This is definitely needed. I think in a lot of people’s minds the two parties became one on a lot of issues a number of decades back, and only really markedly diverged again recently with the rise of the tea party. It made people give up on voting, even really smart ones. I recall seeing George Carlin (RIP) on an interview saying he never voted because of that lack of difference.
Fortunately, we’re seeing shifts to the left in candidates which will make a difference.
Am I being too obvious?
I agree with this in principle, but look at primary turnout. This year had some really exciting candidates in my home state of MN. But still only 2% of people turned out to vote. So I am really frustrated by this precisely because people won’t turn out to vote because the candidates suck, but they also won’t turn out to tell their party what matters to them and who they want to vote for.
I don’t disagree with you on the framing, but George Carlin (per @kxkvi’s example) should have gotten his ass to a primary.
Bigger consideration:
That assumes that they have a party and that their party has a primary. Unless someone’s a Republicrat, that’s unlikely.
It is likely that considerably more than 2% ultimately will vote for one of the Republicrat candidates, but most of those are not die-hard members of the party who want to take part in party functions like that. They’re just people who feel obligated to vote for someone that they guess is likely to be the lesser evil (based on ads, soundbites, cartoons, or what their friends/family said) although no party or candidates really represent them.
Third parties don’t have primaries? Huh. Didn’t know that.
But anyway … sure. I don’t really know what to say to someone who wants better candidates, but is unwilling to vote in a primary or do anything to try to get their views represented in a party of their choosing. The arc of the universe doesn’t bend; it gets bent by people choosing to bend it.
I went to Dem organizing stuff in 2008, 10, and 12. We were not encouraged to discuss. The words heard were the words of liberal Boomers who cared only about hounding, by phonebanking, people they knew might vote and were D or strongly-D-leaning. It wasn’t my skillset, never talking politics to strangers in the middle of trying to get more people to vote. But I tried and they never gave the phonebank any leads that they were trying to persuade. It just never came up.
These two tweets summarise the issue fairly well:
Note: “a slightly reduced possibility of being murdered” is not the same as “90% of what you want”.
Disco is a working class gay black man, BTW. This is not an issue of privileged college kids with no skin in the game.
That’s a [citation needed] benefit anyway, let’s see the numbers
A comment on one of those:
Y’know what you call a person who gets 90% of what they want from Democrats? A Republican.
and one on the other:
the scale doesn’t go from 0 to 100, there are negative numbers my dude and both parties are in that territory
seem to pretty much sum things up.
That’s a beautiful, motivational sentiment worth spreading.
They can. The Missouri primary had some Green, Constitution and Libertarian primary candidates… though in some cases they were unopposed so one wonders why party members wouldn’t choose some other party’s primary to vote in for damage minimization.
But what about the tens of millions of priviledged young white people who don’t vote and literally never will even when active in political conversation? And what about the tens of millions that just wonder off when it’s not a presidential election?
Black people have to be wrestled out of the polling station and suppressed to barely give the establishment control over voting results, but all they do to target young white folks is push a little money into some influencers hands. That’s not an acceptable level of disproportionate action.
And I am not defending the Democrats because they are not interested in getting new blood in because the Party would win but the individual would lose - and Democrats do not have the party loyalty over all the GOP has, no matter how bonkers donut twitter gets.
There’s a bit of an is/ought thingie here.
When discussing issues affecting voter turnout, I’m talking about what people will do, not what they should do.
Should people vote for the non-fascist candidate, even if it’s just more of the same corrupt warmongering scum that the Democrats usually push? Yeah, probably. Will they? No.
If you want to increase turnout, you need to do the things that increase turnout. Trying to shame people over not voting for candidates that are blatantly crap is not an effective means of achieving that goal.
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There’s also a bit of a tendency here to see voting as the only meaningful form of political action.
Most of the lefties I follow held their noses and voted for Clinton. But those who did not didn’t just give up at the voting booth; they proceeded to activism.
When comparing someone who votes for whatever slimeball the Dems put up (but does nothing else) versus a non-voter who’s out on the picket line every week, I know who I’d choose.
Here’s the thing - that’s not what anyone is talking about but it sure is what gets brought up anytime you try and talk how desperately bad voter turnout in the United States is. There is a pervasive culture of not just not voting, but providing any excuse that could possibly be afforded to nonvoters because it is an uncomfortable topic.
It’s not like the normal online Democrat is any better anyways, they are also skipping the local and state election being decided by 20% turnouts even in hotly contested areas. Unless the election itself is under national spotlight and includes cartoonish evil will people drag themselves to the polls. Most voters in the US immediately drop everything to through their support behind the first rich guy making random promises - just look at the Michigan governor shitshow in the primary this year, a random business guy might have taken the primary had journalists not uncovered that he was shopping around consultants to find what party was easiest for him to run in (and he still got 17% of the vote).
The problems in the US’s voting runs so much deeper than the candidates even being presented that the idea that people would vote for the right person is simply not true. We peaked in the 60s and will likely never see that level of participation again.
If you want to increase turnout, consider
vote swaps-- e.g. between Green supporters in swing states and Democratic supporters in blowout states-- but that relies on solid polling data available at state level in presidential elections and maybe senatorial ones and not available at district level in congressional ones, or
low-key action swaps-- e.g. between someone who is considering joining a low-risk protest and someone who is considering voting. Obviously this doesn’t work if the one person doesn’t agree with the focus of the protest.
Ah the TGOP! They have to cheat to win and stay in power.
but if you choose the wrong arc
It seems like all the Boomers suck. Stuck in the past and unwilling to change.
^^^ all of this!!
I vote, but I do my best to be an activist as well (mainly using money to fund organizations). As someone told me once, just because you are not on the front lines doesn’t mean you can’t make a difference.
From what I understand, California has a unified primary, where the top two vote-getters among all parties will end up on the final ballot. So, the can be a D against an R, or two Ds or two Rs running against each other in November… or one or more could be a third-party candidate.
So, it could technically be thought of a third-party primary, but I’m sure very few, if any, third-party candidates make it onto the November ballot.
I bet if Hillary Clinton had won with the same kind of popular vs. electoral college difference they would be falling all over themselves to pass the bill.
There aren’t enough rusty chainsaws in the known universe to fuck that guy sideways with.