So, a “Republican” that votes Libertarian is actually voting Democratic?
I don’t think so.
“If you aren’t for us, you are against us”? Is THAT what you are saying?
Consider this:
If one lives in a completely gerrymandered district, such that one’s vote means nothing in the grand scheme of things, then can one vote one’s conscience, free of guilt of somehow altering the ultimate results?
What we have here is kind of a Chicken or Egg issue. 3rd parties cannot exist if no one votes for them. But if they don’t exist in the first place, then…
By definition, 3rd (or 4th or 5th, etc) parties drain votes from one or another of the two parties.
But…
Non-voters are the biggest bloc of all, re: altering election results.
Perhaps that issue needs to be addressed, instead of blaming 3rd (or 4th or 5th, etc) party voters for voting their conscience.
And this includes the results of 2001. Gore won the vote, dammit. He gave up too early.
This election, yeah, if you vote for a 3rd party, you’re really voting for a one-party system; fascism. If the GOP gets humiliated badly enough, they will fracture and we may be able to break the cycle and get a multiple party system.
Seems to me that I have been voting for candidates that share my ideals.
(Except for Hillary & Joe, of course. I preferred Bernie or Elizabeth.)
They just aren’t the candidates that you might like…
Is that it?
Perhaps you should concentrate your efforts on those that DON’T vote. There are enough of them to sway any election. Persuade them to give a damn. I already do!
And that’s why I vote!
So do I. But neither of them are currently running for president.
Meanwhile, I’ve spent all of five minutes on this little conversation. I’ve spent hours on phone banks for local progressive candidates. So don’t play that game.
As @brainspore wrote above, vote however you like. But if you publicly announce you vote 3rd party as some kind of virtue signaling exercise, be prepared to have that challenged. Because many of the people on this board face an existential threat if too many people vote 3rd party for their “principles.”
I mentioned earlier that I will hold my nose & vote for Joe, same as I did for Hillary.
Sorry, Duke. Gotta call B.S. on this.
If you vote for Lord Dampnut, you are voting for Fascism.
And we gotta hold the GOP’s metaphorical feet to the fire on this; they are trying to disavow their own support of this monster.
I hope the Democratic party fractures as well. It is basically what used to be regarded as Moderate Republicanism 40 years ago. Bernie Sanders (and to a lesser degree, Elizabeth Warren) are closer to what used to be regarded as Democrats, back in the day.
I said ‘closer’… don’t be nit-pickin…
I was very careful to not say this. Of course some voting third party are right leaning. That doesn’t change that a 3rd party vote in a national election is basically a vote for a Republican because - as you noted - of gerrymandering.
Maybe one vote doesn’t mean much in a heavily gerrymandered district but hundreds or thousands can. And in some cases the margins that went to Trump were razor thin. A few thousand votes here or there that went to Jill Stein could have swung one of the battleground states to Hillary.
In any event I’m not sure how you can insinuate that you’re voting for something while admitting in the same breath that your vote doesn’t mean anything. You can’t have it both ways.
One thing we can both agree on is that the non-voters are really the critical audience to reach, but it all makes a difference.
The Supreme Court ended the legal fight. I’m not sure what else he was supposed that do.
If you don’t see how voting third-party in this race is a de-facto vote for Turmp, I can’t help you. That’s electoral basics. In 2016, eleven million more people voted against him than for him. If they’d all voted for the same candidate, we wouldn’t be in this shithole right now.
As I said before, I believe the best chance for progressives to have a real say in determining policy is to break off from the Dems, whether that’s DSA or what. But it’s a game of chicken. That can’t really happen (without political suicide) until the GOP breaks. It looks like they might. But a lot of that is dependent on how badly not only Turmp gets beat this November, but how badly he drags down the national party and down ballot candidates.
Because of gerrymandering, a Democratic vote does not count. Nor does a 3rd party vote.
No, they don’t. That is the point of gerrymandering.
Oh, please. You could make the same argument for whoever the Libertarian candidate was in the places that Lord Dampnut lost, so it evens out.
Hillary ran a failed campaign. We both know why. Blaming it on 3rd party candidates is weak.
It’s not an ‘insinuation’, nor is it ‘having it both ways’.
I live in Texas. I don’t live in a blue area of Texas. Get my drift?
I can vote for whoever the fsck I want to, and it will make no difference!
So, yes, I can have it both ways.
This is not to say that the person I voted for wins…
But I did vote for them.
Yes, the non-voters are critical. Voting early in-person (if possible) is critical. I think mail-in voting is going to be subject to massive fuckery by Lord Dampnut, so best to vote in person. Let 'em frag their own…
Well, he could have sued, for one thing.
Instead, he conceded.
He rolled over & gave up.
And people wonder why I vote 3rd party…
Except for Joe. This time.
Once SCOTUS ruled for Bush the election was over. There was no further path to contest it. It’s false to say he just rolled over and died. Who was he going to sue? The election had already been decided.
You sure about that?
Re: other parties, looks to me like the Libertarians got the lion’s share of the votes, & those can be safely put in the (r) column, if there were no alternative. Similarly, the Greens could go to the (d) side of the ledger. At best, it’s a wash.
In any case, it would have made no difference in the Electoral College, and that’s electoral basics.
You know, the quickest, surest way to croak the DNC is for Lord Dampnut to win.
But neither of us wants that to happen.
OTOH, if Joe wins, damned if I want to go back to Business As Usual. Business As Usual is what got us here!
And if the Senate doesn’t change hands, it’s all pretty much a moot point, anyway…
I don’t think there is anything wrong with having great ambitions. Just know that X politician may want to enact X policy - but the realities of doing so may prevent them.
Voting for someone who isn’t progressive enough but still in the right direction is the smart, political thing to do.
So in this example of politics, Joe may not be far enough left for a bunch of people. But he is better than Trump in probably every category. And Harris has been branded left of Bernie. If she makes VP, she is being teed up for a future shot at president.
Well, the GOP may have branded her left of Bernie, but she’s pretty much center/center-right in my book. She was DA and our state’s AG before becoming a senator.
I hate using left or right as shorthand for this reason. It’s purely a media/political theatre/team sports metaphor that ends up meaning “us/them” to most people.
What is your purpose in waving that flag so hard, right now? If you’re acutely aware of the importance of this election in preserving American democracy, why are you broadcasting that, and why now?
You point out above the importance of getting non-voters out to vote, but you’ve spent this whole thread demotivating any who happen to be reading this public forum. Would you consider that a responsible action? Or Selfish?
Nope. The Libertarian Party received the bulk of the Never Trump GOP votes. If that option was not there, would they have voted for Trump or Clinton, especially, as you say, the Democrats have become the party of Big Business?
The Libertarians I know either did vote for Clinton, or voted for Johnson and would just have left it blank without the option.
Michigan was even closer. Less than 11k votes. The votes from the Independent and Socialist Parties alone would have made it a tie. Again, the Greens would have handed it easily to Clinton. There’s 16 electoral votes.
Wisconsin stands out because their state GOP seems particularly inclined to mess with elections. What stands out there is the huge number of Others/Write-In votes (23,295). Just those votes would have put Clinton ahead. There’s another 10 electoral votes.
Those three states make the difference in the election, and even without the Libertarian vote, Clinton wins if every Green voter in those states votes for her instead.
That’s electoral politics.
ETA: Now that I’ve crunched the numbers, it really does stand out that the 2016 election is a perfect case study of the problem with 3rd party voting in a two-party system. If Stein declares for Clinton before people started voting in those three states alone, and those votes carry over, it completely reverses the result. Let’s say the single-biggest issue for those voters was climate change. Are we better off now after 4 years of Turmp or would we at least have held even, or made slight progress with Clinton, against climate change? It’s an important question to me, as wildfires this summer burned to within 6 miles of my home. So count me in as one of those people whose existence is potentially up for grabs with this election. Voters who can’t see the forest for the trees are doomed to burn, and take the rest of us with them.
From my POV. the whole point seems to be an attempt to demonstrate how ‘superior’ that individual is to all of us who vote pragmatically for the least likely evil, rather than voting for our lofty principles, no matter what.
I agree with you up to here. I think we get the Project Lincoln types merging with the Biden types, the Nazi types going explicitly NAZI and fading from relevance quickly (only to rejoin the Lincoln Dems and start pulling rightward) and the AOC Dems being a different party.
So, quickly reforming into a two party system, but not the same two parties, and shifted left. As others have pointed out, the current dems are to the right of where republicans were a generation ago.
