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.
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.
Okay, cool story. I fail to see the relevance to the topic at hand.
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.