claim 1: “voting doesn’t change anything”
Never forget the recent case of Kris Mayes, who refuses to uphold the Arizona supreme court’s sweeping ban of abortion.
Kris Mayes only won her 2022 election by 280 votes. Voting changes things.
claim 2: “but genocide joe”
Yep. Hold that fucker’s feet to the fire. He has blood on his hands
But trump has promised to be indisputably worse.
I won’t tell you how to vote. I just encourage you to vote. You’re not radical for ditching the only miniscule right the state has granted you to do some small aid for your neighbors.
Not voting is a valid choice in an election though. In part the US has Trump as a political figure because the Tea Party movement wasn’t afraid to tank the 2012 midterms and hand Obama’s administration the legislature. If your representatives have to choose between loosing and meeting your demands, eventually they get the message and meet your demands.
If you’re not voting you’re indistinguishable from someone who doesn’t care about the outcome. The representatives are going to chase after the people who vote, not the people who don’t care enough to vote.
Only if you aren’t messaging. A write in campaign for “nobody” would be a clear indicator that there are people willing and able to go to the polls, fill out the form, just not for the candidates given. Then, in future, you have hard numbers to point to; “look at this block of voters that wrote in nobody, maybe we should target them”.
But that’s a real possibility, especially in an election in which both candidates are intolerable
So: if people on the left refuse to vote because both candidates are terrible, and people on the right are going to come out in droves for God King Trump, where do you think the Democrats are going to go chasing votes? Are they going to try to chase the non voters who wouldn’t vote for Trump anyway? Or are they going to try to steal votes from Republicans by shifting further to the right?
Convincing someone who isn’t going to vote to vote for you is 1 vote, convincing someone who would have voted for your opponent to vote for you is 2 votes. Not voting just means both parties ignore you.
You don’t even need that much. With the proper electoral split, Trump could win with an little as 42% of the popular vote.
But that’s a structural problem. And it’s a proven perpetuated by those centrist voters happy to see elections break whichever way they lean.
Not by the math of the electoral college.
None of that changes the fact that convincing someone voting for your opponent to vote for you instead is more valuable than convincing someone who isn’t voting to vote for you.
You do not add any value by convincing an Alabama Republican to vote for a Democrat, unless that Alabama Republican is part of the electoral college slate.
That’s irrelevant to the discussion at hand of “is not voting effective?”
In places where Democrats are going to chase votes: if shifting right will get them 50 votes from people who would have voted Republican, and shifting left would get them 99 votes from people who wouldn’t have voted, they’re going to shift right. Not voting makes your voice less important.
In places where Democrats aren’t chasing votes (such as Alabama), not voting doesn’t get you more say in politics. In fact, it very much can get you less when Democrats ignore that state. In 2020 Trump won 60% of the vote in Alabama, but only 40% of eligible voters voted for him. How many Democrats didn’t vote because “it doesn’t matter anyway” sending the message to both Democrats and Republicans that their opinion doesn’t matter because they aren’t going to vote anyway?
In 2018, Democrats spent north of $250M in Tennessee and South Carolina to lose Senate seats by double digits.
Nevermind the billions Hillary vaporized by going all in on Iowa.
Do you really think there are republicans left to be convinced? Especially with the rising costs of everyday goods? (Remember, it doesn’t matter if the president isn’t directly responsible, it’s happening under Biden’s watch, so the administration gets the blame - either out of ignorance, or out of a frustration that the problems have not been sufficiently addressed)
If shifting right convinces 50 “centrist” voters to vote for them instead, and shifting left convinces 99 people who wouldn’t have voted to vote for them, they’re going to shift right.
Politicians are all too happy to have people not vote, so they have fewer people to try to convince.
The DNC has been shifting right for the last fifty years, don’t you think the strategy is hitting up against diminishing returns?
If the people on the left aren’t voting then it doesn’t matter. If shifting to the right causes one more centrist to vote for them and one more leftist to not vote at all that’s still better for them than doing the opposite.
I believe primaries are the place to be pushing Democrats to have more progressive candidates, not the general election once the candidate is already chosen.
others have taken a valid attack against this argument, but also worth noting that the Tea Party was backed by ultra wealthy and corporate interests. that sheer mass of capital has insane messaging power that the left either doesn’t have or is refusing to wield.
Yeah, it was a Koch brother’s project backed by big bank accounts – but that doesn’t mean the tactics aren’t valid. Left wing policies poll especially well with Americans, especially when they’re described clearly and without buzzwords. What we lack in funds, we potentially make up for in sheer numbers of people.
Obviously that requires a hell of a lot of coordination, but I think it’s achievable.
the key flaw to your position:
yes. coordination. coordination, which, like it or not, cannot be done without cash. the tea party was able to gain its astroturfed support by coordnation, messaging, which took think tanks, writers and publishers. not free.
you are getting it absolutely correct with the caveat “when they’re described clearly and without buzzwords.” and what does it take to generate that clear communication? research, analysis, understanding, writing, marketing, canvassing, publishing, broadcasting. all of those are job descriptions that can be done remarkably well, for the cost of hiring people to do it. you are counting on a supermassive bulk of labor to reach millions of Americans that can’t and won’t appear for free, as much as i wish it would.
the problem, of course, is the Democratic party. if it would just be better and stop being a neoliberal protoconservative capitalist genocide supporting clownshow, and put a bit of cash toward doing some actual leftist groundwork, we would be fine, but of course we cannot hope for things to magically be better, only to work with things as they actually are.
How is it supposed to Become Better without pressure? Organizations are like organisms; they minimize energy expenditure - whether in the form of cash, calories, or labor. As long as being the lesser of two evils is a successful strategy, the DNC will not change. There’s no pressure to change.
As it stands, it’s in the organization’s best interest to maintain the threat of Republican domestic policies. It’s why there was no legislative attempt to codify abortion rights in the national legislature - the party benefits from the continued uncertainty. If they had pushed a vote, then individual members would have to answer to the public for how they voted – worse still, it might have passed; then they’d have to find something new to campaign on.
I don’t disagree; you just bypass my main point.
There is no pressure without money. That’s literally all I am saying.
Right now, millions of Americans could skip the vote out of protest and go utterly unnoticed because there is no messaging backing them. They are indistinguishable from the majority of Americans that don’t vote anyway, and can be treated by Democrats as such.
Thus hilighting the key distinction between a leftist ditch-the-vote movement versus what the Tea Party was.
As soon as there is significant capital backing pro-Palestine views, my point will be moot. This has not happened yet though I pray it does.
Maybe if we were talking about a private business, sure. But a political party has pressure points outside of the financial - there is some minimum of voters required to keep the institution viable. If they can’t hold office, they can’t deliver to their donors.
Yes, that requires actually talking to people and organizing outside of the party structure itself. But that seems a damn sight more likely than an economy built around arms-manufacture and investment bubbles suddenly developing a conscious and deciding not to continue this very lucrative status quo.
Good thing boycotts, divestments and sanctions exist and are effective.
A lot of this discussion is overly voting centric, as you yourself know I’m sure. You’re asking the election to do everything, while I am simply asking the election to hold the overton window away from a total fascist government (look up Project 2025 if you haven’t).
There are other forms of activism than voting/abstaining. Voting is simply a last ditch measure to hold shit stable after everything else is said and done to the best of our ability. I just encourage you to understand that you are putting far too much emphasis on that one facet of democracy, in a way that puts much more risk on the shoulders of your neighbors.
I’m not sure fascism is a useful word here. We’re talking about a country with a global navel presence, military installations on every continent; a country that accounts for half of all incarcerated people in the world, that has for decades ignored unanimous motions in the UN, who’s economy and politics revolve around the central productive pole of weapons manufacture. The tipping point between “stable US” and “fascist US” seems like an arbitrary distinction at this moment in history.
I’m not asking elections to do everything, I’m asking people to stop treating federal elections like some bulwark against evil. It’s not a useful way to think about it. It’s a hoop to jump through. The electorate decides, mostly by incident and the collective sum of vague gut feelings, where the hoop is and how high is required to jump. What power exists there is the ability to say, too bad, not you! Beyond that, it’s a rubber stamp - about as significant to the running of things as the King of England is to Downing Street.