Bernie Sanders concedes Democratic race, endorses Hillary Clinton

Why not? I sure as hell am. His presidency would destroy the Supreme Court, healthcare, gay rights, civil liberties, and foreign policy.

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???

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That’s true enough, and fights like that are where it matters. Having said that, I live in a safe seat, and my MP (yeah, I know, I know the parallels aren’t perfect, but bear with me) is gonna get voted in even despite his manifest greyness, so I just vote for the local communist candidate, cos I like his hat. There’s plenty of us who’s vote means nothing.

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Voting in the ranked voting system would be bipartisan (for the voters). Libertarians, Socialists, and moderates would all be encouraged to turn out for a vote that might make their vote actually matter. The politicians doing it might be difficult, but if this was petitioned as hard as say, marijuana, it is possible the ranked vote might make it in. Most of the uneducated masses will continue to vote for their party anyway, so what do politicians really have to lose if voting for it makes them popular?

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False premise. Nader didn’t run to help put Bush/Cheney in office. Like most people running for office, he ran to get votes based on the policies he espoused. And given how much the Overton Window had already shifted to the right by then, and given that Gore was the putative candidate on the left, it’s as much Gore’s fault as it is to Nader’s credit that a lot of people preferred Nader to Gore.

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That article doesn’t logic very well.

Your unsubstantiated claim doesn’t convince very well.

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http://disinfo.com/2010/11/debunked-the-myth-that-ralph-nader-cost-al-gore-the-2000-election/

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You haven’t said anything that hasn’t been said about every Republican candidate since I’ve been alive.

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Sure, except that all of those are things that he’s specifically promised to do. He’s promising to eliminate Obamacare, revoke gay marriage, fill the Supreme Court with hard-line conservatives, deport Mexicans, prevent Muslims from entering the country, and stop all dialogue with nations he doesn’t like. I think those are good reasons for being a wee bit intimidated by the proposition of President Trump, don’t you?

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As a (hopefully) sane American, I’m hoping for some last minute legislation putting “None Of The Above” on the ballot.

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http://www.gp.org/social_justice/#sjHealthCare

“We support the teaching, funding and practice of holistic health approaches and, as appropriate, the use of complementary and alternative therapies such as herbal medicines, homeopathy, naturopathy, traditional Chinese medicine and other healing approaches.”

http://www.gp.org/ecological_sustainability/#esWater
"Chemicals used in the fluoridation of America’s public drinking water supplies are toxic waste byproducts. The majority of these toxic wastes come from the phosphate fertilizer industry. Fluoride accumulates in the human body through ingestion and inhalation. A growing body of research suggests that fluoride may be associated with arthritis, hip fractures, bone cancer, kidney damage, infertility, and brain disorders. For these reasons, the Green Party opposes the fluoridation of drinking water."

Those are direct quotes, from the US Green Party’s platform, with links to the relevant sections on their website. If you are going to be a snarky asshole, at least make an attempt to be right.

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As contrasted to the ever-so-gracious Clintonites?

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I think we can all agree that all political candidates have some assholes backing them… and we can also agree that Trumps are the worst of the lot.

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Yeah, the Democratic party has hardly any white people left, only around 60% of the party. (It is true though that the Democratic party certainly can’t go back to its nickname in the 1860s, “the white men’s party”)

The platform of the “Sanders” wing of the Democratic party resembles nothing so much as the platform of the Democratic party before the DLC/Bluedog coup in the 80s. I think the leftward shift is best explained by the beginning of the wearing away of the tired party myth that you need to be centrist to win elections.

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Apparently you did not bother to read the link.

“Furthermore, it seems that during the closing days of the 2000 political contest, Ralph Nader was choosing to campaign not in states where polls showed that he had a chance to win (of which states there were none), but instead in states where Gore and Bush were virtually tied and Nader’s constant appeals to “the left” would be the likeliest to throw those states into Bush’s column”

If he wanted to win, why did he choose to concentrate his campaign in the important swing states where he could prove to be a spoiler, but had no chance of winning? The claim that he drew votes equally from both the right and the left is not credible.

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Fine, let’s take it apart, shall we?

For one, the article assumes that party identification was a determining factor in whom the Nader voters would have gone for otherwise (“CNN’s exit polling showed Nader taking the same amount of votes from both Republicans and Democrats: 1 percent.”). This assumption is clearly wrong, as the article itself goes on to argue.

It also assumes the independent Nader voters would have split the same was as the independent average. Again, wrong. In other words, the analysis can’t wrap its head around a left-right spectrum and who is in what relative position to whom.

The issue of other candidates is a pure red herring. If one guy steals a hundred cans of food and ten other guys steal a can each, who is really to blame for the empty warehouse?

Same thing with blaming the Democratic voters: “Gore lost 191,000 self-described liberals to Bush, compared to less than 34,000 who voted for Nader. Let’s repeat this because it reinforces point #1: self-described liberals overwhelmingly voted for Bush instead of Nader.” This is what I mean when I say it doesn’t logic very well. Self-described liberals overwhelmingly voted for Gore. The percentage lost to Bush was greater than percentage lost to Nader - and these voters were on the right wing of the party. It has nothing to do with Nader eating at Gore’s left flank.

Had Nader not run - and assuming, as the article does, that half of his voters would have stayed home - this would still most likely deliver something like a net of 30.000 extra votes for Gore.

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That article is too full of unsupported suppositions and innuendos for me to take seriously.

So Nader is a shrouded, scheming “covert Marxist”? Who actually wanted Bush, the further-right candidate, to win? The guy who wrote a book with this title?

Gore lost the election by not fighting to keep the Florida vote count going and by not fighting against the suppression of votes among constituencies more likely to vote against for him. People who feel butthurt about Nader because he supposedly stole an election should focus on actual right-wing tactics for stealing elections, not on legitimate candidates fairly doing what they can to get votes.

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and has also been pretty much true of every republican president since richard nixon. is your point that you are impervious to both reality and history? well played.

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That and energizing voters. Turnout in Florida for the general election that year hovered just above fifty percent.

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