Not voting or voting third party will only help trump. Let’s stop pretending like it won’t… If you don’t like that, then get involved with the Democratic party and make it more progressive. That’s how we’re going to get shit like ranked choice voting and other major changes to our election systems. Voting for a third party, especially in swing states will mean we don’t get to vote again, if it helps swing the vote to the Republicans. At all. They WILL take over this country, slaughter hundreds of thousands of people, and impose Christian nationalism on all of us. Let’s stop pretending like that’s not the case, because it very much is.
If you want things to change, you first have to accept how things actually exist in the real world, and figure out ways to actually make change, yes, via reform, yes from within the system as it is. That’s where we are.
It was heartbreaking seeing Gaza come up in the debate between Biden and Trump. Biden talked about all he’d done to help Israel. Trump talked about how Biden hadn’t done nearly enough. Somehow this has become a trolley problem where voters get to pull the switch between one genocide and several more.
It’s heartbreaking. No amount of gaslighting or whoever-splaining on behalf of either candidate changes that. I am fortunate to live in a safely blue state and not have to compromise my values to support her. I hope she wins, but I hope even more that she has a heart.
Suddenly the DNC is in charge of the Chicago Police Department? If blood flows next to blood red rivers(?) then it will be the fault of agents provocateurs who want blood to flow to help the Republicans, stoke FUD, and suppress the vote.
This isn’t to say we shouldn’t object to the policies here… we really fucking should. But we also shouldn’t pretend like the GOP is gonna do anything to help Palestinians.
Which no one here is actually doing. Just pointing out that Trump would obviously be far worse on Gaza (and literally everything else).
Again, the way to change the Democrats is actively involvement. That’s it. They can ignore people who don’t vote for them. It’s harder to ignore progressive voices from within the party.
It is, actually. I don’t want Trump to be president and I don’t have to hold my nose and vote for more of my tax dollars going to kill children while kids in my town are without basic resources. Everyone wins.
Pointing out flaws in Kamala and her handlers here is hardly going to help Trump, regardless.
That’s the subtext behind any “I’m not voting” or “I’m voting third party” piece. Either they’re relying on other people to hold their noses and vote for the “lesser evil” or they’re willing to see Trump win because upholding their personal principles or sending a message to the Democratic leadership is more important to them than preventing a Trump victory.
I tend to be instinctively skeptical whenever someone’s “principled stance” happens to coincide with the path of least possible effort (i.e., not voting).
Sort of like in 2016… some people (let’s face it, it was mostly men) didn’t want to vote for Clinton, so they voted for a third party or for trump to “send a message”… that message was, that they did not give a shit about women and are okay with women in red states losing their bodily autonomy - which is precisely what happened. Women are dead for some people’s need to preserve their voting purity… That’s the message that they sent. Their political purity mattered more than women’s lives. People pulling the same shit are saying that they not only don’t care about Palestinians, they’re saying that they don’t give a shit about women in the US, children in the US, trans people in the US, poor people, POC, etc.
We KNOW what Trump will do if re-elected. We will not have a democracy anymore. Pretending otehrwise is one of two things - that they don’t give a shit about the rest of us or that they’d rather tear the country apart then to do the hard work to change the Democratic party.
No one is saying don’t protest and support the people being genocided in Gaza… but let’s not pretend that voting third party or for Trump will fix that. It WILL make things worse.
If Kamala would actually do something about the concerns of hundreds of thousands of people who may not vote for her, it would get her more votes. That was my point.
[Deleted by moderator: debate the position, not the posters. -Sekhmet]
It will make things so much worse for Gaza too. Netanyahu has clearly been stringing Biden along in hopes that soon he can deal with Trump instead, who knows a sweet real estate deal when he sees one. He and all his fellow fascists can go to hell.
But again, since it seems it’s gone unacknowledged, if people want the democratic party to change, they have to get involved with the democratic party. That’s just facts. That’s what AOC did, that’s what Sanders has been doing for years. The slight leftward shift comes from Biden listening to his progressive voters (not the people who did not vote for him, but progressives who voted for Biden and progressives in the party). That didn’t happen overnight. Neither will a change on Israel/Palestine.
But apparently, a few decades of this “I refuse to vote for anything but purity” being an utter failure to move the overton window isn’t evidence enough of this. I get peoples frustrations, but sitting out and acting like you have no agency hasn’t done the job. If the party has moved left at all, it’s down to progressives being actively involved.
It’s also really unclear what would satisfy the ideologically pure. Maybe if Harris picks a vocally pro-Gaza running mate over a vocally pro-genocide one…
