I’m a Democrat, regardless of who’s leading the party at any given time. That’s my ‘our,’ regardless of the nominee.
I could care less if he’s personally inspiring, I care what sort of difference his being President has made and will make.
Is Colorado that reliably blue? OK then, knock yourself out.
Top 5 offices are Dem
5/3 D/R split in the House of Representatives
2 Dem US Senators
State Assembly Dem supermajority
State Senate 1 Dem seat away from supermajority.
So I think it is safe to say a protest vote won’t lose Biden the state.
Sure, but again - without making this personal - this attitude illustrates one of the biggest issues that’s plagued the Democrats for decades: the assumption that “if I feel this way, then the majority of America must feel the same way as well.”
You may believe Biden has been a strong, effective, difference-making, positive, beneficial president. You may feel that Biden being “inspiring” is not important at all. And you may even be fully correct. But if many other voters don’t feel that way, and if Biden himself or his campaigners aren’t selling that image well enough, then it’s not going to get votes. The reason this election is so close right now is because a fascist immature man has been “inspiring” to a wide swath of America and the stable mature man has not.
That’s like a car dealer believing that his cars/offers are the best. Perhaps they are, but if he doesn’t adequately advertise or convince customers of that fact, he’s not going to meet his sales quotas.
Over the past 30+ years, the Democrats have lost many elections because of this attitude/assumption.
And, yet, you’ve given us Lauren Bobert.
A: We’re sorry
B: Barely in a dark red district
C: She had to carpetbag otherwise it would have gone Dem
California is as blue as it gets, but we still sent Devin Nunes to the House.
Add in the constant “A vote for third party candidate X is really a vote for candidate Y.” When you think of it that way, from the opposite point of view of a supporter of Y, a vote for X is really a vote for Z.
That’s getting three votes for the price of one. How can I turn that kind of deal down?
Yes, I hate that.
I voted for Nader when I was young. In California, where that vote made no difference. For that decision, I blame the following:
- Poor civics education. I didn’t really understand the way third parties and our two-party system interact.
- A Democratic candidate who didn’t even try to appeal to the idealistic, left-wing youth vote. (Edit: “didn’t even try” is probably not really fair: that’s my memory, but probably not reality.)
In 20+ years, nothing much has changed: there is still poor civics (and math) education, so that anything more complicated than the popular vote is lost on people. Young voters are still taken for granted / discounted.
My concern is that, even if Candidate Third Party manages to win the Presidency, without support in Congress, they still won’t get anything done. President Third Party could spend four years trying to get Congress to pass legislation making it a requirement that every American citizen own a monkey, but without a Congress that supports them, the Mandatory Monkey Act will never pass, and President T. Party’s signature policy will die with his presidency.
If you want to actually build a third party, you don’t start with the Presidency. Hell, you probably don’t even start with Congress - you try to win a few smaller states, and build on that.
This is why no one takes third party presidential candidacies seriously.
Trump basically ran as a third party candidate anyway. Since he really has no specific agenda anyway, he just wound up rubber stamping things the other Republicans wanted done.
For those who think Biden is too boring, that’s sort of the point. I don’t think the Dems could have come up with a candidate that is more exciting that Trump. It’s impossible. Trump is the most exciting president ever. To the point of exhaustion. Trump genuinely created a sense of exhaustion when he was actually president. That was the worst of his actual presidency. Beyond being a know nothing idiot, immoral, and wannabe fascist, the constant everyday squabbling and tweets was simply exhausting. If you were paying attention.
There’s a reason why Trump is most popular with low information voters. Because they never pay attention anyway, I guess Trump’s constant blathering is less annoying to them since they tune most everything out anyway. So they are excited to go and vote for the first time. Normal people who try to pay attention, not so much.
I agree in that a party can’t start by winning the Presidency and just assume they’ll get what they want. My complaint is more that there’s always an assumption that if only that third-party candidate hadn’t run all the votes would have gone to the candidate of the major party. Not that the voter that went out to vote (and in a big federal election, especially one with no competitive races at that level the voter might actually be far more interested in a local candidate or a ballot initiative or a bond issue or something) could have just stayed home, left that line blank, voted for the other major candidate, picked an even more niche third party, or wrote in Mickey Mouse.
To me, it’s an old, tired, and generally facile complaint that assumes that a voter owes a candidate a vote. And it never gets fully gamed out. For example, in 2016, the major candidates were of course Clinton and Trump and the best known minor party candidates Stein and Johnson. The assumption made is always that Stein voters would have just voted Clinton and that they cost her the election. (Sometimes add in Sanders supporters who supported the man and had no loyalty to the Democrats as a whole or Clinton). Nobody making that complaint ever does the math to see what the results would have been if all Stein voters went Clinton and all Johnson voters went Trump. Honestly, I haven’t checked it myself. But to me it’s much like blaming Nader for Bush while ignoring that all Gore had to do to make Florida irrelevant was to win Tennessee, which had sent him to the Senate for eight years after being in the House for eight. A state that Clinton won both times in 1992 and 1996.
You misunderstand how people work. You’re out here on social media, saying it’s OK to throw away your vote. You and those like you who are in non-swing states have to realize that your words and your example don’t hit a wall at the state line.
Besides, your approach doesn’t make any sense anyway, absent any consequences to the Democrats for not being whatever it is that you’re expecting of them. Consequences will or won’t happen in swing states. You have made the argument, intentionally or not, for the people living THERE to throw away their votes to teach the Dems a lesson.
Look, I’ve lived most of my life with Presidents who weren’t particularly inspiring. Ike, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, both Bushes…clearly most Americans during my lifetime have missed the memo that they needed someone to inspire them to vote.
Well, about a third to half of them have:
Let’s game this out. It has nothing to do with me “owing my vote” to a candidate. I do think that people need to get over that issue. I will never meet Joe Biden and kind of don’t care about him. There will be other future presidents, hopefully if we retain our democracy, which seems to be in question.
If you think there is going to be difference in substance between Biden and Trump, in favor of Biden, you vote for Biden. If you think it’s better for Trump, you vote for Trump. If you want Trump to be king and there to be no more elections ever, I consider you to be lacking in morals.
Please name the country where there is all this choice for the person leading the country at a particular time. It’s all like this. Or much, much worse.
So if there is a substansive difference, you need to vote for the best candidate. Third party or not voting is saying that there is no difference. That is exactly what you are saying. I do frankly find it disingenuous the arguments that people trot out that “they’re all corrupt” and when I come back with facts they go silent. I take it to mean that the people making these arguments are themselves liars. My tolerance for that sort of bullshit has decreased by orders of magnitude.
And it’s far too easy to predict consequences of that lesson will be a rightward shift of the Democratic Party.
‘Look at how our positions polled among non Democrats … maybe we shouldn’t be quite so loud about insert favorite liberal/ progressive/leftist pet issue here because getting enough Democrats elected, enough to nullify both the conservatives and the Manchins of our party, is the only way to advance those positions which a majority of the voters clearly do not support.’
It’s my right to vote third party for whatever reason I choose. When people criticize others for voting third party for whatever reason it is offensive and we see it all of the time especially on this board. I was accused of taking the coward’s way out for voting Johnson. You know what, at least I voted unlike many Americans. I understand criticizing how someone voted based on positions but criticizing someone’s vote because they didn’t give it to a major party? That’s bullshit!
By your logic, I should vote for Biden no matter how I feel because he WILL win Colorado so a vote for Trump (assuming the Republican nom) is wasted.
Not what I meant by gamed out. You see “Stein cost Clinton the election” or “Nader cost Gore” and it assumes that nothing would have changed except that, for example, all Stein voters went Clinton. 75,000 more voters went for Johnson than Stein in Wisconsin, 12,000 for the Constitution Party, 12,000 for McMullin as write-in, and roughly 27,000 other votes. Yes, if every single Stein voter went Clinton then Clinton would have won. But if every Stein voter goes Clinton and every Johnson voter goes Trump, then Trump wins by a bigger margin.
It’s lazy thinking to assume everything is the same except for the one thing that you wanted to go perfectly the other way.
So what’s the solution? Not vote for a third party candidate I believe is the best candidate so I can sheep and vote for one of the Big 2 that I disagree with?