I still vote. But I’m understanding why some people don’t feel like voting is worth it more every election cycle.
I keep seeing higher and higher stakes, and less and less being done to represent my interests.
It makes me feel like a sucker for voting D.
Used to be I thought Ds were generally against cruelty to immigrants, but then I saw this:
I used to think they were anti extrajudicial murder but Obama seemed not to have a problem with it.
Seems to me while there are many minor differences between democrats and republicans, and while in the past I’ve spent many words (even here) speaking in favor of voting D, it’s beginning to feel like a waste of time.
Biden himself said a Biden presidency will cause no fundamental changes.
But seriously, it would seem the democratic voters want this woman… maybe find out why? And maybe they know something the Dem Party establishment doesn’t. Namely the sort of politician they want to vote for.
When someone argues that a Democratic senator being “too far left” creates problems for the party, it at least sounds like they are making a rational argument.
But mayor of Buffalo?
I assume Buffalo has some sort of large greater metropolitan area or something, but it’s got a population of less than 300,000. Maybe think of what the local people want?
NY state machine Dems are similar to the GOP and different from the DNC in that getting their people* into every office – no matter how “small” – matters to them. Progressives like Walton and Ocasio-Cortez aren’t “their people”, even if they’re winners running under the party’s banner.
[* i.e. people who’ll play ball with the machine, kiss the rings of the kingmakers, and open an account in the favour bank.]
And that is the thing. Cuomo was basically the ne plus ultra of NY State machine politics. And the guy spent most of his time in office openly, and pretty much exclusively coordinating with GOP state legislators.
The Machine Dems here have long been antagonistic to the DNC, and are usually openly spiteful towards Democrats and organizations from the cities.
Because it’s a giant kludge built to workaround the problems of an unusually hard to change, unusually vague constitution written by people who had no extant examples to build off of, and no idea how the government they were designing would evolve and operate. The Founders didn’t want there to be political parties, and that lasted all of ten seconds, and so all the rules about them came later and happened piecemeal instead of really being designed at all.
I haven’t made a political donation in quite some time, but well before that I made a conscious decision to only ever give to individual candidates, never to parties. Stories like this make me feel like that was the right decision. This particular story is making me want to know more about India Walton – maybe I’ll send her some money.
With rare exception, I have also shifted to voting exclusively for candidates I feel like I can get behind. I know I will never agree 100% with any candidate, but I’ll vote for an obscure third-party candidate or leave a slot blank before I’ll vote for someone purely to keep one party in or out of power.
