Hillary Clinton secures Democratic nomination
No, she “secures” the nomination at the convention in July, probably.
She has 2184 pledged delegates. That’s 198 short. DC only has 20.
Of course, the chances that she will convince 198 out of 712 superdelegates to choose her is very high, and her chances of an FBI investigation suddenly disqualifying her are zero.
This completely ignores the existence of third party candidates and write-ins and is therefore completely fucked up.
Do you really think a write-in candidate will win? Or you just reaching for every hypothetical so you can pretend there’s still a horse race?
There isn’t. It’s over.
I’m not saying a write-in will win.
I’m saying that to pretend that people who vote third party or who write in candidates don’t exist is bullshit. Because I’m pretty damned sure that I exist.
Voting third party is NOT voting for Trump, and it’s NOT sitting the election out.
Before Bernie announced his candidacy, I had planned to vote for Jill Stein in November 2016. That’s back on.
if you live in either a deep blue or deep red state, then yes voting third party is not going to effect the outcome of the election. if you live in a state where the race is very close, don’t kid yourself, a vote for jill stein translates into a vote for trump.
they’re not pretending you don’t exist, they’re recognizing that in most circumstances you are irrelevant. if you look at the history of parties in this country there is generally only one type of situation where a third party has a chance at winning elections on the national level and that is when a major party fractures and falls apart and generally the most successful third party in the aftermath of that fracture becomes the new second party. when the democratic-republican coalition collapsed the whig party developed in the aftermath to oppose the jacksonian democratic party. when the whigs fell apart the republican party developed in the aftermath. now perhaps the republican party is ripe for a fracture, but if it does the party that develops to replace it is much more likely to be a center-right party or a far-right party than it is to be replaced by the green party.
What is the operational difference?
Note: having lived most of my life in deep-red States I had the luxury of knowing that my vote would make zero difference to the outcome of a Presidential election. This is my first-ever chance to vote in a swing State – so I do distinguish between those two cases.
I would love to see Bernie on the ticket with Jill Stein. Though don’t really see it happening, I think that’s one person he could partner with without having to sell his soul.
The fact that more than thirty percent of Bernie’s supporters say they won’t back Hillary if she’s the nominee should really speak volumes about the insufficiency of a two-party system in this political climate.
Jill Stein 2016.
Bernie has said he won’t run as an independent. He’s made it clearly that his top priority is a) promoting his agenda by whatever means necessary, and b) defeating Trump and the Republicans, because he knows full well that he can’t get any of a if b doesn’t happen. That said, I don’t expect him to officially endorse Clinton until the convention and he knows how much of a he’s going to get out of the DNC.
It may be that out of the ashes of this a new viable third party arises. Already independents outnumber either party. The hard part is building the organization and developing a sane platform. There seems to be a few groups already forming, but nothing that looks very promising as yet.
A vote for Jill Stein, or another major third-party, is not a vote for Trump or Hillary. When it comes down to those two, I would quite literally feel guilty casting a vote for either. I want the statistics to show that I, alongside many other voters, am dissatisfied with both options, and won’t support either party until they smarten up.
The two-party system in the US clearly sucks, but so does first-past-the-post in the UK. I think by all means efforts should be made to update both systems.
However, for the time being, I would say there’s nothing wrong with voting strategically - or negatively - in recognition of the problem. As such, it would be a question of deciding who one dislikes more, and how historically votes have been decided in your area, and working out how best to make your feelings heard. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous.
It’s not exactly change you can believe in, but politics very rarely is.
Only if there was any chance you’d vote for Clinton if you weren’t voting for Stein. If Clinton never had a shot at your vote, then she never lost it. Now, you could argue that any swing state vote for any minor party candidate or any abstention is one vote you could have given to Clinton to improve her odds.
But to cast the lesser evil choice dilemma in less ambiguous terms - because many progressives don’t see Clinton as an evil choice at all - imagine the only two candidates with a chance of winning the presidential general election were Trump and, say Fred Phelps (yes, I know he’s dead, this is just a hypothetical question to illustrate a point). I suspect that most progressives would probably say that Trump, awful as he his, is a lesser evil candidate than Fred Phelps would be (if he were alive to run). So in that scenario (and again, yes it’s contrived, I’m only illustrating a point), a vote for anyone other than Trump becomes a vote for Phelps. My question is, would you swallow any lesser evil to block a greater one? If not, what is the threshold of evil beyond which not voting for either choice becomes more important than not not voting against the greater of the two evils?
I’m in Texas. Once upon a time it was a blue state, becoming a red state in the late 80’s / early 90’s. Given that Cruz got almost twice as many votes as Trump in the GOP primary, I can’t totally discount the possibility that enough moderate conservatives who would normally vote for the Republican nominee might vote for Clinton or stay at home, making Texas blue again for the first time in nearly three decades. As such, I will vote for Clinton. So for me my personal answer to my own question is the evil must be greater than Clinton.
For example, Texas is an open primary state. The differences between the GOP candidates were more critical than between the Democratic candidates, so I chose a Republican ticket with the express purpose of voting against Trump. However, while my vote for Kasich did help to deprive Trump of votes and Texas awards GOP delegates somewhat proportionally (somewhat because it’s by district), the most mercenary thing I could have done was vote for Cruz, since it was clear at the time that Kasich coulldn’t catch up and Cruz was the last best hope to stop Trump’s nomination, in which case his run would have been over. So the other answer to my question is less evil than Ted Cruz, who I could not in good conscience vote for even if it meant helping stop Trump.
tl:dr - There are lesser evils I won’t vote for. Cruz is one. Clinton is not. But I understand why Clinton is for some Bernie supporters, and therefore why their vote was never hers in the first place. I only hope that any Bernie supporters who don’t support Clinton, do so because they sat back and decided on policy and voting record differences, and not merely because their candidate of choice (and mine for that matter) will not be the Democratic nominee.
Agreed. I thought the voting system for the London Mayoral election was good. Voters had a first and second choice and in the event that no candidate got over 50% of the votes, the top two went into a second round where the second choice votes counted.
This meant one could vote for the candidate they actually wanted with a backup (safety) vote for one of the two biggest candidates.
I can’t imagine a remotely plausible alternative that would make Cruz the “lesser evil.”
When I hear these observations, I always expect them to be followed up with calls for revolution and destruction of such a corrupt, undemocratic political process.
But for some reason the punchline is always that you should vote for a centrist.
IMO, he is a slightly lesser evil than Trump, if only because he actually understands politics (and not just campaigning) and would follow the existing GOP playbook. Four years of him would do real long-term damage to the country and be horrible, but Trump is a real and present danger to the very body politic and would do irreparable damage. So, for me at least, the answer to your question is Trump.
What keeps me up is that a year ago, before Trump looked like he could with the nomination, I too wouldn’t have been able to imagine a remotely plausible alternative that would make Cruz the lesser evil. Which leads me to wonder what else I still can’t imagine happening in American politics that I might be wrong about.
Cruz would actually have been a lot worse than Trump I think, especially in terms of foreign policy (this is someone who threatened to assassinate the supreme leader of Iran at one point remember).
Well, Jill Stein just got some cash from me, so I guess she should thank Clinton for that.
And so did the Sanders-endorsed Democrat running in the primaries to be my congresscritter.
Write-in candidates are often protest votes. My write-in vote for Sanders (in a very blue state) will be. Even though the numbers are relatively small (it looks like 5-6% fall outside the poll) they’re still significant. The questions about write-ins and third-party candidates should have been asked, because combined with those sitting out the election or voting for her opponent they’re indicators of great dissatisfaction with the party’s presumptive nominee, with the party establishment, with the duopoly, or all three. Whatever the source of dissatisfaction, that can translate into dangerous results in swing states.
Definitely not denying Cruz is evil. Just denying Trump isn’t even worse. Cruz saber rattling is deeply disturbing. Trump could very well spell the end of our democracy.
