US 2024 Presidential Election

[Hades]

This is the part of the election that has me the most disheartened. With all the noise about wanting to stick it to The Democrats for their role in the genocide, I was really hoping for a swell of support for Green. I'd never be so blind to think they'd actually win but that 5% number for Federal Funding felt like it might actually be in play for once with so many flat out rejecting The Democrats.

Unfortunately it seems like apathy was the name of the game for the vast majority of people yet again...

Believe it or not but most people, even left wing voters don’t vote solely to give the dems a bad day.

 

[tippy2k2]

Believe it or not but most people, even left wing voters don’t vote solely to give the dems a bad day.

It's not about giving The Democrats a bad day (though that can be a tasty cherry on top). It's about voting for what you WANT, not just voting against something you don't want.

I'm disappointed that so many were willing to reject The Democrats and their right wing politics and genocide but couldn't bother to do the little extra work of going to the polls to try to get a third party to 5%.

 

[Satinavian]

I'm disappointed that so many were willing to reject The Democrats and their right wing politics and genocide but couldn't bother to do the little extra work of going to the polls to try to get a third party to 5%.

For people to do that they would need to believe that a third party vote would matter.
Win a state or two and have a sizable faction in the house before trying for president.


For the last time a big US party failed, we need to go back to the Whigs. And even that one just exploded from infighting and was not just replaced by a third party movement.
It is extremely unlikely we will see the end of the Republicans or Democrats in our lifetime.

 

[Silvanus]

It's not about giving The Democrats a bad day (though that can be a tasty cherry on top). It's about voting for what you WANT, not just voting against something you don't want.

Well, that's just it: discussions about why to vote Green also tended to just be about how awful the Dems are. They derive their support primarily from rejection of the 'uniparty', which can just as easily be accomplished by staying home.

It's a mirror of the same mistake the Dems evidently made, resting their case on what they're not.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

This is my favorite aspect of the win by a mile. The mainstream media, social media, and all 3 branches of government all worked in concert to try to tell people to hate this man, and the majority of people said no. That is an actual victory for democracy.

"Social Media" as if shit like Rogan, Shapiro, etc aren't the most widely viewed and pushed posts on Facebook and Twitter. You're just whining that the cool kids don't think you're cool

That's gonna be the most annoying part of the next 4 years. Your politics will run basically unopposed but you'll still be whining about how you aren't universally adored

 

[crimson5pheonix]

My bad, sorry about that, sincerely. Like, man, I'm not mad(a little peeved maybe... ) or trying to belittle you or your stance. It's just that my anxiety wracked brain is just sitting here trying to parse how to come to your side of laissez-faire attitude to all this, with

No, I'm not taking anything you're saying as a personal attack or anything, just a thought that I didn't express myself well with that statement since both people who commented on it took it not how I meant.

or even,

Because if you think the centrists aren't doing well, then what the fuck is going on with the left? (*This post has taken so long to shape that I realize that this may again have been taken too literally and you probably just mean 'here' as in the forums and I apologize in advance if that has happened again*) @tippy2k2 has rightfully pointed out that even if you took out all of Stein's votes that they wouldn't make the deficit between Harris and Trump, and this is true because

My God, Stein is looking to pull in less than 1 million votes nationwide. She's is in the dregs alongside the Libertarian party, whom I did not even know was a party on the ballot. Fucking Kari Lake has almost twice the amount of votes as the supposed left wing voice of America, in a single race that (knock on wood because I don't trust much else these days) she is going to lose, and she is a fucking loon (and will probably end up everyone's problem anyway when Trump puts her somewhere in his govt. for licking his taint for years).

She did real bad this year. My copium is that people listened to the centrists who said voting for her was useless and so on, so they just all went and voted Trump. When I think of what the left could do in this situation, I think of Mexico, Brazil, and France; where the left was allowed to fight the far right and soundly defeated it where centrism is struggling literally everywhere else. This election was predictable by world trends, but stopping it here was like wrestling a freight train. And why get upset about something you have no control over?

Because,

I know this, and this is what worries me, because speaking of local, while we managed to pass our signature based ballot proposition to put abortion rights in our state constitution, we also had to beat off no less than goddamn three different other propositions that would have made such measures both harder to pull off and easier to tie up and kill, including removing term limits and our ability to vote whether to retain judges in our state judiciary (such as the two State Supreme Court justices on this very ballot(and fucking won their retention votes no less!) who allowed a law from before our state even had a constitution, hell much less 'a state' (160 years old!), dictate modern law, what a wild fucking coincidence).

Worse still, not only have we elected one of Joe fucking Arpiao's old deputies to county sheriff (of again, the 4th largest county in the US), we also seem to be passing a proposition similar to our fucking SB1070 fiasco, with the added nonsense of a Supreme Court likely to side with the idea of profiling any vaguely brown person as an illegal (with doubley nebulous passing of a another prop being passed forcing a max sentence of life for child trafficking, which can only go wrong I'm certain). And that's only here, and then I look out upon a sea of red for all of the main federal branches of government, and can only extrapolate that this is the norm across the board.

Like, you can't just blame this all on some sort of fucked tampering scheme specifically to screw over the Greens, but honestly, from my own cynical, paranoid view, I don't see how one can look at the how the powers that be play the two major parties to ensure the worst candidates that nonetheless tow the line end up in charge, and not think that they are using the Green Party as a bowling gutter to catch any wayward leftists and funnel their efforts off a fucking cliff. Or have this weird belief that this continual rightward momentum will somehow make it easier to come back in power down the line (from both Democrats and leftists).

There's just little else in the realm of electorialism, that's why I say it's the lowest activism and why I have no issues voting green. You're right, the system is rigged and voting itself is pretty much a joke. So what do you do? All you can do is use it as a cudgel, but what would be more important is earning wins in opinion. Winning that ballot initiative (and stopping the others) is far more important than who wins the presidency. Making waves between elections is more important than the last few months of panic in the leadup. It's all about not playing the stupid game that is put in front of us.

EDIT: And I'm sorry if these walls of text seem like I'm arguing or anything, but this is flat-out a genuine cry to try and understand because I have spent over 10 years trying to find the left in this figurative and literal desert and found nothing. And I'm worried that people here have been privileged with being surrounded by people no more to the right than Democrats or like some of the posters here, but as someone who has had the distinct horror of watching the slide into actual fucking Nazism (and before anyone jumps in here at me, I mean full-on "the Nazis had the right idea because there is a secret cabal of Jews running this flat earth through the power of satanic blood magic" Nazis) up close, the stories pulled up and posted here in the forums about them are the equivalent of finding the corpses of smaller squids while the giant ones lurk further below, and the abyss is dark...

Don't you apologize, I'd way rather talk to you than some of the other people on here. As for seeing the far right up close, my family has turned to Newsmax because Fox news is part of the liberal globalist conspiracy, I am fully aware of what American far right looks like and get it ranted at me on visits.

Not really. Initially all I said was that I was feeling depressed, & that it was partly because there's been an expression of hate towards queer people. That apparently warranted a flurry of insults and told-you-so's.

Well you started by talking with me about some of what I posted and I did in fact just post back cordially. There was some "I told you so" ism, but to be fair you literally mirrored what I have, in fact, told you for years at me. I got prickly when you turned the conversation into a conversation about yourself.