The People that anger me the most: The "Independents" who voted for neither

Politics & Elections
1

They didn’t vote for Trump. So, I’ll give them that. They didn’t vote for Kamala either, or maybe they didn’t vote for Hillary either, or for Biden?

And their reasons? Some conservative on a college campus felt uncomfortable. Or some transgender person is competing in sports somewhere. Or DisneyWorld has DEI in hiring. Or Fauci said something once that wasn’t completely correct. And let’s not forget about our all-time favorite: Hillary’s private e-mail server!!!

These people that just can’t bring themselves to vote for any sort of normal Democrat, when they’re faced up against a Fascist, who wants to deport anyone that disagrees with him, and who is actively trying to destroy our economy…I don’t understand these “double haters”, and I lose my temper just thinking about it.

2

I had voted Libertarian for a long time. This time I didn’t. In my state it didn’t matter ( Oh).

3

Be angry all you want, if it makes you feel better and gives you the emotional satisfaction of having someone to blame for this.

I live in New York.

New York’s electoral votes all go to the statewide winner. If Kamala Harris had been in any remote danger of not carrying New York, she was toast nationally, because New York being in play would equate to losing Colorado and New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin, and Minnesota, and Maine and New Hampshire, and Virginia.

Know what your beloved Democrats did in New York State? They passed a law tripling the number of votes and signatures that a party needs in order to have ballot status. It started out as Governor Andrew Cuomo’s temper tantrum about a small party called the Working Families Party. They usually endorse Democrats – the State of New York has a weird system where candidate Joe Blow can appear on the ballot multiple times (as the Democratic Party’s candidate but also the candidate of Socialist Workers, Working Families, Liberal Party, Universal Healthcare Party, the Rent is Too Damn High Party, the Puppy Dog Party, etc etc). The conservatives have a similar raft of them. Many of these parties hope they can pull one of the two major parties into supporting one of their positions or issues in return for an endorsement. Well, in the Democratic Primary, the Working Families party endorsed a Democrat in the race, all right, but not Andy Cuomo — they endorsed Zephyr Teachout, who was also seeking the Democratic nomination. Cue a Cuomo tantrum.

His resulting laws, snuck first into a budget reconciliation bill and, when the courts overturned that, into an emergency spending bill, were passed without due process or discussion, and didn’t have the outcome that Cuomo had been intending: the Working Families Party still has ballot status, because they were able to get lots of people to vote FOR Andrew Cuomo but as the Working Families Party’s nominee so they met the new high threshold. But he messed things up for the Green Party and the Libertarian Party and some other small parties, many of whom do not endorse candidates from the main two parties and instead try to run their own candidates.

Now, in my case, I ended up voting for Kamala Harris, as it turns out. If she won, I wanted to know and to be able to say that I had cast my vote for the first female US President, it was potentially an historic moment. (I also, to be honest, wasn’t that hot on Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. I really am an independent).

You think I did a great and wonderful patriotic thing by voting against Trump? It made no difference here. Might have if I’d been voting in Wisconsin or Georgia, but we all knew Harris was going to carry New York with plenty of cushion to spare. New York doesn’t get to vote more loudly or more brightly or more emphatically if the winner in that state gets a larger plurality.

The people that anger me? The “didn’t vote” people and the people who voted for Trump thinking he wouldn’t really do the things he promised he was going to do. Like make it so none of us ever has to vote ever again. Or turn the Gaza strip into a fancy resort with a Trump-branded luxury hotel prominently featured.

I don’t know what we do about him but just voting against him is insufficient. We already know he would have tried to claim a victory with or without the votes, and was lining up judges and smarmy congresscritters to pull that off if need be.

4

AHunter makes a very valid point about folks whose vote didn’t matter b/c of where they lived. I live in a pretty blue county in a pretty blue state. I believe every precinct in my city went from 54-56% to Harris. So what did my vote matter? Or what would it matter if I didn’t vote?

For me, it is so hard to “get mad” at anyone in particular, because it comes down to a really small number of people in states other than mine. The numbers were just too overwhelming and depressing for me to try to grok out the math. How many non-voters/3d party voters would it have taken in how many states? How consistently were the motivations of those folk such that I can stir up personal feelings about them?

I find it simpler to simply think uncharitably about the vast number of folk who voted to Trump - since I have not yet heard a non-selfish/ignorant/evil reason for doing so.

5

This. The problem isn’t the wishy-washy (read “lazy”) soft-right conservatives who stayed home.

The problem is the millions of hard-right Fascist wannabes who did vote.

If you’re going to waste heartbeats on useless performative anger, at least direct that futility at the correct target.

6

Not true. It didn’t make a huge difference but America will be a bit more fascist now because Trump won a “mandate” by the popular vote. The teensy bit of Facism is entirely the fault of progressives in blue states who didn’t vote for Harris. Failing to vote for Harris was a vote for fascism, so that little bit of fascism belongs to them. They consciously decided they wanted more fascism, and they got what they asked for.

I am more mad at them than anyone on this election TBH. They knew what they were doing and what they were asking for by not voting for Harris.

7

At the OP: Whatever reasons these people have for voting third-party or abstaining, ultimately, everyone’s vote is rational - for reasons that may make sense only to them. If someone virulently hates transgenderism or DEI, for instance, then their reasons not to vote for Harris/Clinton/Biden are strong enough - emotionally or whatever - to justify their choice not to vote (D).

8

As Griffin1977 pointed out, it’s not just about who carries a state. The image and perception really matters. The fact that Trump won the popular vote has given MAGA a lot more credibility and legitimacy than it would have had millions more blue New Yorkers and Californians showed up to vote and made Kamala the popular-vote winner. Sure, it would still be Trump in the White House, but he wouldn’t be able to claim the popular vote was his, and maybe our Canadian/European friends wouldn’t be able to use the talking point of, “A majority of you Americans voted for the 79-year old who behaves like a 7.9-year old.”

9

Along with Democrats that didn’t vote.

I’m a Republican and I voted for Harris. It’s sad that I did more to get her elected than all of the Dems in swing states that didn’t even vote. Unlike LSLGuy, I don’t blame Fascists, Racist and Christian Shariists for voting for their boy Trump. I do blame everyone else who looked at the presidency in 2017-2021 who didn’t say, “We need to vote for ANYONE else other than Trump.”

Exactly! Unlike 2016 where Trump won by picking up the majority of EVs, we now have a situation where more people wanted Trump as President than Harris. :astonished_face: This is the first election I can recall (dating back to the 70s) where I don’t understand the results. I have disagreed with the results, but I understood why the winner got elected. 2024 has me at a complete loss. Let’s say 40% of the US voters are rabid MAGAs. How did 60% of the voters not vote Harris?

10

I beg to differ. I don’t spend any more time absorbing his claims and statements than I can avoid, but I know he claimed to have won the popular vote in 2020, and to have won more states than Biden, and that his electoral college margin in 2016 was the biggest ever, and that everyone should rise up and stop the steal.

11

Claim is the operative term. On the Sean Hannity show, he accidentally admitted he didn’t win in 2020, but yet he still claims he did to work up his minions.

tl;dr Trump lies.

12

Right. Trump lies. And his people believe that shit, reality be damned.

His claim of a mandate is not credible to his detractors and is massively credible to his fans. And would be true no matter what the popular vote had been.

13

To the extent I think of it, one group that stumps me the most is the folk who stayed home describing Harris as “the lesser of 2 evils.” As has been said often, when faced with 2 evils, why not choose the lesser?

I don’t think there are enough “Independents” etc., to outweigh the stupid.

14

3 posts were split to a new topic: 65 Mustang Trock Posts

15

The notion that as a voter you either have to ‘participate’ in the two party system or your vote is meaningless (and makes you lose your temper) is its own kind of anti-democratic sentiment. As a voter, you are (and should be) free to vote for whomever you want, and (for better or worse) however informed you choose to be, and it is the job of the candidates to show how a vote for one of them is to your advantage even if they don’t represent a broad array of your specific interests. That Harris was not quite able to do that is some combination of not having a clear platform and not convincing people what an imminent threat Donald Trump is, which frankly should have been an easy task if we had a well-informed electorate that wasn’t primed for adopting fascism.

I know this is going piss off a lot of people to point this out but the Democratic Party writ large is essentially just as responsible for the lack of public trust in government and the decay of democratic institutions as the GOP, if not quite as concerted in outright attacks on it. The Democrats supported financial deregulation and repeal of Glass-Steagall, it was a Democratic president which gave the Peoples Republic of China permanent “Most Favored Nation” trading status (after, it should be noted, having been influenced by Chinese interests), and Democratic candidates have eschewed supporting the interests of labor and minorities in favor of sticking their hands out to well-heeled corporate interests. Very few Democrats have actually stood up against the tide of corporate dominance in civic affairs and consolidation which reduces economic choice, or campaigned against corporations buying up public lands and housing en masse in what are clearly rent-seeking behaviors, and in general although there are distinctions in rhetoric there is relatively little difference in most areas of policy between Republicans and Democrats until the recent far-right MAGA-friendly shift of the GOP. Obama didn’t invade another country or imprison more people in Gitmo but he did joke about using attack drones to kill innocent people, which given the facts of how the use of them expanded under his administration is not so much a joke as an acknowledgement of now normalized this use of extrajudicial force with scarce oversight has become. And the DNC has pretty vigorously opposed any kind of collaboration with progressives and often maliciously tried to purge them from their ranks. The fact that Bernie Sanders made such an inroads in the 2016 primaries against mainstream Democrat Hillary Clinton, nearly upsetting her candidacy if not for the superdelegate system intended to prevent such spoilers, is indicative of just how far to the right the DNC has shifted compared to the majority of people who are nominally aligned with the Democratic Party.

If you want to be upset that people didn’t vote with Democrats in lockstep to prevent the rise of an avowed autocratic demagogue because they couldn’t choke down their distaste, well, I think some introspection is called for. And yes, some of that is because of the culture wars nonsense that appeals to identity politics over policy and ideology, but frankly, how would you describe the ideology of the modern Democratic Party other than the party that continually shifts rightward to chase voters bleeding toward Republicans and MAGA. Democracy is fundamentally about having choices, and if you don’t like the choices that people are making I don’t think a principled (or practical) response is to argue that the public should have fewer choices, but rather why they are making choices for which the consequences are worse than the next less-bad choice.

Stranger

16

My guess is that it’s due to the “both sides are the same” school of thought. I’m with you. I disagree with the MAGAs, but I understand why they voted for Trump. If they want to tear it all down, then Trump is their man. But the “both sides are the same” mystify me.

17

Philadelphia is very much a city of liberal Democrats. I would never assume that because of this I can stay home and not vote. If enough people make the same assumption, only Republican voters actually show up and vote and they win the election.

Stein could not correctly give the number of representatives in the House. I freely admit that I don’t know either. The major difference, she was a candidate for President and I’m not running for political office of any kind.

Additionally, voting for anybody but the Democratic or Republican candidate in a Presidential election is wasting your vote. Teddy Roosevelt was nationally known and had a good reputation. He lost. Ross Perot had money to buy all kinds of ads and publicity. He lost. Other parties can and have been successful on the local level. The elections for mayor and city council have the Green party and the Libertaian party on the ballot. While I have never actually voted for one, I do take the time to read up on these candidates, their track records and their positions instead of just automatically ruling them out. If one comes along who I feel is the best person for the office, I would vote for them.

Yeah. I have posted about this quite a bit. While I was trying to understand why so many Hispanic voters voted for Trump, I discovered a Hispanic friend had voted for Trump. It was a horrifying revelation. He made it clear in that conversation that he didn’t care about the rights of immigrants, or LGBTQ+ people. He was straight and born in this country. He said that I should not care either. He said he voted Trump because Trump would fix inflation. I was so utterly stunned I did not think to ask how any President, let alone one who has run so many businesses into bankruptcy, would do this.

That friend is dead to me. They are still in my Facebook friends list only because I knew him through his wife. I have known her much longer. Should she ever reveal taht she shares his political views, I will cut them both out of my life.

Another friend was going to vote RFK. I never asked why. I was certain it was for some emotional rather than rational reason. I used the same arguments about Presidential elections and third parties I gave above. That actually swayed him. I pointed out the many many evil things Trump had done and said. He accepted that. For reasons he never told me, he said he could not bring himself to vote for Harris. He finally made a post saying that he had decided not to vote, so he was in no way responsible for what happened.

I made a bunch of comments arguing from different angles that the reverse was true. If Trump becomes President, and you don’t try to stop him by voting for Harris you are entirely responsible for all the evil things he does. He just didn’t see it that way.

I have not had contact with him since. I honestly don’t know if I can ever forgive him.

I disagree rather strongly. I think some people vote for rational reasons, reasons based on data and logic. Their data can be wrong and their logic can be flawed. But it is a rational process. Some people base their vote on emotion. Hatred of some ‘other’ has gotten a lot of people elected in a lot of countries.

18

Well, because Pennsylvania overall is a swing state.

19

Independents who didn’t vote for either piss me off, but not as much as leftists who didn’t vote for either of them as well.

Independents I can understand, since most people I have encountered who call themselves “Independents” are really conservatives who are pissed off at the Republican Party for one reason or another, so I didn’t really expect much support from them. Leftists on the other hand are people I thought I could count on to put aside their petty and ignorant “both sides are the same” and vote against a fascist tyrant, but they chose not to, and said screw you to all of us who have to suffer the consequences.

Screw leftists who have helped enable Trump win.

20

How many of them are fake “Independents” trying to discourage people from voting, which almost certainly aids the Republicans. How many misdeeds of one side do they ignore? How many misdeeds of the other side do they magnify? When they talk about troublemakers which ones do they bring up…until the troublemakers on the other side are brought up and they say “Oh, and them too, of course?”
When winning is the only thing, and cooperation means only capitulation to them, lying is easy.