I can’t believe the Dick Cheney fans forgot to vote
Tens, literally tens of voters Liz Cheney brought to the table.
But it’s cool! She’s the friend of bigots! That makes brown and queer people feel welcomed, right?
I was downvoted to oblivion for questioning this move as a campaign strategy. I wonder if I should look and see how that turned out.
As was I on here and reddit. It’s crazy.
Hey I was downvoted again for saying “I got downvoted for being right.” Again, I was right.
They refuse to actually campaign and address people’s concerns. They gaslight, minimize, denigrate, guilt trip, and verbally abuse people and then are surprised Pikachu when no one is happy or motivated to vote for them.
“You owe it to your country to vote.” “You are a bad person/stupid/russian shill etc if you vote for anyone but Kamala.”
These things just stroke your ego and are otherwise thought terminating. They do not get votes. Like holy fuck, if you just listen to people’s concerns and talk with them, it tends to work.
But with Citizens united, campaigns focus around a capitalist spending strategy like it’s Election Christmas. Bernie Sanders, Stacey Abrams, and AOC all had what I’d call “authentic” campaigns, where they requested help with canvassing and phone calls before they requested donations. Like donations were fine, but most emails and texts were asking for workers, volunteers, and physical help. Those requests were completely absent from Kamala’s campaign.
The status quo just doesn’t want the common person to have political literacy. If they teach us how to canvas, then we’ll do it for someone who isn’t status quo. If they show us how to run for office, then we will just run ourselves like AOC did. They are in direct conflict with themselves because they are trying to suppress anything except status quo Dems.
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Get organized. Join a Leftist org, find solidarity with fellow comrades, and protect each other. The Dems will not save you, it is up to the Workers to protect themselves. The Party for Socialism and Liberation and Freedom Road Socialist Organization both organize year round, every year, because the battle for progress is a constant struggle, not a single election. See if there is a chapter near you, or start one! Or, see if there’s an org you like more near you and join it, the point is that organizing is the best thing any leftist can do.
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Read theory. A good primer is Blackshirts and Reds. It will help contextualize what fascism is, what causes it, and how to stop it. I can offer a good introductory reading list regarding Marxism if you’d like, but this is a good starting point.
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Aggressively combat white supremacy, misogyny, queerphobia, and other attacks on marginalized communities. Cede no ground.
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Be more industrious, and self-sufficient. Take up gardening, home repair, tinkering. It is through practice that you elevate your problem-solving capabilities. Not only will you improve your skill at one subject, but your general problem-solving muscles get strengthened as well. Theory guides practice, which sharpens theory to be reapplied to better practice.
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Learn self-defense. Get armed, if practical. Be ready to protect yourself and others. The Democrats will not save us, we must save each other.
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Be persistent. If you feel like a single water driplet against a mountain, think of the Grand Canyon. Oh, how our efforts pile up! With consistency, every rock, boulder, even mountain, can be drilled through with nothing but steady and persistent water droplets.
https://www.optionsri.org/post/chattering-classes-activism-is-the-best-remedy-to-authoritarianism
Rest, recuperate, get into a sustainable rhythm. Only we will keep us safe.
If I had canvassed for Harris in Tennessee I’d have been shot.
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meanwhile im already seeing “moderate” “pundits” saying the reason Harris lost is because she was too woke and Democrats need to move further right 🙃
Democrats just aren’t going to be the progressive party. How many times are you going to fail to learn this lesson?
The DNC actively kneecapped Bernie Sanders twice. And the SCOTUS said it was their perogative.
Without a Sanders platform from which to pilfer popular talking points, the Dems had zip. That doesn’t get John Q out of his Lazyboy. As the results showed.
Like all political “analysis”, this one is just another bit of meaningless preaching.
Seems more like a boastful “I was right” from those that ensured they were right.
Maybe you should call on the candidate to have less bad positions than try to call on voters to support them despite their bad positions. For some reason ‘she’s electable if you vote for her’ seems to keep being a losing strategy.
Reminder - Americans didn’t just vote “no” on Kamala Harris because she had bad positions. They also voted “yes” for a guy with 34 felony convictions and almost no positions except “immigrants are bad”. He vastly fails the standard you’re applying to Harris. I think the two most likely reasons the election came out the way it did are A) it was rigged by Republicans, or B) a vast swath of America is incredibly fucking stupid. Option B seems a lot more rational to me.
Democratic strategists keep refusing to learn the lesson that presidential elections are about driving turnout. Centrist swing voters are a red herring and the way to win is to enthuse the base. Her positions failed to enthuse the base and so they were bad. It’s much easier for the right to enthuse the base because their base is morons who are going to project whatever they believe onto the candidate as long as they dog whistle enough.
Refusing to wat?? Driving voter turnout was probably the central theme of the whole Harris campaign. Maybe not in enough memes, I dunno.
Maybe if you get enough celebrities to endorse you, that’ll drive turnout. Oh, and the Cheneys. Because everybody loves them.
Trump is horrible and wrong, but he had a solid message. I could tell you what he’s about in 5 minutes without having to think about it.
What could you say about Harris besides “she isn’t Trump”? She wants an opportunity economy? What is that? How would it work? Why was she even running?
Democrats shouldn’t be trying to get Republicans to vote for them. We know who they are. They’ve told us over and over and over again. Forget them. Work on turning out your base, and the independents, and people who don’t normally vote. Have a strong, populist message and a solid narrative.
MAGAs gonna MAGA, but lots of Republicans are fed up with Trump and voted for Harris this year (or at least said they were going to). I don’t see how it was a mistake to try.
There was zero defection from the Republican vote from 2020
How’s that “Schumer Strategy” working out for ya?
The DNC knew it would fail. That was the plan. Perhaps not this spectacularly, but they knew it wouldn’t work. They did their job. They defended the interests of Capital.
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Yeah, they’re just passing the buck to the people responsible for winning votes who made every decision about how to run the campaign that lost.
That’s sarcasm, by the way. I know how thick you people can be, so I thought I’d just point that out.
We’re adults here. It’s our choice to vote or not. I really dislike the implication that handholding voters to the ballot box is necessary. Yeah, the DNC f’s up plenty, but at the end of the day people that should have voted, didn’t.
And I really dislike the implication that voters should be expected to change to meet the campaigns that politicians want to run as opposed to politicians changing their campaigns based around what the voters want.
The blame should always go upwards, but instead it’s always pointed downward.
Preach
The choice was between a potential dictatorship and a mealy neoliberal. At some point it doesn’t matter you weren’t catered to. Failing to vote is cutting off your nose to spite your face.
I hope voters like the change that will be forced on them with this new administration seeing as they couldn’t change their self interest enough to vote. Or will they just play the victim, taking up the Republican’s mantle and blame everyone else for the situation they find themselves in?
I have zero sympathy.
Who gives a shit about your sympathy? What matters is what can be changed in the future to prevent this outcome from happening again.
You seem to think the thing that needs to change is voters at large. I have no idea what your plan is to make that happen other than condescending lectures and shaming people into obedience, which, good luck with that. The things I’m saying should be done differently would only require a handful of politicians to change. So the question is, is it easier to change how a couple politicians behave, or how all of society behaves?
I mean it worked so well when Hillary called all Trump voters deplorables and got a hate train going for “Berniebros” /s
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I have zero sympathy.
Exactly.
people that should have voted, didn’t.
The people who didn’t vote wanted Harris less than they wanted Trump.
They are allowed to have that opinion.
That’s intentional. A conscious decision made by the DNC.
They don’t want to give up their share of rich donors and insider trading privileges.
Somebody is paying attention.
Exactly. In bourgeois “democracy” political parties serve the wealthy Capitalists and Imperialists that can afford to buy them. Socialism is the only path to actual democracy.
What % of total voters is a “registered republican”?
Roughly a third
Why is this third considered to be representative of the “moderate republican”?
Look, I just got my coffee, it’s four am, and you are asking me to effectively explain the previous 40 years of American politics to you.
I want to trust that you are asking in good faith, and that you deserve an explanation here, but I’m burnt out in the equivocation right now. So just give me a small signal that my time isn’t wasted here and I can explain this to you .
I’m sorry. To me it seemed like something the more politically involved voter would do.
I don’t think that’s the response they were after.
You could have tried something like:
I can appreciate you’re tired and I think we’re all a little exhausted after this election cycle. I am definitely interested in learning your perspective on this and opening myself up to other viewpoints.
See I acknowledged OPs comment and tried to explain my motivations for the question. You, on the other hand, you called them out for rightfully wanting to value their time.
That’s alright. Simply trying to understand the relationship between that graph, and the conclusion the author took from that.
But I see now that this might not be the appropriate crowd to help me understand.
Sure, everyone is downvoting you but you can’t be the constant here and it must be this entire community.
Perhaps someone more eloquent than me can come along and explain why your approach fell on deaf ears.
There’s no way to know exactly. Some states don’t disclose the voter registration statistics. North Dakota doesn’t even require party registration to vote.
WAIT YOU HAVE TO BE REGISTERED TO A PARTY TO VOTE?!?
what the actual fuck. how does that not subvert the secret ballot???
Many Americans such as myself are registered as Independents.
Or not registered with any party and are little “I” independent. Some states have Independent candidates or parties. I wrote a “ySK” about it early this year around primary time and was accused of misinformation by people who don’t understand different states have different party registrations and laws. I wrote the post as someone smart I knew thought they had to register as an Independent party voter to “not be a Republican or Democrat”.
You’re not required to vote in alignment with your registration. It simply allows you to vote in the primary for your party.
I switch my registration to Republican when there’s a Democratic incumbent so I can vote in the primary.
You have to register as x or y to be allowed to vote though?? Like I knew all the other fucked up parts of the whole US system, but this just fundamentally breaks the secret ballot. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have to align your actual vote.
It’s like y’all saw us (Australia) doing the secret vote thing and thought “how could we fuck up implementing that?”…
You can register without party affiliation, or under under any party, not just Republican or Democrat.
It’s not just about your vote being secret from others though? It’s about you not being able to make your vote known to others as well!
Stop treating rural republicans, chuds, incels, and conservatives, as human beings. The problem is that too many democrats want to go back to the “good old days” of bipartisanship. Those days are long gone.
We have to treat any republican, no matter how “reasonable” as an enemy of democracy and the United States. It doesn’t matter if they’re family, friends, co-workers, etc. This is who they really are.
too many democrats want to go back to the “good old days” of bipartisanship
Democrats, despite preaching bipartisanship, do not want it. In fact, they benefit greatly from the trumpification of the republican party as they can gather their votes without making any significant concessions to the voter by denouncing how outrageous the republican party is.
Dehumanizing them is counterproductive.
They ARE human beings, who need to both be deprogrammed and held accountable, proportionally to their actions. But they didn’t just spontaneously erupt in hate and bigotry, people aren’t born that way, they are socialised to be that away.
There is a collection of deeply effective systems at play here that control every aspect of our lives and those, and the people who run and directly profit from them, are to blame, not the individuals they manipulate, however hateful and harmful and misguided they become.
You’re never going to solve a problem by attacking its by-products, but only by destroying it from the roots.
2020:
2024:
1% less this time around.
That attitude isn’t helpful either.
Bipartisanship is possible, but only by convincing everyone to come further left.
Because actual left leaning policy is popular.
That’s the true lesson that Democrats refuse to learn. Mostly because they’ve been paid not to.
We need a cardinal voting system.
But Dick Cheney! Dick Cheney!
They gonna go hunting with him?
If you didn’t vote, or voted third party, because the Democrat candidate wasn’t “Left enough” for you, then like it or not you got exactly what you voted for.
You have to vote like we have the system we have, not like we have the system you want.
Stein got 0.6 million votes. Over a hundred million stayed at home. I sincerely doubt that each of those hundred million is a dyed-in-the-wool anti-electoralist, so why focus on the “Not left enough” people? They had no effect on the election one way or another, just like they kept telling you. Your problem is that the majority of people in this country are completely alienated from politics. If you continue to focus on the left to the exclusion of the Democrats’ very real shortcomings, if you continue to ignore DNC’s failure to offer a winning platform to everyday people, then you are damning us all to an eternity of the current moment.
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Block, block, upvote, scroll, upvote, block, upvote, upvote, block
I mean, there’s a whole lot that went wrong, but the big one was subverting the democratic process with primaries that didn’t really pick a popular candidate (2016 and 2024).
The primaries are the time for the candidate to energize a base of support. Harris has never energized anybody, and it was silly to think that affection for Biden would carry her.
Conservatives vote in force to signal their loyalty to their chosen community.
Progressives stay home when they perceive that their community doesn’t chose them. Harris’ vote totals at the end of this will sit somewhere below Biden 2020, for that reason.
I wouldn’t leave 2020 out. Having politicians ahead of Joe Biden pull out to endorse him ahead of super Tuesday was really irregular and didn’t result in a good candidate either
There werent primaries. None of the challengers had sufficient ballot access.
Maybe if they got a couple more celebrities to endorse Harris she would have won. Or maybe all the celebrities could have sung Imagine like what they did during COVID.
No, you ignorant fool… they needed more scorned establishment Republican figures to support her. Liz Cheney wasn’t powerful enough, that much is clear now. The absolute genius of having our vehemently pro-choice candidate on stage accepting the endorsement of rabidly anti-abortion figures almost payed off. It’s the voters who were wrong!
