B is better at hitting and getting on base than Team A, which is clearly false. When this falsity is pointed out, the Team B fans reply that their team won, therefore it is better, and that any talk about which team is better at hitting the ball or getting on base is just to say that team B didn’t really win.
It is only in the face of Team B’s false bragging that Team A points out that their brags are without merit. And it is starting to appear as though Team B only brings up this falsity from time to time because they know that Team A will correct their inaccuracy, which gives Team B fans another chance to brag about their win.
I get it, as Team B dumped the fans as soon as they got on the bus to Disney, so all the fans of Team B have left is the chance to further taunt and troll Team A. It’s not much, and it’s certainly not enough, but it is all they have.
Besides, we have all those illegal voters to cover that.
As opposed to one of the most popular politicians in the country being seen as somehow prevented from running?
Y’all need his supporters, and they already don’t trust you. You may wish he didn’t run, but you need him.
He is popular simply as he suits what the GOP and the Kremlin wants- a person with lots of strident supporters who will fiercely attack the other Dem frontrunners, thus allowing Trump to win. If Sanders ever became the actual candidate they would roll out the portfolios of hate & negative news they have collected and ruin his popularity in a matter of hours.
Just like Hillary went from quite popular to hated in a few months.
Check pjacks’ link in the post directly above yours.
This pretty clearly satisfies the requirement of the DNC rule.
but yet he ran against Dems in many races - and not in the Dem primaries. What was his issue with not running as a Dem?
Technically he can’t register as a Democrat, because he’s a resident of a State that doesn’t have partisan registration.
I don’t get why people have such a problem with Bernie being an independent in Vermont and a Democrat on the national level. The Democrats have been giving him committee spots since 1994, his Congressional votes have followed the Democratic Party line much more closely than the average Democratic Congressperson’s, and the Vermont Democratic Party hasn’t run a candidate against him since 1992. What exactly is the problem here?
Let’s unpack “popular.” Hillary is quite beloved by many, and at least seen as competent by a majority of Democrats. But that doesn’t change the fact that most Americans range from unimpressed by her to actively disliking her & Bill. I don’t think her popularity changed that much except that a lot of us were disappointed that she was still trying to get back into the White House. [I admit that some of us who were cool to her ended up hating her. But I don’t remember that the approval numbers changed that much.] Rather, fervor on the part of the base ran into distrust & animosity from everyone else.
Could Bernie have the same problem? Yeah, easily. But like Hillary, he has a huge following.
Why do you think I’ve been talking about Elizabeth Warren as the nominee? She, or Sherrod Brown, might be able to draw on both camps. It’s not clear who else besides those two can. And Kamala is a rerun of Obama, so she has an uphill battle for credibility with more populist voters who came to see him as an opportunistic liar.
He prefers to be an independent, and he was able to make that work in Vermont. To run seriously for President, you need a national Party apparatus.
As I said above, the Vermont Dems haven’t run candidates against him in many years. In the early years of his career, when he did run against Democrats, he was more progressive than they were, so it’s a good thing that he did beat them. At least if you value principle and policy over personality and partisanship.
I don’t consider myself a Democrat either, I’m an independent socialist who votes for the Democratic candidate 100% of the time. I’m just not a “joiner”, and I see no need to go out of my way to join a club that includes the likes of Joe Manchin and Rahm Emanuel. If my State required me to register Democrat in order to vote in their primary, I would do so, but it doesn’t, so why bother? To me, a political party is an instrument to be used for winning elections and enacting policies. The idea that people consider their party identification to be some core part of their personal identity, like it was a religion or football team or something, is just bizarre to me. It’s not so much an ideological as a characterological thing.
Hillary’s approval ratings were running around 66% until she announced her second run for President. Then after much Negative crap spread by the Kremlin, the GOP and Bernie bros, it went down to 36%. That’s a huge decline. Comey didnt help either, of course.
Bernie Sanders had a quite low national rating*- until he announced his run- then it went to 53 % or 56%. In other words, before the election, Hillary was regarded way more favorably than Bernie. Even so, his rating never got as high as hers before she announced.
*likely mostly due to the fact that few outside Vermont had heard of him.
I’m sorry. I was asked a question about my political opinions, and I answered it respectfully and honestly. I don’t understand what warranted this comment.
Since Harris has been a prosecutor, she’s pushed hard to shut down platforms such as Backpage. She is also eager to tout this given the opportunity. Harris has directly jeopardized the income and physical safety of several of my friends. Concern over the basic needs of the people I care about is not purity politics. In a state such as California, slavish devotion to a political party that often fails to represent my interests is.
Contrary to iiandyiiii’s wishes, I cannot be excited to vote against Trump. Politics is not exciting. It is depressing. However, I vote in every election. I research local candidates in every race, and I have campaigned door-to-door for progressive city council candidates. I regularly attend city council meetings; and I’m a monthly donor to Planned Parenthood, the NAACP, and Lambda Legal despite being unemployed. I’m a bisexual trans woman of color, and most of my friends are some flavor of LGBT. I have been homeless, and I am a survivor of repeated sexual assault. My father is a refugee. My mother has relied on scrounging free insulin samples from her primary care physician to survive. But please, dalej42, tell me that my concerns are strictly about maintaining some internal sense of purity. That seems to have worked out well for the Dems in 2016.
I’m the one who asked the question and I apologize if the question was insensitive.
By this point I’m so disappointed that the U.S. Government has been turned over to evil, hateful, and traitorous criminals that I’d enthusiastically support Kamala Harris, Al Franken, Bozo the Clown or even David Berkowitz if they ran under the banner of the Democratic Party.
Bernie’s problem is the same problem that every president has and ever will have as long as the Constitution remains in its current form: there is really never a mandate to govern in any particular form. What you call opportunistic lying is what the rest of us call pragmatism, not letting the perfect be the enemy of what’s good or what’s possible, and all that. I think you need to consider the fact that in between presidential elections, there is another national election, so even if a president was elected on a “mandate,” that mandate can be reversed in as little as two years.
But truthfully, few presidents ever govern with a mandate to begin with - because our government was designed that way. The Constitution we’re living with today is not necessarily a democratic one; its architects were fearful of the kinds of mob rule that was tearing our sometimes ally, sometimes competitor, France, apart. Thus, they created two co-equal branches of government (three counting the judiciary). Gridlock is a feature, not a bug. So the idea that someone like Bernie is going to ride in on a magic carpet and change everything needs to be thought through.
I am a progressive and I appreciate that Bernie has made progressivism great a gain. However, the brutal reality is that, even today, progressives simply haven’t been all that effective in convincing the rest of the voting population that we should vote for the things that we value. Medicare for all? A $15 minimum wage? Universal income? Stronger unions? Some of these are good ideas, but it’s not clear that a majority of the voting population would support even one of these in an actual vote in a major national election at the present time. And frankly, I doubt that happens until we have another Herbert Hoover moment.
But none of that has any relevance to what he’s saying. He’s saying that not voting against Trump because the Dems put up the wrong candidate doesn’t actually accomplish anything. It may make you feel good because you didn’t hold your nose and vote for the lesser of two evils, but it accomplishes nothing.
Fortunately, since you’re in California, it’s very unlikely to help Trump win. But your logic spreads to many places, and is a large part of how Trump won in 2016. People thought Clinton would win and thus refused to hold their nose and vote for the lesser of two evils.
I myself am doing my best to point out that this is just what democracy is. You always, always, always vote for the lesser of two evils. When you hear people pushing the idea that the lesser of two evils are bad, those are people trying to suppress the vote, and help the side that benefits most from the vote being suppressed (i.e. the one running the less exciting candidate).
So it’s great you do all those other things, but I’m going to join Dale in asking you to vote for the nominee, whoever it is, and to push this idea to others. If all the people who leaned left would do this, Trump would lose by triple digits.
Why get excited? Among other things, he’s already tried to make the T of LGBT no longer exist legally in our country. As in, you are legally defined by your birth gender and no state can say otherwise. I can’t think of any other time someone has tried to destroy a minority like that. That’s more than trans erasure: that’s trans destruction.
And if that doesn’t motivate you because it’s so shitty, fine. But you already say you can force yourself to vote and campaign for everything else. So why not also vote against Trump and encourage others to do so?
I do not want to let them win again by convincing the left not to vote against him. So I will always fight back against the “I’m not gonna vote for president” meme. It must not spread.
Ronald has made it clear that she will do everything realistically in her power to defeat Trump. I don’t see why you need to bully her into saying that she will do so enthusiastically, or that she will make an empty, useless gesture (voting for President in a safely blue State) in order to gain *your * personal certificate of moral purity.
To say that someone casting a protest vote in California is going to inspire people to do so in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania is like saying that I shouldn’t wear shorts in the summer because people might be inspired to do so in the winter and freeze to death. The situations are so obviously different that only a fool could fail to see the distinction.
Why do you say that Harris is a “rerun of Obama”? Other than their race, I don’t see a lot of obvious similarities. They have different professional backgrounds and come from different parts of the country. Harris doesn’t seem to be as universally agreed to be a good orator. Obama ran and governed as a moderate, where Harris seems to be staking out a slightly left of center position (endorsing Medicare for All, for instance).
And voting for a third party is an even more empty useless gesture that is done in order to gain one’s own personal certificate of moral purity.
Every vote is useless. Votes only matter in the aggregate. It is the very concept of voting by purity, rather than practicality, that I am against. Convince enough democrats to vote for a third party, and we may just lose California altogether.
Vote how you want, but be aware that when you announce the way that you are voting, you do have an influence on the way others vote.
I’d say it is more like someone in Wisconsin, being used to the cold, wearing shorts in the winter, inspiring a Californian to do the same thing in a rare winter snap who ends up getting frostbite.