Still Don't Sleep Though

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Didn’t vote for it isn’t good enough. 90M people didn’t vote. We needed 2M more to vote against it. Remember this when the midterms come around next fall.
- We also need a political party that also understands this. The entrenched democratic advisers lost 2 times to Trump and I havent seen any mass firing. If anything, the establishment dems are attacking anyone trying to change.
  
  It doesn’t work like that. I’ve been saying this for decades, but maybe this explanation from a political strategist will do a better job.
  Simply put, the donors want to win to influence the candidates. They base their data on past voters, not the entire electorate. If you don’t vote, you don’t influence. It’s really always been that simple.
  We need to stop rewarding those who have the financial means to reach us in our living rooms, and actively seek out the progressives in every primary. Vote in every election. Stop allowing retirees to pick our candidates and continue to push the Overton Window to the right.
  
  But that video basically tells you straight-out… the usual campaign strategies are clearly wrong. You put out a campaign that gets people excited and suddenly way more people get out to vote. It's not a complicated theory. It clearly works in practice.
  All of this conversation though, just shows how fucking poor democracy based around voter turnout is. Put elections on a weekend or make it a public holiday, and make voting mandatory (with the option of a blank ballot for those who really object to voting). It doesn't solve all your problems. But it sure does help a lot.
  
  Bruh. If you voted, they’d cater their advertising to you. The candidates are still there, you’re not voting for them, and blaming the lack of advertising. That’s like blaming lettuce for not advertising salads and complaining about always eating McDonald’s.
  Do you want to take control of your government or not?
  
  I vote. I'm not American, in case my instance name didn't give it away. I'd vote even if I didn't want to, because it's mandatory to do so, one of several vast improvements my country has over yours in the quality of our democratic processes.
  But did you watch the video you linked in the last comment? Because it completely turns your argument on its head. You say "if you voted, they'd cater to you". But that video clearly demonstrates that the exact inverse is true. If you want to get out the vote in a large segment of the Zero Primes, all you have to do is run as exciting campaign with bold progressive policies. The evidence is all laid out there in front of you, even in common sense couldn't get you there.
  
  Both things can be true.
  A good campaign can get people into the voting booth.
  A demographic that fails to show up when you think you've done everything that makes sense to get them out can cause them to give up on the demographic. They may be woefully misinformed about what they should be doing, but since they don't know any better, they are likely to just give it up as a lost cause.
  Show up in the primaries for the candidate you want, it's the only realistic way to break the chicken and egg of the establishment ignoring the voters that don't show up and the voters not showing up for the establishment that ignores them. If the establishment is surprised by the primary outcome, that's the strongest wakeup call for them.
  
  Of course that’s all the donors have to do. That’s how we get a wolf in sheep’s clothing. We need grassroots primary candidates, and they run all the time. We just don’t do our civic duty and vote in every election.
  To give you an idea of how bad it’s gotten, the average turnout for congressional primaries is less than 15% for the last 30 years. That’s why we have this government. We’ve been letting retirees pick conservative centrist Democrats and push the Overton Window to the right for decades.
  Edit: You’re going to downvote my factual information in favor of your disenfranchising bullshit? Bruh. You don’t even go here.
  
  You’re going to downvote my factual information in favor of your disenfranchising bullshit? Bruh. You don’t even go here.
  Nope. I didn't even see your comment until after the edit. I am going to downvotes because of the edit, though. Probably woulda upvoted otherwise.
  
  I'm not sure why you're so hell bent on keeping a strategy that objective reality shows doesn't work. DNC needs to evolve or they will die.
  
  They absolutely do. That happens as soon as we start voting in primaries.
  
  I definitely agree with your last paragraph here. Try to vote in progressives in every primary we have access to in order to use voting to make a difference, yes.
  However,
  the donors want to win
  You mean they want everything for themselves by buying politicians, right? Because often times Dem strategy is so incredibly tone deaf the only thing that’s clear about it is that they aren’t trying to win an election, they’re simply doing what the donors tell them to do. In this case, it’s the classic pretend fight, send strongly worded letters, and then let the republicans narrowly pass the massive tax break for the rich. Which is in fact a win for the donors, but nobody else.
  
  That’s not the case if we get behind candidates with good ethics in grassroots campaigns. They choose to accept donations, and can refuse contributions from unsavory donors. We have several clean donor Representatives in the house. It’s not impossible. It just takes our participation.
  
  What do you think fascism is, and what are its causes?
  Do you seriously think the German descent into fascism was a result of poltical apathy?
  
  I’m not entertaining a philosophical debate with someone who equates Harris and Trump.
  We can try again when you’re older.
  
  I saw a great quote somewhere that said something like, "You will understand modern American politics if you realize that GOP politicians fear their voters and Democratic politicians don't fear their voters."
  A lot of progressives and leftists use this as an excuse to not vote and act like withdrawing from politics means they're not complicit. What they don't realize is that is exactly what creates this atmosphere where the Dems cater more and more to the center and right to get votes.
  Not to mention the general atmosphere like we have on this very thread where the left eats itself alive and divides itself with purity tests that could never work in reality.
  
  I do this but we can go even further. If you are a US citizen looking to change the DNC please look into your local DNC delegation. Taking over the party at the local level is a part of how the mentally challenged were leveraged by the Koch network to effectively take over the GOP.
  
  If you don’t vote, you don’t influence.
  That's the stupidest strategy you could have when you know WHY a lot of people aren't voting at all. The only purpose of this strategy is to participate in the degradation of voting shares, and by extension, fascism. You want new votes, you get new people to vote, and you know how to do that. The GOP figured it out (I don't want to say Trump figured it out).
  
  How do you think the GOP got those candidates in the election? They enter through primaries. We don’t need to figure it out. We have the goddamn answer. We just need to vote in primaries and stop allowing retirees to pick corporate centrists for us.
  
  Look at the Cuomo / Mamdani primary for NY mayor, the DNC really tried to kill the socialist campaign. Most primaries like that don't get that much support against the "old guard" among Democrats, so most of the time, the actual good non-centrist option gets swept away like dust. The work that's needed to push a socialist through the primary is so much more than "you just need to get out and vote" because those like Cuomo have so much more weight to shut them down, it's so rare for that to fail like this.
  
  They didn’t try to kill anything. They just didn’t put support behind Mamdani. If we did our civic duty and voted in every primary, the candidates that represent us, like Mamdani, would always be in the general election.
  We can’t keep blaming big lettuce for not advertising salads while buying McDonald’s every day. We know it’s out there. Go get some lettuce.
  
  The purpose is you have to stop supporting bad parties from somewhere, otherwise you can be coerced into voting against your interests every single time.
  It had to end at some point. Now there is a socialist candidate.
- what we need is for people to start exercising their second amendment rights
- If 2M more voted Democrat, Musk would have donated a bit more to make up the gap. I think we're flying past actual Democracy pretty soon. We'd need 20 million more before skewing the vote is prohibitive.
  
  Campaign money is important, but it also has it's limits. At some point, more spending has diminishing or even negative returns. We just saw that with Elon in Michigan.
  
  Definitely true. But the vote can't be close. Even if Democrats would have won without tampering, it's way too close.
- There's no way to vote against something that both candidates support (eg. genocide).
  
  Your insistence on seeing black and white in a gray world will be your end.
  
  Unfortunately it's also my end.
  They didn't vote for trump, but they sure as hell voted for this.
  
  You're the one stuck in black and white thinking. Any Democrat is better than any Republican, by definition. You would canvass for Mussolini if his opponent was Hitler.
  
  That’s entirely false. Read my comment history. I spend most of my time on Lemmy trying to engage people in the primary process to unseat the corporate centrists.
  Regarding the 2024 election, the Palestinians had two options. Bad, and worse. By refusing to choose, they were going to get worse. People like you would rather not put their names on bad, and let the Palestinians get worse, so they’d have a clear conscience.
  I have no respect for the self-righteous.
  
  You still don't have any red lines though. There's nothing a candidate could do, no behavior so monstrous, no atrocities so grand that would ever make you not vote for the lesser of two evils. Again, you would vote for Mussolini if he was running against Hitler.
  If not, where is your red line? What would a Democrat have to do before you would refuse to vote for them, regardless of who they were running against?
  
  https://lemmy.world/comment/18013309
  
  I’m not entertaining a philosophical debate with someone who equates Mussolini and Hitler.
  We can try again when you’re older.
  -disguy_ovahea@lemmy.word, c. 1939
  
  There's nothing a candidate could do, no behavior so monstrous, no atrocities so grand that would ever make you not vote for the lesser of two evils.
  Yeah that's basic moral judgement. You realize that the alternative to the lesser evil is the greater evil, yeah? For as grand and magnificent as the atrocities you're talking about are, the existence of a greater evil implies even grander and more magnificent atrocities. Given a choice between "grand and magnificent atrocities," and "grander and more magnificent atrocities," which would you choose?
  Is it worth allowing the grander and more magnificent atrocities to happen just to fool yourself into thinking you had no part in it?
  
  If they cared about genocide so much, they should have voted to prevent the one they would trigger back home.
  
  Medicine*
  
  Primaries!
  If more people voted in primaries we would have probably had president Sanders instead of Trump the first time around

291 comments