this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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As we get more towards the proper midterm election season we'll inevitably start seeing more of this 'both-sides/hopeless' stuff that does little other than to help suppress the vote...
Vote for the lesser of the two evils, for sure. But at the same time we can also recognize that they are, indeed, two evils.
And try to primary out the evils! And we can make ground on local elections, it’s not just Congress or presidency
Both sides hopeless, nah.
But it's important to recognize whose interests lie with corporations and whose do not.
Overall, the Democrats are the more left-wing party, and I've been loving a lot of the younger politicians coming from the Democratic Party.
Just be careful, ma'am. Their best strategy for preventing progress to the left is by losing on purpose. If your meme costs them votes, you're actually helping them shirk responsibility. You could be spreading Democrat propaganda right now.
(It's kind of the same as how Israel wants you to hate them so much you do an anti-jewish terrorist attack, except way more subtle and insidious)
Idk, years of winning office and then always breaking the stalemate when Republicans want to push something like ICE funding until 2029 through seems pretty effective at preventing progress too.
I think the solution is to stop electing people who lean on their party affiliation and nothing else, while understanding the contextual gravity of every election. I would say in 2024, for instance, Kamala Harris was the best shot at winning and stalling this current situation, so I voted for her. We need to reform the voting system.
How does it help suppress the vote? I have had things to complain about regarding Democrats that are valid complaints for 26 years, since I could legally vote. I haven't just bowed out of voting due to those valid complaints.
I see this trotted out a lot, but I'm curious who you're actually referring to. Harris wasn't my cup of tea, I was especially upset that we didn't even get an actual primary because of Biden's idiocy and backtracking on his promise of being a one-term President, but I still fucking voted for her.
I see this sentiment around a lot, and it seems like it does little other than prevent Democratic voters from ever being allowed to voice their valid complaints about their own party and instead are supposed to suck it up and play pretend that everything is perfect like Republicans do with their party.
Part of why I think the Democratic Party is failing is that they think just because the opponent is crazy, they don't need to offer anything.
If all you're offering is the status quo that people are clearly unhappy about, they're going to go with the wildcard.
Well you're smart, but you'd be amazed how many people aren't. A lot of muslims and Palestine allies in 2024 voted for Jill Stein's Greens because they were mad about Israel. And I really hope they've learned their lesson, but I fear they haven't, and that they're going to make a bad decision for the Gazans in the midterms because of their anger.
You need to be careful about how you talk in front of the people who aren't as strategic.
There is no good decision to be made for Palestinians in most American elections. No, not even comparatively. Even Trump did no more or less than Biden already was. That aside, though, Trump would've won even if every single Jill Stein vote went to Harris.
See, @snotflickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone? Here's one of those people I was telling you about
Historically, GOP candidates have benefited from lower voter turnout (Trump ‘24 being the only notable exception in 40+ years).
By disincentivising Dems and Independents from voting because “both sides bad” and “nothing gets better” it’s increasing the chances of a Republican victory, and accelerating your nations decline.
Your primaries are the period you’re meant to vote for your preferred candidate, whereas in the general election you vote against the candidate you hate more.
The primaries for 2026 don't start until March, with some happening as late as September, so we're well within the time period to be critiquing various candidates before the finalized candidates are chosen. It's not like this is being said in October 2026 when all the primaries are already over, no, none of them have even begun.
As I may remind you, in 2024, we didn't actually have a primary for the Democratic candidate for President. So no voters really had a choice in the matter at all. Quite a large number of Democratic voters felt strongly that the national party heavily put their finger on the scale for the primaries in 2016 and 2020 as well, so there's a history of feeling like the primaries may have less real voter input than people would hope. (DNC lawyers never argued in court that they didn't put their finger on the scale for Hillary Clinton, they argued that it was legal for them to do so, and that since it was the lawsuit should be thrown out, which it was. We never got to find out if that was true or not, but they certainly hammered it in court that whether it was or not, it was legal for them to do so.)
I still have seen very little evidence that statements like this "disincentivize" voters as much as I see people claiming it does. Are there polls to back up this idea, that people choose not to vote because they have been convinced it doesn't matter due to Democratic inaction and people discussing that inaction?
I mean we're literally talking about a party that shut down the government over healthcare, one of the longest in history, and then rolled over for literally nothing at all. We're talking about a party that has members pushing to give ICE more funding while they're killing people and who fold and accept Tom Homan taking over as though he will somehow be better than Greg Bovino instead of kicking ICE the fuck out of their cities. We're talking about a party that gave police nationwide more funding after the George Floyd police riots where police nationwide brutalized peaceful protestors. We're talking about a party that codified, legalized, and normalized some of the worst crimes of the Bush administration, and literally set the stage for the surveillance state and police state that is now turned against us because they didn't want to appear "soft on terrorism." People like myself were screaming bloody murder during the Bush administration that these kind of tools could eventually be taken by a despot and turned against us, and those of us still paying attention kept saying so when the Obama administration didn't shut any of it down and instead kept it around for convenience because they were so sure such a despot would never be elected.
How is that the fault of voters who have the audacity to talk about those very real issues?
Last election cycle I would be driving around town, and of course you see the rabid maga cultists plastering dear leader on everything.
You would find a few tepid supporters of Biden/Harris, nothing extravagant but Dems don't tend to go into a frenzy over their candidates. More anti-trump than anything when he's been a factor.
Then you have the 'genocide joe' crowd, who largely treat it as a given that people know the maga clan is bad so they don't say anything about them, but are real vocal about how bad the Dems are and make it their business to shout it at everyone.
Now anyone that can math knows our system only works for two parties and with the two electoral votes auto granted to every state as a base it favors small more rural ones that tend to vote red. When people go around constantly going on about how bad the only viable party to the r's is then people end up with a 'fuck it, why bother' mindset.
I'm no fan of the weak spine 'we wrote a nasty letter' D's who won't lay a real smackdown on the idiots across the aisle, but I can see why it happens. The right and far right will fervently vote for whomever is the most vicious option they think they can get away with. The far left though, they tend to protest and stay home if someone doesn't pass their purity test, so their support and votes are unreliable.