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

Michael: It’s just a simulation. I would never make you kill real people.
Chidi Anagonye: Oh, well, that’s reassuring. Because some of the parts of the fake people flew into my mouth!

Big-L Libertarian.

It’s my vote to waste. If you voted for Harris, then you wasted your vote, didn’t you? There’s no difference. If all of you Harris voters had voted for Chase Oliver, you’d’ve wasted your votes, too. Trump won; everyone who didn’t vote for him wasted their votes by your logic.

I don’t see why I should explain basic maths. My vote and your vote aren’t important because no one ever wins by a single vote.

I voted for Chase Oliver. Chase wasn’t the best Libertarian, but he’s not a piece of shit like both Trump and Harris.

I’m not picking and choosing replies to all of the random aspersions elsewhere in the thread, but no, I didn’t vote for Trump and ashamed to admit it. No, I don’t support Trump. Trump is a piece of shit. But Harris is a piece of shit. I fail to understand how anyone expects me to vote for a piece of shit, let alone get angry because I refuse to vote for a piece of shit. I mean, except for people that are pieces of shit, too.

Moderating:

This is a personal attack. Knock it off. You can express your opinions without making it personal. Or if you can’t, expect a formal warning next time.

If you didn’t vote for Harris then objectively you did. That’s just how elections work in the two party system.

We all know that the probability of the U.S. presidential election being decided by one vote is some extremely tiny unknowable fraction. I know that for a definite fact beyond any reasonable doubt. And that makes it not mathematically important.

I can’t prove it, but I think there also was some far smaller yet, but real, probability that Chase Oliver could have theoretically won. That also was not mathematically important.

I voted for the Harris-Walz ticket because I thought it was the best available, and was NOT shit. I actually think Harris and Walz were trying to do the best for America and the world, even when I disagreed on an issue. If I thought the candidates were all shit, I would have done a write in, knowing that the chance I was handing over power to dictator Trump was vanishingly small.

You seem to be merging nonvoters and independent voters, but those are two different groups of people. Independents typically lean to one party or the other. Nonvoters tend to be younger and less politically engaged. AP:

In 2020, nonvoters were more likely than voters to be young, not college educated, never married, have a low household income and be a person of color, according to AP VoteCast, a comprehensive survey of the electorate. Nearly 4 in 10 nonvoters during the 2020 election were under 30, whereas only about 1 in 10 voters were, VoteCast found.

Then again on the Palestinian issue, I suspect there were a fair number of reasonably politically engaged voter who opted not to vote. But based upon the text messaging I did last year, they were a small share of the non-voters.


Back to the OP. Trump has a base of about 40% of the country. The minimum polling trendline during Trump I was about 39%. Now it’s 47%.

You know who irks me? That share of the 40% who really should know better. Especially the business class. Some people can’t help it. But others can.

That’s just an argument against voting at all. One person among hundreds of millions in an even slightly democratic society has almost no power, just because of the numbers. The only way your vote can “really matter” in a modern society is if democracy is eliminated and most people’s voices suppressed so that yours can override theirs.

If you want your vote to “matter”, then go off and live in isolation in some ten person tribe. Otherwise it’ll never be anything other than as tiny an influence as you are as a percentage of the population.

It’s an argument against voting for the purpose of changing the presidential result. I vote to express my opinion.

It is reasonably possible that one day my one vote will decide a local race. But that’s not why I vote.

That makes no sense unless you presume it’s outright rigged.

Yeah, really, what? The votes are tallied by the elections board so as to determine the electors who will in turn determine the presidential result, not to “express an opinion” (I mean, it DOES express an opinion, as in “I believe this party’s policies would be better than the other’s” or “I believe these guys are better people than those” but it’s operationally for the purpose of choosing the electors)

I live in California. I have the right to vote, but not the right for my vote to matter. It makes no difference who I vote for in any election ever. I have no power to swing elections. I only have the power to make my tiny voice heard. I don’t like to reward the two major parties for picking candidates I don’t like, so I don’t vote for them unless they pick a worthwhile candidate.

I don’t think I need to explain why I didn’t vote for Trump. In the case of Biden, he clearly was developing dementia back in the Democratic primary of 2020. He was the worst candidate on the debate stage. Literally any of the other Democratic party candidates would have been more appropriate than him. The way he became the front-runner wasn’t good in my opinion. The people clearly wanted one of the other candidates to win in the first 3 primaries. Then the media and Democratic party pushed for Joe. In the case of 2024, the Democratic party decided to forgo democracy entirely and just made Harris the candidate without letting the party voters choose at all. I think they should have had an open convention which would have excited the Democratic base.

This kind of behavior isn’t surprising, but it also isn’t something I want to encourage with my vote. If I had a vote that mattered, one that was powerful enough to swing elections, I would put more consideration into who to vote for, but as it is, I simply ask if this Republican or Democratic candidate is someone that is pushing an agenda I really want to see enacted, and if the answer is no then I don’t vote for them.

I have one of these progressives who posts very regularly on my Facebook feed. She says she won’t vote for the mainstream Democrat because she knows that only encourages the party to ignore what she wants. Blue no matter who means you can completely ignore that voter’s wishes. Bernie or Bust means give her the candidate she wants, or you won’t get her vote.

In her mind, if Bernie was the candidate he would win because the people that want Bernie would vote for him and the people that just don’t want Trump would vote for him too. I cannot say as to whether or not she is correct, but that is her logic.

But they also didn’t vote for Trump. So in that sense, Balthisar objectively supported Harris.

So as well as being a vote for fascism this is also incredibly dumb as its vote for the Democratic party moving waayyy to the right. Whether or not they had previously moved right in response to the GOP doing so, they absolutely will do now. Their next candidate will make Biden seems like Bernie Sanders. It think it’s a mistake (FFS they have only failed to win more votes in the general election threw times since 1992) , but its going to happen and it’s what your friend voted for.

Nope that’s not how two party elections work. If you were on the left of the political spectrum and didn’t vote for Harris you voted for Facism

Even if they are in the bluest of blue states they choose Facism, and America is a teeny bit more fascist now because of Balithisar. The fact Trump won a "“mandate” in the popular vote will make him more fascist, only very small amount but that little bit of Facism belongs to Balithisar. They said “yes I would like some fascism” and they got what they asked for

what about the other way around? What if someone generally votes Republican, but couldn’t bring themself to vote for the orange menace. Did they implicitly support Harris, even though they didn’t vote for her, since they refrained from supporting the party they normally do?

I look at which party is more interested in getting people to vote, no matter who they vote for, and it doesn’t seem to be the Republicans.

ok, but that’s not relevant to the question I posed. If a traditional democrat, who didn’t vote for Harris, could be thought of having thus supported Trump even if they did not vote for him, then the inverse must also be true. i.e. a traditional republican who could not bring themself to vote for Trump must be considered as having implicitly supported Harris.

Yup totally and if Harris had won, their maga friends would have been totally correct to berate them, telling them that all this not fascism is their fault, the blame lies on them for all the normal functioning survival of the American Republic we are seeing over the next four years.

Though one key difference is the Democrats were completely expected to win the popular vote. So they are not going to be treated or behave differently because they received a few more votes in the red states. In fact if they have won with the same margin as Trump there would be commentary on how they are a losing their mandate :roll_eyes:

ok, so getting back to the title of this thread, it then follows that it’s not the “Independents” (or even “Republicans” for that matter) that didn’t vote that the OP should be pissed at, it should only be the nominal “Democrats” who didn’t vote, since only they were the ones who should have been expected to vote for Harris anyway.