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submitted 6 months ago by randy@lemmy.ca to c/politics@beehaw.org

"My experience is that most of the people who get really upset about the current leadership of our nations tend to be folks who haven’t spent much time either as an activist or as someone working for a candidate. What happens instead is they immerse themselves in on-line news and commentary."

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[-] t3rmit3@beehaw.org 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

As I said to him, “in the US you don’t get to vote and get someone better than Joe Biden

Actually, write-ins are a thing, so you literally can vote for anyone else than him and Trump.

This rhetoric that a vote for someone who represents you is a waste if they do not have a realistic chance to win, would equally apply to an unequal match-up of Dem vs Rep, but it's never deployed that way; it's only used to argue against smaller candidates. You never see people arguing that Democrats should have voted for a Reagan because a vote for Mondale, who had a 0% chance to win (he only won one state- his home state of Minnesota), was "a waste".

Voting has to be about political representation, otherwise Democracy is just a veneer for selecting a plutocrat or oligarch to be the new figurehead for a while. Half of Trump's appeal was his (fake) rhetoric that he wasn't that, which Republican voters actually acknowledged they'd been selecting for years. Too many Democrats have yet to admit this to themselves about our party-preferred candidates. Obama won with record numbers, both terms, because he wasn't this.

Obama was one of those '0% chance' candidates early in the primaries according to political pundits in 2008, too.

But I also believe that it is tremendously wrong-headed to insist that people should vote for candidates who have absolutely no chance of winning

No one has a chance to win until people actually vote for them.

[-] Intelligence_Gap@beehaw.org 12 points 6 months ago

The problem is that this specific election is an election that will decide if we become a Hungrian illiberal democracy or continue being able to vote. If you don’t vote for Biden, and yes this is true, Trump will win because anyone slightly in his direction will vote for him. There will be no write in campaign for Romney. You can’t have change in a system that has had Project 2025 fully implemented.

[-] t3rmit3@beehaw.org 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

That was also the rationale last time. It's still going to be the argument next election. And the one after that. It's not specific to this election at all. After Trump, there's always going to be a DeSantis or Ramaswamy waiting in the wings, because we're not doing anything about the root cause, which is Republican voters. Trump didn't make Republicans racist religious nutjobs, he just showed them that they can choose their candidates over the RNC, and the DNC is terrified we'll figure that out too.

Republicans being a threat to democracy is the new eternal argument that the DNC will make in order to goad you into only voting for their candidates, because they have the money to ensure that their candidates will always have the biggest campaign warchests, the most name recognition, and the most impressive political resumes, and thus will always be "the best candidates to defeat [insert name](R)".

On paper, Obama had no chance in hell (and DNC lapdog pundits made a point of saying as much, loudly, when he started his campaign). In reality, he got more votes than any Democrat president before him (and more than Hillary, after him).

[-] Intelligence_Gap@beehaw.org 2 points 6 months ago

Just because something is true for a long time doesn’t make it false. Just because you see a train moving doesn’t mean it’s going to stop if you just stand on the tracks

[-] t3rmit3@beehaw.org 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Did I ever suggest that Republicans aren't destroying democracy? The problem is that the DNC is intentionally setting themselves up as the only alternative choice, which is also destroying democracy.

Democracy is the ability of the voters to direct the government, and they are intentionally quashing that in favor of their political picks.

"Vote for us, or we let them hurt you (while we work to make sure you can't vote for anyone else)" isn't a political pitch in a democracy, it's racketeering.

If Democrat politicians actually believed that the US was going to turn into a dictatorship under Trump, they would be doing much more than just hyping up Biden, because if Trump became a dictator, they would all be first against the wall.

But they're literally doing nothing other than telling people to vote for them. Why? Because they don't actually believe it, they just know that you do, and they're more than happy to have you come on here and try to browbeat others into giving them another term of paychecks.

That's why they were more concerned with winning the primary than actually putting up a strong candidate against Trump; actual progressives are a threat to their gravy train, while Republicans just want to ride it with them.

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this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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