Is it? You think registered Democrats or Independents who voted for T**** or Jill Stein or Ralph Nader or just failed to vote had nuanced political views? I don’t. I think they were either low—information voters or too superficially caught up in their own importance to think of the actual impact of their vote (or lack thereof).
Again, I’m NOT talking about folks like you who held their nose and voted for Democrats, no matter how painful it was.
Make some noise. Demand change, demand what you want. I’m pretty happy with my representatives because they have pretty consistently represented my needs and those of my area. But when Jeffries called my House rep (and others) to the carpet for being to uncivil during T****’s SotU, I wrote him to object that he was taking away MY voice, and that I wouldn’t donate to the party again and I would donate to progressive challengers to HIS district until that was fixed.
In other words, if TPTB in the party suppress progressive voices, kick them out and get new ones. It’s a lot less work to do that than to grow a whole new viable party from scratch.
But that’s part of my point! Who is “THEY?” Because I know my representative DOES have my interest at heart and is actually doing the things I and her other constituents have asked her to do. It’s not party loyalty - it’s practicality. I would much rather have a Democratic Socialist party to put my support behind - but I don’t, so I work with what I’ve got. If there’s an Independent (like Bernie) who puts in the work, I’ll support them, too. And Democrats who betray our purposes need to be protested and primaried. That’s frankly what’s going to happen in SW Washington with Marie Glusenkamp-Perez. She’s better than the neonazi she ran against, but she’s facing very vocal backlash by her constituents for voting for the SAVE Act and unless she owns that mistake and changes her actions, she’ll be a one-term representative.
I agree with this 100%. They work for us, not the other way around.
I did - in reference to people who voted for T**** or a 3rd party or just stayed home as some kind of protest vote. And I absolutely stand by that.
I’m not sure we even disagree at all on the desired future state we want to achieve. I think we have minor disagreements about process. Because I’ll vote for a more progressive Democrat over an incumbent who is useless. I’ll vote for a viable Independent in a general election if they are more progressive. I will probably never donate to the party again - only directly to candidates or organizations like Fair Fight or Indivisible. And I’m going to talk about problems with what Democratic politicians and political operatives are doing right next to you. But I do think it’s important to distinguish between the actions of Democrats who are failing to represent us vs those who are fighting for us. And I don’t think that’s an unreasonable ask.
I think most voters are low information voters. Really low information. Most voters. Republican, Democrat, Independent and non-voters alike.
And the more I learn and participate the more low information I feel as I realize over and over again how I get bamboozled and misled then blamed for what’s been taken.
The rest the failure-to-show voters the dems are on about are disenfranchised already and there’s nothing to do about it because a big chunk of those voters live in Republican controlled territory anyway. Those people are/were depending on low information voters like me to vote sympathetically for them… out of kindness.
A small percentage of voters in the US are highly motivated but unfortunately they are either religious zealots or extremely elitist chauvinists.
So I see one party that is fully and loudly populist fascist and which won by being so and the other that is willing to reconsider all that progressive shit for a seat at the table in under the new paradigm now that they don’t really need us anymore.
And @tornpapernapkin: That isn’t what I intended but I see the problem and own it. I fucked up in using that metaphor, and it was hurtful. I genuinely apologize.
I am a strong believer that the main reason voting the lesser of two evils doesn’t work is that people haven’t been doing it. Things have been falling apart because the greater evil gets in more than half the time. If there had been no president Trump, no presidents Bush, no president Reagan, maybe there could have been some real progress.
But I also can’t stand arguing that “actively supporting genocide” shouldn’t be a red line and can’t really blame anyone who couldn’t bring themselves to get out and vote for it. That’s a choice nobody should ever have had to make. It’s the fault of Harris and the Democratic leadership for forcing that inhuman choice onto people. I wish they won but they can still go to hell.
Here’s where I disagree. The misinformation from the GOP makes empty promises and turns out the voters to support whatever agenda that party might have. They’re also engaged in attacking Democrats and anything that they do, and will weaponize an issue if it benefits them. I believe a significant percentage of the failure to show voters who made enough of a difference for to win were successfully influenced.
I say this because I’d been railing against major press outlets for a while. The imbalance of coverage was obvious. The GOP efforts to weaponize free speech and antisemitism on college campuses bore fruit as they intended. They shifted focus from domestic issues to one area of US foreign policy all day, every day leading up to the election. Mission accomplished, they got what they wanted.
Now that we’re all at risk of having our civil and human rights violated at the whim of the regime, the press is burying the resistance to the point that too many people believe it doesn’t exist. On the site, we have multiple people posting resources and action items - if not daily, at least on a weekly basis. I’ve also been contacting my elected representatives and meeting with local ones. Some of the suggestions I jokingly post here, I seriously bring up with pols IRL. We cannot afford to get tired, to give up, or to turn on each other. That’s what the forces of evil count on.
I’m on board with the bus analogy, too. If somebody wants to take detour and put us in harms way, be prepared to knock them out before they reach the driver if necessary. If you notice the bus isn’t going where we want, be prepared to take the wheel - 'cause the driver can get knocked out, too. However, I am not willing to allow my bus to run off the road because someone wants to distract the driver whose first priority should be focusing on the safety of passengers on the bus.
I may or may not agree with third-party voters’ choices, but I listened to some of them talk about it as the election approached, and I do believe they were standing on their principles. Whether or not that was a good idea, I don’t know, but I can’t blame them for it.
Except that’s a gross misrepresentation of Harris’ actual stance on Gaza. It’s the one policy she deviated from Biden’s direction on. She committed to defending Palestinians from Israeli bombardment. What she didn’t do (and this is where I think there was some magical thinking on in this regard) was commit to essentially going to war against Israel in order to accomplish it. There were Arab-American groups that endorsed Trump because she wouldn’t commit to that, and that was frankly stupid and counter-productive (as we now know).
But hey, why listen to someone’s actual policies when reliable cough news sources like The Hill and Politico have some delicious misinformation to swallow?
Oh, please. I didn’t listen to those, I listened to Harris. This is what she said on the subject when the whole world was listening.
With respect to the war in Gaza, President Biden and I are working around the clock, because now is the time to get a hostage deal and a cease-fire deal done.
And let me be clear. And let me be clear. I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself, because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on Oct. 7, including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival.
At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.
President Biden and I are working to end this war, such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.
And that said to me the same thing – Israel has the right to do what it’s doing, atrocities against them get named while atrocities by them get the exonerative tense, Palestinians will get rights at some point in the future, and in the meantime Biden is on the right course. Which wasn’t just not “going to war against Israel”, it was arming it and ignoring all its war crimes. If that wasn’t actually her policy maybe she shouldn’t have stood up for it like this.
Because what it said to me is that the Palestinian people, human rights, and upholding international law were all things she was willing to throw under the bus to appease the centrists. Lots of people got the impression about things like trans rights too, given how she never defended them against the cacophany of right wing attacks. And guess what? Throwing principles like that under the bus is how Democrats lose elections, and she did. She was our best hope to stop Trump, and she deserves blame for throwing it away like this.
Oh here we go, the reason I left Metafilter: blaming Green Party voters for the Democratic party’s failure.
We are still talking about 2024, right? If you look at the breakdowns of the popular vote, you’ll see that the Greens, Libertarians, whatever the hell Kennedy was, and "others’ were each between 0.41 and 0.48% of the popular vote. Collapse those down to two parties, with Libertarians going to Trump and, generously and unrealistically, everyone else going to Harris, and Harris still would have lost the popular vote. More importantly, the electoral college results would be unchanged.
Even more so in 2016. The Libertarians had 3.28% of the vote, the Greens only 1.07. If you assigned the third-party votes to either D or R, Trump would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college.
I voted for Stein… in Obama’s second term. Not since then. I’m still mightily tired of hearing about how people who vote for her are enablers of fascism.
…
Voters have a duty, yes… but politicians have a duty to earn those votes. When there are no inspiring candidates, I find that placing the blame on voters for not voting anyway really can only be taken so far.
I will note vote for Gavin Newsom, whoever he’s running against, unless it’s a very different Gavin Newsom than the one we’ve been seeing the past few months.
(I may need to just drop out of this thread for a while, it took me way too much time and many edits to remove most of the bitterness and anger from this post.)
That was August 3. She changed direction by early October and just as openly demanded immediate ceasefire in Gaza and support for Palestinians against Israeli bombardment.
Oh. Good for her, and sorry for missing her developing some god damn basic humanity just before the deadline. I don’t think it changes what I said about her showing what she was willing to throw under the bus at all though. If we can ask voters to make good choices, we should be able to ask the same of leaders, and she did so as little as possible here.
Yes, I’m aware… we live within systems and that means addressing said system, not just thinking it’s a problem of a few bad actors.
I’m also aware of that, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need to talk about how the less worse option is failing us. There are Democratic politicians who are cozying up to the very same people seeking to replace our broken system with a literal technofascist dictatorship and throwing vulnerable people under the bus. The party seems fine with that. I’m glad that there are democratic politicians standing up for what’s right, but there are also ones who are being floated as the 2028 nominee (or at least trying to position themselves as such) who don’t want to call what’s happening to our country by it’s name. And the leadership seems to be willing to platform and empower those people over those seeking to call out Trump and the Republicans for their actual fascism…
Good thing no one here did that?
But is it though? Systems are not neutral. They are built by particular people for particular reasons, and we need an analysis that addresses that, or we’re just gonna be right back here again soon enough.
No, but fixing it to be better will! I don’t think anyone here is just whinging, they are making important structural arguments about the systems that are directly oppressing many of us here. Like, there are people here directly in the line of fire that the Democratic party seems perfectly willing to throw under the bus right now. I know you don’t find that any more acceptable than any of us do.
TLDR, I think we can both work through the broken system to try and get us out of this mess AND call out the people willing to work with fascists no matter who it might destroy.
I don’t think anyone here is unaware of that fact. That doesn’t mean we need to limit our criticisms when people are actively being hurt by their actions.
And that is obviously NOT TRUE of literally anyone here. If anything, all the privileged white men on the Democratic side believing that if we could only find “our own Joe Rogan” and spin up a propaganda machine like the right has, and ignore the suffering of actually human beings are the ones who are being immature and childish (and NO, I’m not saying that @DukeTrout is doing that at all), because they refuse to see beyond their own economic framing to the heart of the culture wars framing that is directly aimed at anyone who is not a white man.
Many of us have been… we’re just not being taken seriously. For YEARS, many women argued that they right was coming for abortion, and the party leadership refused to do more than argue that it should be legal and rare. They played right into the rights hands on abortion, and women are literally dying right now. Many Black Americans who are the most solid Democratic bloc warned about the rising racism in the GOP that was often used coded language… and the party leadership just kind of ignored it. Trans people have pointed out that they are the canary in the coal mine, and now we have Democratic politicians who are perfectly willing to see them erased if it keeps them in power. People have very real reasons to be pissed off here.
And therein lies the problem. People tried and tried to get new leaders with a more progressive platform in. For literally years now. How can you say people haven’t been trying?
Pelosi, Schumer, Jefferies, for a start. Harris, Newsom, Schiff… Martin, Hogg… Emmanual, the Clintons, Carville, the Obamas… the party leadership is more interested in trying to win over “moderates” than in looking at the people who actual NEED something from the party. None of this is abstract. It’s facts on the ground. It’s not about YOUR specific rep who might be doing a great job. I’m personally angry with my Senators voting in favor of the Laken Riley act, but am happy about other things they’ve done. The vast majority of the party is probably in it for legitimate and good reasons. But it’s the leadership that’s beyond fucked at this point. And who has more of a say in the path the Democrats pursue - the leadership or our local reps? They absolutely have put their thumbs on the scale to ensure that the progressive wing doesn’t do as much as they could. Just look at how they treated Walz in the campaign. He went from being an effective attack dog (weirdos) to “coach Walz, homespun midwesterner”…
And some in the party leadership NEED to be reminded of that.
And no one did that, I don’t think.
I think that’s right. They listen to whatever their preferred talking head tells them, because they often don’t have time for much else. They need to depend on the party being what they pitch themselves as. That’s part of why we have parties, so we can get a general idea of what politicians stand for and how they’ll vote in office.
Yes, the mass media has borked us in its drive to “please” both sides… in reality, they are just out pleasing their corporate overlords.
And the thing is, plenty of people warned about this state of affairs, on the press on minority rights, on women’s rights, and the mainstream democratic party SCOFFED that it could possible happen. The third way has completely and utterly fucked ANYONE who isn’t a wealthy white man at this point, by helping to hand power to the far right. Every time the far right demanded something (curbs to reproductive health care for women, equal rights for trans folks, maintaining the line on multi-racial democracy, a comprehensive immigration bill, etc), they democrats thought that if they gave just a little, they’d win back those Reagan Democrats FINALLY… well, they didn’t Now many of them are literally in a cult and we have a guy who is openly corrupt sitting on a throne basically…
Exactly that. Yes, we can be on this bus, but let’s not let them go on a Klan-country detour.
Then why not platform a Palestinian voice at the Democratic convention? It would have been easy to do so, and the protesters even offered to let the party vet their speech. But no.
To be fair, the guy who led that is NOT a palestinian, but a wealthy Lebanese business man who already had ties to trump. Most of the people who did not vote for Harris also did not vote for Trump. Many had relatives who died in Gaza.
Yeah, I think at some point we need to blame the fascism ON the fascists.
That really wasn’t platformed that well in all her campaigning with Liz Cheney, though.
Yeah. Honestly even my centrist self finds it a bit galling that somehow even acknowledging an obvious textbook genocide has been painted as radicalism.
I don’t really think it’s naive to think that the US has made the situation worse and that it’s ultimately not great that we have put ourselves in the position we have with Israel.
Every time criticizing Harris has come up, I’ve pointed out that I wanted her to win, because there seems to be this weird notion that supporting someone means pretending they walk on water. But she lost, I think the run to the center I was criticizing is no small part of why, and there is no point in campaigning for her any more.
Why is it fair to say “candidates are what they are, and the people have to vote accordingly” but not fair to say “voters are what they are, and the candidates have to run accordingly”? It should be a lot easier for a Democratic candidate to change than the mass of Americans, and yet it feels like there’s a hundred times as much vitriol for non-voters than Harris’s disinterest in appealing to anyone but Republicans.
No, in the case of Jill Stein, I was talking 2016, where she did affect the outcome. I don’t think it makes sense to just hand T**** all those Libertarian votes when the vast majority of them were Never Trumpers. Were most Jill Stein voters Never Hillary-ers? Because the ones I interacted with weren’t. They were folks who though that voting for Stein would emphasize the urgency of reversing climate change, and instead helped elect the guy that incentivized coal mining and fracking, cozied up to the Saudis, and undid decades of environmental legislation. Though I recognize I don’t have a good view of other regions.
And Nader before her in 2000, definitely giving us Shrub instead of Gore.
Neither will I, but I think it was clear from when he was maneuvering to be Biden’s replacement last year that he’s not viable as a Democratic nominee. I worry way more about him as a potential Republican nominee.
Yes, because it wasn’t built by politicians, it was build by us, the voters, and the Democratic voters who came before us. It’s our vehicle. If we don’t take it back, there isn’t another to replace it without decades of work.
Emphasis mine in the quoted text. YES! That’s what I’m saying! Call out the people who are doing bad things. It is absolutely useless to complain generically about “Democrats.” WHO? WHAT DID THEY DO? That is what is actionable.
I’m one of them. My suggestion has never been to silence anyone or stop criticizing bad behavior. My suggestion has been to direct it specifically and tactically instead of generally.
Our local reps and Senators have control over the party leadership, at least in their respective chambers. Push them to replace Schumer. Push them to replace Jeffries. Demand it. We only give that list of establishment Dems power when we conflate them with the whole party. We take away their power when we insist that the party is separate from them, and take specific action to make it so. We are NOT powerless.
I guess I don’t see what that has to do with Gaza, though.
to win were successfully influenced.
It would have been easy to do so, and the protesters even offered to let the party vet their speech. But no.