While Education and Organizing is building the parts for a new engine the rest of the year.
If only the Democrats with Obama encoded abortion rights like everyone screamed at them to do when they had full control of everything.
But it was too good a carrot to make people scared for the Repooblicans and force them to vote Democrat.
Also Genocide Joe wanted to get rid of abortion rights in the past. He’s probably glad it’s gone even though he’s acting like he’s sad about it:
“I do not view abortion as a choice and a right. I think it’s always a tragedy, and I think that it should be rare and safe, and I think we should be focusing on how to limit the number of abortions. And there ought to be able to have a common ground and consensus as to do that,” Biden, who was a Democratic senator for Delaware at the time, said in the video.
What a loser post. I’ve voted for the lesser evil before and Duterte won anyway. Then I voted on principle and Marcos won anyway. Votes for Leody de Guzman did not have a spoiler effect on the lesser evil candidate Leni Robredo.
Your vote matters.
If 100% of voters voted liberal in the upcoming election, the one after that would have way more left leaning candidates.
Your vote directly matters.
I don’t honestly see why that would be the case. If they’ve already won, why bother changing?
As we see with the Republicans eating themselves, there will always be opportunists looking to take down their own and fill the Gap. But we can use that to our advantage to get the legislation we actually want. But we kind of have to take care of the crazies before we can 100% focus on fixing our house.
That didn’t exactly answer the question. If Democrats consistently get all the power, why would they bother changing? Don’t they already have what they want?
Democrats aren’t a monolithic entity that wants to gorge itself on power and then sit around fat and happy. It’s a bunch of competing politicians who are constantly at risk of losing their seat - if not to Republicans, then, as in Cali, to fellow Democrats who propose a different line.
Dems haven’t bothered changing even when they lose power. Part of the reason we are in this mess. They most go left or wither on the blue dog vine.
Maybe we can ask that when they actually do get all the power, because they’ve consistently lacked the majority needed to do any worthwhile changes.
Speaking for myself, voting for down ballot candidates is the first step towards changing a party. My home city secured a progressive majority in 2022, and previous elected progressives are now running for higher offices. It’s always a process, and when done right provides better changes for the years to come.
To move the Overton window.
If the right never wins, they move further left to collect more centrist votes. If the right moves more left, the left moves more left to differentiate themselves and appeal to the more progressive crowd that might otherwise vote green party or some other third party.
This has actually been happening for the last few decades but in the other direction. Left leaning voters not turning out for elections, partially because Dems have a history of suppressing exciting progressive candidates meant that Dems sought more centrists to compete with the right. Particularly after 5 of the 6 presidential elections went to Republicans between the late 60s and late 80s So they moved further right as a result. Both Clinton’s, Obama and Biden are not progressive, they’re barely left of center. The Democrat Party actively discourages progressivism, particularly in presidential candidates, to make them feel “safe” and “reasonable” to centrists. That shift to the right meant that the right has had to appeal more to the relative eccentrics on the right like anarcho-capitalist libertarians, the Christian nationalists, and the white nationalists. And not just at a presidential level but on every level even down to school boards. Thus our current status quo.
Not that Nixon, Reagan, or the Bushes were at all good people, but at the very least they didn’t feel comfortable publically and openly appealing to bigotry and the dismantling of the federal government as a campaign tactic. That is no longer the case with the modern GOP.
If the right never wins, they move further left to correct more centrist votes
That would be the theory, but it doesn’t seem to actually play out in practice. Look at the UK, where worsening performance in recent elections and drastically worse polling at present is leading to their right wing doubling down and being upset that their leader’s policies aren’t right-wing enough.
Or Australia, where at the last election our right-wing had its moderates absolutely wiped out by even more moderate independents (and in some cases, by proper progressives). There are no prominent moderates left in their parliamentary party. As a result, the people who are left are the right wing of the party, and they have selected as their leader a rabid tough-line conservative.
Question on more left leaning candidates - do you think there’s a possibility a progressive party can actually gain traction?
I like the thought of revamping the Green Party as it’s goals seem more relevant than ever, though they have to shed the kooky perception they’ve gained.
No, a third party will never make traction with our current voting system in place. The solution is the push the Democratic party left like Republicans have sprinted to the right (but obviously to not go crazy like they did).
Ok same question if Ranked Choice Voting was in place?
I can speak firsthand here and say that the answer is yes. Australia uses Instant Runoff Voting for our House of Representatives, and Single Transferable Vote for our Senate. I’ll concentrate on the Reps here because it’s by far the more politically powerful of the two, though it’s worth noting that STV being a somewhat-proportional system makes it even better for minor parties.
The Australian political climate was, for most of my youth, not too different from America’s. Our conservative “liberal national coaltion” is not quite as awful as the Republicans, and Labor is a bit left of the Democrats, but it was very much a two-party system in practice. In 2010, after years of slowly doing better and better, the Greens won their first seat. They came second on first preferences, at 36.17% to Labor’s 38.09%. But the Greens received preferences from minor parties like the Sex Party, and even from the LNP in their attempt to destabilise Labor, and ended up winning the seat 56.04–43.96
Now, this is the innermost city electorate of Australia’s most progressive city, and you’ll note that even in FPTP, Labor would have won, which wouldn’t be a disastrous outcome. But the Greens saw an over 13 point swing toward them in that election alone, which is only possible in a situation where voters aren’t afraid of the spoiler effect leading to the LNP winning.
They’ve kept that seat ever since, and at the last election in 2022, the Greens almost won that seat entirely on first preferences, with 49.6% of the vote, and 60.2% after preferences were distributed.
Even more excitingly, in 2022 the Greens won their second ever seat. And their third and fourth. These all in a much less typically progressive area, the inner Brisbane seats of Brisbane, Griffith, and Ryan. Brisbane and Ryan previously belonged to the LNP, and Griffith was previously Labor. In Brisbane and Ryan, the LNP lead on first preferences, but the Greens lead in Griffith. If it were only down to these three parties, Labor would have won Brisbane, since the Greens came third by just 11 votes. The Greens would have won Ryan and Griffith. But thanks to preferences coming in from the smaller candidates (most smaller candidates are further right than the LNP, but most notably the Animal Justice Party pulled in a couple of per cent), the Greens finished ahead of Labor, leading to Labor being eliminated and most of their votes going to the Greens candidate. As a result, right now, I am living in an area represented federally by a Greens member. I also have a Greens state representative, and I’m hoping that something similar will play out so that in just under 2 months, I’ll also have a Greens councillor.
The rise of the Greens party in Australia has been incredible over the last couple of decades. It’s still slow progress and there’s a long way to go. Sadly IRV is not a proportional system, so despite polling about 10% nationally they still only have 2.7% of seats—if you’re going to switch systems, try to switch to a proportional one if you can!—but it is a system that allows for this kind of growth to play out in a way that it simply can’t when voters are forced to vote strategically for the least-worst of two main options, lest you get 2000’s Ralph Nader play out in Florida.
No, a third party will never make traction with our current voting system in place.
Who said anything about a third party? I, for one, am hoping that the Republicans self-destruct thoroughly enough that the Democratic Party becomes the more right-wing of the two major parties.
Wouldn’t that be lovely.
If they aren’t even winning in state elections, aren’t even winning in house elections, aren’t even winning in senate elections
They don’t have the voting base for president.
except when I’m the minority in my area and my vote gets thrown in the trash
It still matters. It pushes candidates towards you ever so slightly.
The two party system isn’t good, but it works fine as long as people fucking vote.
Similarly, if the DNC hadn’t absolutely SCREWED my boy Bernie, we also wouldn’t be in this complete shit-hole.
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Uhhhh no. He didn’t pull any votes because he wasn’t even on the ticket during the general election and he endorsed Hillary. Also, considering how unpopular Hillary was she should have picked Bernie as her VP. Picking anti union, milked toste Tim Kain was a joke.
What kind of pretzel knot do you have to tie your brain into to think that?
A socialist will never be elected. When anyone gets close, the entire capitalist world immediately forget their differences and unite to make sure it doesn’t happen.
Happened to Sanders.
If you want read a more heinous example, it’s Jeremy Corbyn. A genuinely good man .
A socialist will never be elected.
Christ, they’ve been calling every democrat a socialist for 20 years now and it’s chased half of the democrats rightward so far that it’s a problem for a lot of democrats to keep voting for that
Demsocs (really, socdems) still believe in capitalism. They’re not quite Debs levels of socialist.
Not yet
It’s probably more accurate to state that they believe capitalism and markets to be two separate things, for example a market economy where every business is a multi-stakeholder worker-consumer coop and workers and “consumers” alike can consent to what happens at work, would be at odds with private ownership given that everyone is an owner with decision making power (collective/socialized ownership). This is pretty much what Corbyn and the Labour party a few years back were aiming for - they were going to experiment with cooperatives by having the government encourage and fund them.
Yeah, the Richard wolf revolution. Would be nice.
“If Poliece voted for Hillary in 2016…”
Hillary Clinton is/was not obliged to anyones vote and should have run a better campaign to attract leftest by doing bare minimun actions like supporting trans people or election/education reform. She also could have chosen a different candidate for running mate rather then the complete personality void that she ended up with as a sop to some imaginary “moderate conservitive” that was simpathetic to humanity over their net worth.
But she didnt. I wish she ran a better campaign as well, we may have been better off with her in office in 2016, but the issues that trump brought into focus in our society were not caused by him. They have been here the whole time.
The whole “you didn’t vote for Hillary so Trump is your fault” is a typical liberal statement. Just like how their solution to plastic pollution wasn’t to regulate the producers, but to get everyone to recycle things. And then if an individual didn’t recycle that person was bad, but they ignore what the massive industry is doing.
Same with health care. Their solution wasn’t universal coverage, it was making sure every individual had to buy health insurance, and then fining the individuals who didn’t. No action against the massive, inefficient industry causing most of America’s health care problems. Nope, it was passing the buck off to individuals yet again.
The Clinton campaign sucked. It was so dull the news shows would rather show an empty Trump podium than a speech by her. I thought the reason Clinton won the primary was because people wanted adults in charge who knew what they were doing, but clearly they didn’t because she lost to a reality TV show con man.
I thought the reason Clinton won the primary was because people wanted adults in charge who knew what they were doing,
And I think she won because she worked out a deal with the super delegates from 2008 when Obama “stole” the nomination from her.
While that might be the case, the line from the Clinton campaign on why they won was because they were the grownups who could actually beat Trump, not a bunch of petulant Bernie Bros.
if Leftists had voted for Hillary in 2016 abortion would still be legal.
So, this really isn’t true in any meaningful way. People like to make a big deal out of the 12% of Bernie voters who went for Trump, but the majority of them identified as conservatives or centrists, while only 18% identified as liberal or left-leaning. Likewise, a lack of turnout doesn’t seem to be the issue; black voter turnout dropped, but not by an unexpected margin, and young voters (who tend to be more left-leaning) had very strong turnout. Finally, you could try to blame leftists who voted third-party, but analysis shows that even if every single Jill Stien voter had gone to Clinton, she still would have needed to win over 50% of Gary Johnson’s voters (who were obviously unlikely to consider themselves leftists).
You might be able to get the numbers to work if you say that if every leftist who stayed home OR voted third-party OR went to Trump voted for Clinton she’d have won, but that’s incredibly hard to prove and probably relies on some specious assumptions (for example, that every Green Party voter was a disgruntled Democrat). At that point, you’re pulling so many different groups together under a single banner that it’s basically meaningless. You might as well say if women had voted for Hillary abortion would be legal.
Honestly at this point there’s no convincing his cult that anything else matters.
You just have to hope that are more democrats in the right places, and that they vote.
Reminder, you get to choose from the 2 canida8that were chosen for you.
What a bad take. If regular normie DEMOCRATS had voted for her, she’d have won. She failed on so many levels.
Edit: or if she hadn’t rigged the primary, we would have had Bernie, and abortion would also have been legal. Reforming the DNC is harm reduction.
If you wanted to win an election, maybe you shouldn’t have run with the example of the absolute worst that a democrat can be. The Clintons and Hillary in particular are garbage people who need to go the fuck away, they are toxic. They need to shut the fuck up and leave.
They did…
Well no. Hillary was a center-right candidate. If she wanted votes from progressives or left-wing voters, she knew exactly what to do. But she threw those votes away, relying on rhetoric like this post. We all saw it happening, and she did it anyway. What if she had pushed for universal health care, or unions, or campaign finance reform, or gun laws, or against wars? It would have been an exciting election.
maybe instead of demanding the votes of the left you should earn them. Of course, this only really applies in systems where 2 parties dominate while other parties aren’t really a credible option for most people, like the US, which in itself is a systemic flaw that should be addressed if you want a healthy democracy.
You don’t get to blame people for not voting your candidate because “it was less bad than the other”, if your whole point is being less bad than the other, rather than actually being good, then you’re already losing and you should start looking at how to fix this issue before it gets worse. When turnout is lower than usual, like in 2016 in the US but also other elections like Italy in 2022, it means that democracy isn’t healthy and there’s a systemic problem which is leading to voters getting disillusioned, disengaged and disenfranchised from politics, which is extremely bad and should signal to you that “There’s an issue! We need to fix it!” not that “Voters are so lazy/dumb/scum for not getting off their couch and voting [for me]”.
Finally, I’d like to reiterate that if you keep asking leftists to vote for you at every election (to beat the other bad guys), yet every time you move further away from the left and/or disappoint leftists, eventually leftists will stop believing your bullshit and not vote you anymore, and you deserve that.
If liberals had voted for Bernie in 2016, the same would be true.
Depends on where in the process we’re talking about. OP is(to me) clearly talking about the general election. If Bernie had won the primaries, then yeah, that would be true, considering where his base mostly is.
Didn’t she win the popular vote?
This is just shit libs blaming the left instead of taking responsibility for running a shit candidate with so much baggage that she lost while “winning”
If you want to be mad at anyone, blame the dnc.
I don’t want to be mad, I want to change things and improve people’s lives. So I vote for the lesser of 2 evils until we can abolish this “first past the post” nonsense.
Bernie would have whooped trump in 2016. Shame the dnc decided to change the rules the day of to avoid a split ticket or God forbid, supporting the actually viable candidate.
Bernie would have whooped trump in 2016. Shame the dnc decided to change the rules the day of to avoid a split ticket or God forbid, supporting the actually viable candidate.
DNC/DCCC isn’t exactly in the business of winning elections. If it comes between winning an election and BAU (they’d rather have a republican they can ‘work’ with), they pick BAU. They’ll happily (and have) fund Republicans over Progressives.
Lol, no.
Bernie is the Ron Paul of the left; he has a small group of very loud supporters online who by constantly shouting at each other on the internet have convinced themselves that he’s actually some sort of populist god. I mean seriously, he couldn’t even win the popular vote in the Democratic Primary in 2016, losing to Hillery by over three million votes, where were all the extra voters to “whoop” Trump supposed to come from?
“Pro-Trump Russian asset Wikileaks reveals that DNC said mean things about our Lord and Savior Bernie Sanders”
Seriously, have you actually looked at the Wikileak emails rather than the hype? It’s the weakest shit imaginable.
wikileaks is not pro trump. wikileaks is not a russian asset
You sound like someone who thinks Russiagate and rachel maddow were legit. WikiLeaks used to be trumpeted by liberals as a bastion of truth untill Assange came out with the corrupt dnc stuff. Which you can still all read, yes they conspired with Hillary. MSNBC and CNN gave her easy questions while grilling Bernie. “Weakest shit indeed”.
If the establishment doesn’t like the candidate they won’t get airtime. Same shit with Dean Philips and Marianne Williamson. The Biden team places some phone calls and bam your campaign is dead and no airtime/coverage. Are they viable candidates, who knows?
Should they at least get airtime and be heard in a democratic process?? Yes…
Yeah, you might want to scroll down to “Secret correspondence between WikiLeaks and Donald Trump Jr.” on the Wikipedia article.
I swear to God if any fucking idiot is here to relitigate the 2016 election they can suck a fucking egg. It was toxic then and it is toxic now. Please do us all a favor and go the way of the_donald and drop off the face of the earth.
The emails were never even denied, and they are damning as hell. That is precisely why the entire response, to this day, has been to ignore what was revealed and go after the people who revealed it. Yes, it was shit people revealing shit about other shit people.
dont underestimate how much people hate women
Sanders, God love him, was not going to be electable. Had they run him, Trump would have picked up the whole of the big fat moderate lump in the middle of the bell curve.
Exactly like Boris Johnson did when he ran against Jeremy Corbyn. The capitalists simply won’t allow socialists to win in this environment.
Sanders, God love him, was not going to be electable. Had they run him, Trump would have picked up the whole of the big fat moderate lump in the middle of the bell curve.
This is simply false, and the same consistent misunderstanding of real politic that keeps the DNC on the struggle bus.
By the same logic Trump would not have been considered viable. See how that played out.
Sanders, God love him, was not going to be electable.
Literally every single poll says otherwise. We’ll never know for certain, but there’s much more evidence to support a Sanders victory than a Sanders loss, and claiming that Trump would have picked up enough moderates to win is baseless speculation.
Or blame both.
There’s more than one way to solve most problems, and more than one cause as well. Would a stronger candidate have succeeded? Perhaps. But that was a solution for earlier in the process. A solution for late in the process was voters turning up.
We literally had that candidate and he got fucked over by super deligates or some nonsense.
I’m sick of being blamed when I voted for someone as vile as hrc. Dems lost the vote, not me.
Maybe if hrc actually showed up to purple states and appealed to actual voters it would have went differently.
This
If you want to be mad at anyone, blame the dnc.
1000x over this.
Neat. I’m over being chastised while voting for a piece of shit that was “the lesser evil”
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I mean, I will always be mad at the DNC for not running Sanders.
Doesn’t mean I’m not gonna vote Biden in Nov 2024 though.
Then you aren’t mad at the DNC you support their decision to keep the status quo in check
Bruh I participated in the 2020 Nevada caucuses when I lived there, and I stood for Bernie (which he won btw, Biden took second). Idk what else you want me to do when he didn’t make the final cut.
I will always vote for the Dem in the General, and do my best to make changes in the primary/local elections where I vote Progressive.
Otherwise, you risk a Republican winning the General, and that will mean FURTHER devastation for American society at a quicker pace.
Bernie himself is stanning for the Democrats after they screwed him over. He even still refuses to call the genocide in Gaza a genocide. He didn’t even call for a ceasefire for a long time. Many Bernie staffers are very disappointed with him that’s a lot closer than you shaking his hand
Bernie is not the second coming of jesus. He bent the knee. Just passing motions like a human rights report is the most weak sauce left wing thing America has left.
Otherwise, you risk a Republican winning the General, and that will mean FURTHER devastation for American society at a quicker pace.
Make no mistake - that’s what these people want.
Don’t you see the contradiction in “she won the popular vote” and “she was a shit candidate”?
It’s kinda like the contradiction that Bernie could win the general election, but 12% of his voters defecting to Trump wasn’t enough to make a difference.
Leftists are going to be shouting “the DNC is corrupt” on the gallows after Trump wins.
No that just shows she was more popular out of the 2 shit choices
TF do you think our vote was? I can’t vote any harder or some shit.
The hilarious bit was all the shit libs backing comey during russiagate. It’s literally his fault she lost.
Yeah but in their eyes it couldn’t be anything wrong with her as it was her turn so couldn’t have been his handling of anything
“Leftists are going to be shouting “the DNC is corrupt” on the gallows after Trump wins.”
This is the stupid shit is see all over lemmy that makes me so mad… Yes the DNC SUCKS but guess what? They’re the status quo right now, and the alternative is literally a fucking dictatorship that has vindictive actions as their highest priority.
There aren’t even dog whistles anymore, he’s using the word dictator… But yeah BomberBiden… Mr.Genocide… I get it… So that means let Trump win? Seriously?
Yeah, and I’ll still likely vote for Mr genocide all while being blamed for his loss. So why’s it matter?
Don’t you see the contradiction in “she won the popular vote” and “she was a shit candidate”?
Both of these things can be true. If “did not vote” had been a candidate in 2016, it would have won in a landslide. Just 8 states + DC had enough voters turn out such that any candidate won more votes than there were eligible voters that didn’t bother. As a percentage of eligible voters, Clinton received 28.43% of eligible voters, with Trump trailing at 27.2% of eligible voters. While Trump outperformed Romney (2012) by 2M votes, Clinton underperformed Obama in 2012.
As a percentage of the entire US population (including those too young or other ineligible to vote) Clinton got votes from 20.30% of the population and Trump got votes from 19.41% of people.
They both sucked so badly that just over a quarter of eligible voters/less than a fifth of everybody was all it took to elect Trump
Don’t you see the contradiction in “she won the popular vote” and “she was a shit candidate”?
No, because the popular vote isn’t how US elections are won. She needed to appeal to the people in the 5 or so states that actually matter and failed to do so.
So we’re gonna act like winning the popular vote and losing isn’t a problem in and of itself?
So we’re gonna act like winning the popular vote and losing isn’t a problem in and of itself?
Right?
Apoligists. Apologists all the way down.
Of course it’s a problem. But people point to this and say “the system’s broken [of course it is], so why vote!” Which is what the most fascist, anti-freedom politicians want. Functionality, it’s the same as voting for the ‘R’ in every election.
Systems fucked, but I always vote. Getting blamed while supporting a candidate I despise certainly is icing on the shit cake
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