You vote third party for President, and the worse option gets in. Do you feel any responsibility?

Politics & Elections
61

And on what issue is Joe Biden your best representative? I mean, if your issue is Medicare for All, your best representative would’ve been Bernie Sanders. If your issue is Wall Street Reform, your best representative would probably have been either Bernie or Elizabeth Warren. If your issue is UBI, no doubt you’d have wanted Yang. If your issue is judicial reform, you could’ve probably done a lot worse than Pete Buttigieg, who was the first candidate to suggest adding more judges to the SC. If your issue is criminal justice reform, then former AG Kamala Harris would’ve probably been the natural choice. On the issues, nearly every candidate could credibly claim to be far superior to Joe Biden.

But all of these candidates were roundly rejected by Democrat voters. Why? Because Biden, despite standing for nothing specific (or perhaps because he stands for nothing specific) was deemed the most “electable”, the most likely to beat Trump.

There are a lot of Bernie fans on these boards (I’m one of them) and many of us have spent the last couple of months repeatedly asking “Why Biden?”. The answer, from almost everyone, is the same: “I don’t like him. He isn’t my first choice. But he’ll beat Trump, and that’s all that matters.” You’re as familiar with these posts as I am, so I trust I don’t need to cite them.

This tells me that Democrats don’t particularly care what kind of agenda Biden tries to enact. They only care about getting Trump out of office. Joe Biden, if he wins, could spend the next four years doing absolutely nothing about anything, and the majority of Democrats would probably be satisfied, because he would’ve already done the one thing they nominated him to do; get Trump out of office.

To me, that makes simple victory a single issue. I can’t see how you can view it any other way.

62

Nope. Removing the current occupant of the white house would make things a whole lot better on a lot of issues.

63

“Must beat Trump” is just a way to sum up “Trump is so bad on these dozens of issues that replacing him with someone better on most or all of these issues is the most important factor”. So yes – Democrats care about the issues and the agenda – it must be better than Trump so the country doesn’t go down the drain.

I also preferred Bernie. Unfortunately, most Democrats disagreed (and many actually disagreed on the issues – in my understanding, Biden’s position on the issues is actually mostly in the middle of the Democratic party).

If Biden is elected, I plan to advocate for Biden to take the “correct” stance on all the issues, as hopefully will all Democrats. “Must beat Trump” is not remotely a single-issue stance, any more than “must retake the Senate” is a single-issue stance.

64

People can vote on any issue they want. If Oakminster wants to vote solely on what he perceives are gun rights, that’s surely his right. I confess to being a single issue voter in the primary this year- that single issue is winning the White House in November. Like most Democrats, it’s my estimation that Joe Biden is the best candidate. Would single payer health care be better? Probably. But it isn’t going to happen absent 60 Democratic Senators so chasing that great white whale isn’t a very good strategy. Do we want to rein in Wall Street? Sure. But having Warren on the ticket would scare Wall Street so shitless that they’d move heaven and earth to defeat her in November. We’ve got a guy who in every measure on every issue is infinitely better than Dolt45. We’ve got a guy who might actually carry enough weight downticket to flip the Senate. I wasn’t about to throw that away in pursuit of empty pipe dreams.

65

I do understand how it works, and I do not see how your accusatory question here is at all related to what I said here.

I don’t know if you are old enough to remember the 2000 presidential election, but that came down to 537 votes in Florida. The more recent one came down to a few tens of thousands in a couple states. Those were the closest elections in recent history.

If your point is that your vote doesn’t matter, my point is that with the EC, almost no one’s vote ever matters.

Which is why our votes only matter in the aggregate, which is why, since no individual vote matters, every vote matters all the more*.

Sure, it’s complicated, but we’re running a country here, not a garage band.
*not to mention your cavalier attitude toward democracy can very well inspire people who are in places where their vote is more strategically located to share in your apathy towards our experiment in self governance.

66

I’d forgotten about them so I guess you’re right, Trump isn’t so evil after all.

What to do, what to do; after all a number of Democrats, including Biden, voted for that little misadventure as well so their hands aren’t clean, either.

Guess I’ll sit this one out and wait for that perfect candidate next time around. :rolleyes:

67

I sympathize with your sentiments, but Oakminster’s arithmetic is correct. Some small numbers are smaller than other small numbers.

Everyday I take a pill which reduces the risk of chest pains that day by about 1%. Suppose the chest pain carries a 2% risk of heart attack. The pill then reduces heart attack risk that day by about 0.02%. I want to take that pill.

Each Floridan in 2000 had about the same 0.02% chance (or even more) of swaying the election. (I wonder if Florida’s turnout has since gone up, now that they know how important voting is.)

Is 0.02% a small number? Yes and No. Would you board an airplane if told the risk it would blow up in flight was 0.02%?

Oakminster’s chance of swaying the Presidential election is about 0.00000000000000007%. It shows innumeracy to think that number is in the same ballpark as 0.02%.

Wrong.

68

None at all.

I refuse to get sucked into the premise that I must vote “against” someone rather than “for” someone else. In our current situation, why is it MY fault if the Democrats [del]can’t[/del] choose not to provide a candidate that I would be proud to vote for as opposed to their usual “probably not worse than their guy” strategy? Screw that.

It is easy for me to envision the Best Candidate Evarrr looking at the situation and realizing D & R are the same wine sold in different bottles, deciding to run as an independent, and splitting the votes in BOTH parties to secure a nation-unifying win. That opportunity is totally lost by breathing the air the current arrangement blows to us. Donald Trump didn’t win because I voted for Johnson. He won because half the country thought he was a good idea, or at least a better idea than flaky Gary or voting in favor of the concept of dynastic rule. None of that shit is my fault.

That’s retarded. You clearly have no idea how variable the human psyche is from one person to another, or understand that people have different motivations and priorities than you.

69

2008 was the first time I didn’t vote third party. So I’ve never really felt this way. In 2000 and 2004, maybe the worse option got/stayed in but that was only with hindsight. my vote didn’t make a difference either way. 2016 the worse option got in but again no real difference. Maybe this is because I grew up with an open mind and no real party ID and I arrived at my first votes based on the issues and neither major party platform was more than 50% correct and the individual candidates weren’t either. For local races I think I’ve voted for every party, except for any nazi parties that may have garnered ballot access.

70

Vote your conscience in the primary.

In the general there are only two choices that have a serious chance at winning. All the other choices won’t come within light years of winning.

Does that suck? Sure it does. I hate it too and I wish it were different.

It doesn’t change the math though no matter how righteous you get about it.

71

I just don’t understand this sort of position. When you’re faced with a decision between two outcomes, and it’s abundantly clear that exactly one of those two outcomes is going to transpire, what do you gain by bitching and moaning that you wish there was a better outcome available?

People in debates like this also have a weird tendency to treat the democratic primaries as if they were a conscious action of a single person. It’s one thing if I’m a chef and I’m coming up to you to offer you breakfast and I personally and deliberately chose the two dishes you can choose between, and they’re both awful. It makes sense then for you to be upset at me for being such a bad chef and coming up with bad options. It might not do you any good, but if you get pissed off at me, well, it might be a dick move, and it’s not necessarily the case that I will have the ingredients and know-how to make better food, but at least it’s relevant. At least you’re upset at someone who was in fact directly responsible for the choices that face you. It’s possible I’ll learn my lesson, and next time, provide some food that you’re more interested in.

But primary elections aren’t like that. They’re enormous complicated procedures with zillions of inputs working with and against each other on a huge number of different axes. If you don’t like Biden much, is that because “the democrat party” in some sense failed you? Who is responsible for that? What did they do wrong? What can they do better next time? If you reject Biden, will that in any meaningful way provide feedback that will cause the dems to nominate a candidate you like more, next time? How could it? How do they know whether you’re rejecting Biden for being too far left, vs too far right, vs whatever?
All you’re doing by drawing some metaphorical line in the sand and saying “I will only vote for candidates who pass this line, no matter what, no matter who they are running against” is absolving yourself of your responsibility to act as a responsible citizen, and use your vote to move the country in a direction you like, as best as you can.

72

Thank you for sharing your differing opinions about whether or not to use strategy in an election, whether to look long or short term. For my part, the only mind I can read is my own. I know what I like, and what I can and can’t live with. Sometimes I can’t live with the D or the R choice and the I looks … well, not worse anyway. To nevertheless choose D or R based on the presumption that’s what everyone else is gonna do betrays not only myself, but everyone else who was similarly conflicted and chose the I. Nobody likes anything new until everyone else does–so somebody’s got to go first. Americans are quite accustomed to betraying themselves, but what if that were to change? How does it change if not by individuals refusing to continue to do it?

Does this mean Trump is potentially my fault (Had Colorado not gone Blue anyway)? Of course it does. And I’ll wear that, because I consider myself to be one member of one group–Americans. He’s a terrible man and a worse POTUS, and he is no longer just a hypothetical brick through the window. But he remains only an echo of the collective voice of a massive chunk of our population. He, in all his debauchery and treachery, is what has been on our minds for a long time now. He’s just a symptom. Aiming my vote to stifle who he represents seems wrong and needlessly divisive to me.

73

still cannot figure out why Biden is best to beat Trump. I guess people like a guy who has not had a regular job since Nixon was president. Experience is important but you don’t need 40+ years in DC to be president.

74

So tell me about how amazing it was the last time we elected a non-career politician.

75

And then be careful what you wish for. Look at how many parliamentary governments get snarled with so many micro parties fighting over tiny niches.

76

Oddly, trump got very excited and claimed massive fraud when it was shown that he lost the Popular vote. The dems could claim a mild but not very relevant moral victory in winning the popular vote. So the popular vote mattered to both sides.

So, no, your vote is *never irrelevant. *

77

You want the USA to be more like GB or Israel, then? :dubious:

Multiple parties is no guarantee of a less sucky choice.

78

In 2016 when Bernie announced that he was challenging Clinton for the nomination, I was convinced that he had been convinced to do so by the DNC for the purpose of creating newsworthy buzz to get Clinton mentioned in newscasts during a primary season that would otherwise have seen coverage dominated by Republican primary candidates. I’m still not sure that wasn’t the case.

But he did far better than I expected. I think he did far better than he expected too.

I have a dream that some day an independent or third-party candidate is going to get enough votes that the Democratic Party as a whole is going to realize that there is a substantial appetite within the party for something other than milquetoast candidates and a good number of independents who either agree, or more likely, would be attracted to a candidate who actually had inspirational beliefs or even just represented something different than the normal frick and frack candidates they get. Obama had some of that going for him. So did Trump.

Since the 90s, the DNC strategy has mostly been to run inoffensive candidates and to move rightward in the hope of convincing right-leaning independents to vote Democratic The result has been to push the Republicans even further right and to move the government that way politically, even as the populace has moved left and become more stratified. It wasn’t that long ago that you had to work hard to find a Democrat who said they supported gay marriage, and then the Supreme Court made it the law of the land, and suddenly every one of them had “really been in favor of it all along.” The DNC’s favored “third-way” politics are no longer a sustainable way of moving in the political direction I favor.

If everyone accepts that they must vote for whatever candidate the DNC selects to appease unregistered Republicans, nothing about this thing I disfavor is ever going to change. Why would it? I reject your premise that a vote is only a decision between two outcomes: candidate R or candidate D. I want to believe it also has some small effect in the selection of candidates in future races. We need those third-party voters, not for the election with which you are most immediately concerned, but for the next one and the one after that. If lessons need to be learned from losing, so be it.

I’ve never voted third-party, but I wouldn’t discourage those who do.

79

Trump’s problems have nothing to do with him being a non politician. His problem is that he is a narcissist and he’s a bully.

There have been plenty of people who were elected without having political experience and they did good jobs. One example is Eisenhower.

80

I’ve been noticing a rather disturbing trend here and in some other threads, mostly in the Pit. It’s the tendency to talk in terms that imply that Biden is somehow deserving of our votes, that anyone and everyone owes it to him and the country to vote for him regardless of personal feelings.

Responsibility? Being absolved? A vote for a third-party candidate is comparable to drunk driving? (Full disclosure, I will most likely not vote third-party. There is only one thing that would make me do so, and this isn’t the thread to discuss it.)

People, nobody owes Biden shit, OK? If they think he’s a lousy candidate, they are under no obligation, legal or moral, to vote for him. Biden is not owed your vote any more than Trump is owed the votes of his base. Biden and Trump both have to EARN the votes. If that leads to four more years of Trump (and while I hope I’m wrong about that, I think that’s what’s going to happen), well that’s what America wants.

Really, it’s the way that every presidential election in my lifetime going back to 1968 has worked. People who are pissed off at the status quo owe no loyalty to the person giving it to them, and, in fact, voters tend not to give it to them if they feel they have a choice. In my lifetime, incumbents have been beaten in presidential elections three times since '68, and I don’t even really count 1976. 1976 was a weird year. That leaves 1980 and 1992, and what did Reagan and Clinton have in common? They were dynamic. They were different. They were popular, charismatic, and new, and they found a way to convey that newness into their message. They ran rings around their stodgy, ineffectual opponents, and whatever you can say about Trump, the man is not stodgy. Trump does one thing–one thing–very, very well, and that is sell the image. You might not like that image, but folks, he’s good at putting it out there. Voters as a whole might vote along party lines, but they won’t vote along loyalty lines. Not to you, not to the country, not to anyone else.

And maybe that’s for the better. Think about it: If it were that easy, if the whole key to getting rid of a shitty incumbent were to find a slightly less shitty challenger, then what would be the motivation to get fresh blood into the races to begin with?

As someone from another message board put it so eloquently: “If your opponents run a guy who couldn’t beat a gong, what’s to stop your side from running a gong?”

Again, I might be wrong. Trump might lose. But if so, it’ll be the first time the incumbent loses against a total goofball in my lifetime, and I’m almost 55.