2020 was… truly unique. It was so hard to stay away from doom scrolling, and I (and many others) were pretty disillusioned by the sad fact that so much of our country legitimately supported the Orange Man. I didn’t get a wink of sleep the night of the election because I genuinely considered it to be a make or break decision for America.
My point is that looking back on it, in the end the only real difference I made was at the ballet box. This year I’m going for the Head-in-the-Sand approach. I’m done with the political memes. Done with the Twitter screenshots. It just riles me up and this year I’m gonna do my best to fight that.
Not Trump
I’ve voted for both Democrats and Republicans in the past. Frankly, neither one of them deserves too much power.
If Trump is the nominee I’m voting for the other candidate no matter who that is. There is no circumstance in which I would vote for Trump. The devil himself could be running against Trump and I would either vote for the devil or abstain. If he is the nominee then the election is essentially a fight for democracy.
Although I generally like Biden’s administration, I am concerned about him and his age. If there was a normal candidate running against him I would consider voting for them, but it’s mostly a bunch of wackadoos on the Republican side.
Chris Christie and Nikki Haley were the only ones in the last Republican debate who had any common sense. Christie’s campaign isn’t going anywhere because he’s anti-Trump. Haley is too conservative for my liking. Ramaswamy and DeSantis are garbage humans. The Republicans need a reboot because they really suck.
In other words, I’m team blue - not because I’m thrilled with them but because I’m afraid of the alternative.
Spot on friend. Trumpers look at us and think we like Biden as much as they like Trump. Noooope. There were way better candidates. If anything the Dems are the party of the status quo and republicans are the party of “Fuck anyone who isn’t rich, white, and male”. I’d love an actual progressive party - I don’t see anything that the democrats have done in the last 8 years that has actually been progressive.
The Republicans need a reboot
That sums it up. I’m conservative, but the GOP is such a train wreck now I just can’t support them.
I’m on the same page. The republicans need some feedback that what they’re doing isn’t going to win elections. Unfortunately I think it will take losing several more elections to sink in.
Prepare as many molotovs as possible and vote for Biden. My heart wants everyone to write Bernie in but that ship sailed. Instead, I will vote for the person thats not a faux mob boss and prepare for my country to turn into an autocracy because the faux mob boss is somehow pulling a shit ton of votes.
Edit: way too many comments here saying it doesn’t matter and they aren’t gonna vote. Just hand the direction of your life over to someone else then lmao
You know they sell drones that have a latch to drop things now?
I like my rising from oppression to be organic.
Fucking democrat all the way. Primaries I’ll vote for the less corporate candidates. The republican party is fascists and traitors.
Spoiled vote
The only reason he lost is because people were loud, reading, reposting and following. People who probably wouldn’t vote did because of the doom scrolling post being shared and talked about. Personally, I will continue to do it because this guy is running on revenge.
Blue no matter who. Nothing has changed about that.
I think leftists ranting about not voting for Biden in the general election at the moment are just blowing off steam, and when election day comes, everyone on the left will remember 2016 and vote blue.
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Don’t care. I don’t want to hear their BS. Apathy is the enemy. Re-elect Biden, then go out and yell at him for whatever the hell you want. The alternative is never being able to vote again. Not hyperbole. Republicans are actively trying to change the rules to disregard your votes.
Yeah I’m so tired of seeing this, “both sides,” bullshit. One party is openly flirting with fascism, the other is a turd sandwich. It really is a shame, and quite frankly alarming, so many don’t understand what is happening and what is at stake. Even if you hate them, vote for the party that will at least give you the opportunity to vote in future elections.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
There are so many that don’t know the horrors of that war and the brutality of the Nazis. We are doomed if they continue this ignorant rhetoric.
Yes I don’t know how many are bad faith actors posing as liberals or what. You’d think losing Row would have been the wake up call, and looking at the last couple years of elections it has, so I’m hoping it just that. Otherwise the constitutional originalists are going to turn back the clock to only rich white land owners having the real right to vote before all is said and done.
I absolutely will not. Vote blue no matter who is why we have the situation we have. 2016 did not give us trump. Generations of shitty corporate politicians on both sides of the aisle gave us Donald Trump. Populists win because they’re popular, and trump got popular by pointing out the factual information that the house, the Senate, and the oval office are filled with corporate skills and corrupt puppets. Sadly, it was the fascist who got popular pointing it out, but it doesn’t make that part of what he says untrue.
I live in a red state where my vote for federal office does not count. So I will cast my pointless protest vote for the green party in the hopes that one day they’ll get their 5%, and maybe something can change. Down ballot I’ll hold my nose and vote for the Democrat in most offices, and if I ever move to a competitive state, I’ll do the same for federal, because I’m being held hostage by the corporate shills, and I’d rather my family not die in concentration camps that are inevitably coming if/when the fascists fully take power.
But no. Fuck blue no matter who. Who. Fucking. Matters. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Have some standards.
But what are we supposed to do? We can vote for Trump instead or no-one instead. How does that make anything better? We agree there needs to be change, but we still have no real option here.
Hilary Clinton in the 2016 election had supported Trump in the primaries because she thought noone would vote for that idiot. The Democrat Party apparatus will support worse than Trump in the future if they think it will help their chances of winning. You don’t want to wait another 4 years for change 🤷♂️
I’ll be voting for a socialist candidate. Vote for a president who tells us it’s okay to stand by a genocide or vote for trump who will tell you the genocide is good. Neither for me thanks. If trump had just served his 8 years we wouldn’t be here again.
If Trump had served 8 years we’d be in a much worse place as a nation. That’s a hot take if ever I’ve seen one.
Which one? The Democratic Party has been supporting genocide. It’s well past time we recognized that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are both fascist and reject them accordingly.
I get the concept. I do. And I wrestle with the notion myself, as I’m an anarchist (you and I don’t agree on a few things, lemmygrad friend).
But I don’t subscribe to the notion that not voting as a principled abstainer is a righteous act…I don’t think. Because I do agree, of course. The democrats are capitalist, war-mongering shitheels. They aren’t “good” or just or righteous by any stretch of the imagination. They destroy the environment and will kill us if we challenge the status quo of lte stage consumer capitalism. I have no illusions about this.
But doing nothing in the face of a Republican Party that is hellbent on wiping trans people from the face of the earth, strapping us all to the whipping chair until they can establish a Christofascist nightmare in which we are all beaten into straight, white submission is…not a heroic act. Because, yeah, the democrats support Israel, they are neoliberal capitalist pigs. They boost police budgets whenever they can, they take obscene amounts of money from special interests and work for them, not for us. But the republicans do all the same shit PLUS hating trans and gay people and pass laws that make it so they can lock you away for protesting and they are clearly more “business friendly” because they can be open about it while the democrats have to do slightly less because their rhetoric and their base don’t approve like Republican voters do.
My point is, there are two terrible options. Yes, we are in agreement. And yes, electoralism is bullshit, incrementalism will get us nowhere. But hierarchy is bullshit. Capitalism is bullshit. These things will exist until some insanely devastating event upturns the way the world has run for a long time.
Not voting won’t change these realities. VOTING won’t change them. But all the people that are hurt by an emboldened xenophobe and vicious bigot WILL be hurt. Actual, measurable hurt. PLUS the Palestinian people you’re basing your position on will continue to be killed. Because the US supports Israel. Not the democrats or republicans, but the US.
Not voting against a party that is openly using REAL LIFE fascist methods and speech so you can maintain your perceived purity isn’t noble.
We can all hate capitalism. But we’re stuck with it right now. We can all hate electoralism. But we’re stuck with it right now. Capitalism kills way more people than the genocide currently happening in Palestine. But you’re way more involved with it than you would be in electoralism by casting one vote.
These things are truths right now. You’d do a lot more good (or at least contribute A LOT less hurt) by abstaining from capitalism than you would abstaining from electoralism. We can all be principled. But all-or-nothing-ism that is rampant on “the left” (read: in modern people with principles and humanity and half a brain) isn’t noble because it helps. It’s perceived as noble because you can say, “pfft. I didn’t _____.” You’re not helping anymore but yourself.
Engage in praxis. Fight for your beliefs. But when your abstinence will be weaponized by insanely powerful and horrible people, and leveraged against minority groups, your “purity” is nothing but self-aggrandizement.
Not voting against anti-trans Christian fascist bigots is a huge show of privilege.
Amerika as an empire deserves to die. I will not pencil-whip your colonizers or genociders without them giving up said colonialism and genocide first, and verifiably, long-term at that. I will not stand alongside that and tarnish my community’s history misleading that way; and I don’t care how many people try to couch it in “but what about your (white) countrymen?!”
If they cosign the Democrat Party’s genocides, if they back the colonizing invaders, then fuck them. They are emphatically not my ‘countrymen’, especially not my allies, and can only be seen as weak links that deserve to go with the nation in the same fire.
We may as well be two entirely different nations at this point with how much enmity I see in your party of colonizers.
Lol you really didn’t read what I said, huh?
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On Stoke, as soon as you wanted to play the “not voting for the blue genociders is an act of privilege” horseshit like every other aggrieved liberal cracker I’ve had the misfortune of knowing, I stopped caring what you had to say. You’re just another opp to me seein that-- because not a single peckerwood that’s ever run the play you’re running right now, where you try to act like you’re ragging on the Democrat party while still stumping for them, not one has ever been able to sell that shit. That’s disingenuous to me, just as disingenuous as the Republicans who go token-fishing to find minorities to weaponize.
Nah, man. I’m just an adult. I have my principles. And casting a single vote, I’m still sure what my principles are. And they don’t align with the Democratic Party.
But while there are two harmful options, one is significantly more harmful to populations of people whose very existence is apparently up for debate, friends of mine who I see struggle every day—also anarchist, but transgender (…who have also decided to give up a little of their pride in their stringent ideals in order to not be made illegal or to keep younger trans kids from suffering the way they did growing up in the 90s/early 2000s), opened my eyes to the urgency of the situation for them.
I didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton. Obama didn’t get my vote either time. But I did vote for joe Biden. I didn’t love it. But I did it. It didn’t take too long, and I continued living my principles. I didn’t burst into flames.
I’ve voted third party most of my life. And I’ve wavered on this as I’ve gone through my life. I make a judgement call when I can. But I started reading anarchist literature young. Like I said, I came of age under late Clinton/bush II. So my radicalization happened early. And my proactivity in my beliefs has come and gone. But my principles have stayed the same. I dunno how old you are, but honestly, I’m assuming you’re kinda young based on the way you speak. I was cooking for FNB and burning American flags and spray painting banks and paint bombing Lockheed Martin longer than you seem to have been alive.
I think of my taking a few minutes to cast a ballot against a genuine fascist movement like harm reduction in drug addiction. I don’t support drug addiction, but I do want to help those at the mercy of the worst of it. Drug addiction is horrible. Our electoralism is horrible. I don’t want to support either. But there is a little I can do to reduce the harm to most vulnerable victims of both.
I’m secure enough in my beliefs and can still be a full-fledged anarchist doing my praxis and casting a vote. My beliefs aren’t so flimsy that I need to PROVE TO EVERYONE IM ABOVE IT. I’ve been there. I can still see the problems inherent in our system while casting a vote. I can still hate capitalism while working and spending money. It’s not the system we want. My beliefs are lived through my praxis and my sense of what I believe. Not by what I DONT do. Electoralism will still exist if you vote or not. Not participating in the vote doesn’t do shit to electoralism. You not voting won’t help the Palestinians. My voting won’t help them either, as we both agree. But there are people in my direct vicinity and in my life and in this country that I MIGHT have the off-chance of keeping from harm by sacrificing my own sense of “purity as an anarchist.” The electoral system doesn’t live nor die by my vote. To think that way is beyond self-centered.
Ah, a third party supporter I see
Fuck off.
We don’t like that we are only allowed to have two choices.
The problem is that a moderately small number of people and corporations who combined have more money than god have decided it’s a great idea to execute regulatory capture of the entire US government.
I just hope guillotine season starts before the world catches on fire.
We don’t like that we are only allowed to have two choices.
You chose it and chastised someone for telling you to stop choosing it lmao
Do you genuinely think that the population of the United States likes only having two neoliberal political parties that have been able to get laws enacted that make it effectively impossible for any 3rd political party to exist in an effective fashion?
Pull your head out of your ass.
I think they keep voting for it, so if they don’t like it they must be pretty fucking stupid.
able to get laws enacted
What laws have they passed that force you to vote A or B?
Tell me you don’t know how FPtP voting systems work by not telling me you don’t know how FPtP voting works. Please read up on it and the “spoiler effect.”
Any vote for a third party is a vote against your preferred candidate. It happens with any first-past-the-post voting and two parties is the eventual end result. Eventually multiple parties get eliminated by voters who don’t want their vote to go to waste.
it’s FFtP that does that. It’s your attitude that does that. You’d rather throw your hands up and whine about the situation than make even a tiny effort to change it.
It happens with any first-past-the-post voting and two parties is the eventual end result.
39 parties are represented in my country’s Parliament. The UK has 10, Canada and Russia 5 each. Electoral systems like FPTP that produce a single winner tend to favour a two-party system (Duverger’s law), but it is not inevitable.
Stuck between a rock and a hard place. It sucks.
I’m tired of the 2 party system. I don’t think I really have a party or political ideology that aligns with Democrats or Republicans and third party candidates are all over the place. I want to start voting on issues and not just politicians.
I don’t care what my politician’s feelings are. They represent a constituency and the only things they should be speaking about and for are exactly what they’re being asked for. Instead we have this political machine that takes every issues and gives it a red spin and a blue spin and then it’s force fed to the people.
Congress should not be creating our ideologies they should create the laws that structure the things the citizens want.
The Supreme Courr overturned Roe v Wade, put it on the ballet and let the people decide.
Gun control, put it on the ballet
Universal health care, put it on the ballet
Abandoning fossil fuels, put it on the ballet
Stop forcing your political and personal ideologies on us and start listing to the people. If we vote “Yes” on universal health care, the politicians must then go and figure out how to make it happen.
Let it truly be a government of the people, by the people, for the people.
i’m pretty sure the u.s. will collapse before it becomes a democracy, but it certainly is a nice dream
Preach!! That’s how a democracy should operate!
The same way I always do. Ignore as much of it as I can until I get my ballot.
Research people/issues as I fill out the ballot.
Check the results the next day to see how the results shake out. Repeat for the next election.
Vote DNC and hate it.
Oh, who told you the 2024 campaign slogan?
Waiting for the impromptu Cornel West vs Jill Stein debate ig
My approach is the same as it’s been since 1996: FUCK THE REPUBLICANS.
I don’t need to follow the news. I don’t need to pay attention to dumbfuck liberals or self-styled progressives online. I know the score, and I know what to do. “Vote blue no matter who?” Fuck you, you self-righteous, terminally online shitfountain; I’ve been doing that since I turned 18.
Why? Because GOP = KKK, and has been since the fucking Nixon administration. The Republicans are terminally infested with fundies, fascists, and white supremacists, and has been since Lee Atwater came up with the Southern Strategy.
Unfortunately, this means voting Democrat or for myself as a write-in (when the only candidate for a given office is a Republican). Why do I call this unfortunate? The Democrats are a neoliberal party. They might allow progressives to run in primaries, but its corporate-friendly neoliberals who make it to the general election. That means having to vote for capital-friendly stooges like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Unfortunately, voting third-party or not voting at all helps Republicans more than it harms Democrats, so I’ve got to hold my nose and vote for neoliberals to keep neo-Nazis from winning elections.
However, I’m not holding out much hope for Dems in 2024. All Biden had going for him in 2020 was that he isn’t Trump. That’s not going to cut it in 2024. Not after four years of everything going up but our wages.
Frankly, I’d rather just kill 'em all and let the carrion-eaters sort 'em out. Fuck democracy; we barely even have a republic. What we have is an empire governed by an oligarchy that has generally managed to swap out figurehead emperors every 4-8 years without a lot of bloodshed.
