Friendly reminder: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/yes-science-is-political/
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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I swallowed my misgivings and voted Democrat, just like I've done at each election since I turned 18, but handwaving away valid criticisms is not how you get people to side with you. Pressure needs to be put on the democrats to be better, too.
I'm 100% for valid criticisms—I don't even consider myself a Democrat and I have no compunctions about criticizing them when I think they are wrong. But I'm pretty sure that meme is directed at those who withheld their vote.
It would be in theory, but mostly it's just spread around as how any protest against Israel cost the democrats the US election (despite how it was considered widely unpopular to support Israel's genocide by most democrats).
Unfortunately it may have.
A lot of voters are stupid. They see Israel=Bad, Biden/Kamala = pro-Israel, they stay home.
Then maybe Harris and her team should have listened to some feedback about their widely unpopular stance that seemed to somewhat equate them with the Republicans during an election which they absolutely couldn't afford to be seen as remotely similar to republicans.
Democrats are pragmatically there for the money. They aren't comically evil, but they are corrupt. They will throw an election before they ever give up AIPAC money and count on the next election swinging back to them. They get to sit back and watch the republicans be the bad guys and stir shit up for a few years. Then, when they get back in power, they fix the things that's don't make them money and look like he good guys but conveniently leave the unpopular policy the republicans enacted that makes them money and they don't have to look like the bad guys. They just look incompetent. But they aren't. This is all very purposeful. They love this dynamic. They benifit from it.
The democrats as they are for sure need to go. But we need to be more pragmatic ourselves about removing them instead of throwing elections to the republicans hoping it will teach the Democrats a lesson. Because it won't. We need to focus on getting a foothold and changing the party. And that means turning out to vote in every election no matter what. Vote third party. Vote write in. Vote whatever. But sitting out of elections to teach democrats a lesson just isn't going to do anything. It's just throwing away the small amount of political capital most people have. If we don't vote now its either corporate feudalism or civil war in the future.
The problem is that those people (leftist prostest not-voters) most likely wouldn't have changed the results.
No, I agree. There weren't enough single-issue Gaza voters to have changed the outcome. It's still an idiotic position to have taken.
Shielding the Democrats from the pressure to adopt more popular positions lost this election.
No, they were never going to do that. They've already said that they learned their lesson, and in 2026, they're gonna double down on the losing strategy that they've been running since Clinton was in office and run on building the wall on the Mexican border and deporting immigrants to court the moderate Republican vote that doesn't exist and never would vote for them even if it did.
By the Presidential election, it's already years too late to force them to actually do good things. Protest votes and withholding your vote have done nothing to stop the slide that led to Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney in tow in the 16 years that I've been voting. If you want change, it's only going to come by threatening the position of the people in charge of the party and replacing the old guard with people like AOC. Whoever gets elected President does neither of those things. Unless Krasnov declares the Democratic Party a terrorist organization and has them all arrested as political prisoners. But then we won't have to worry about voting ever again, just like he promised.
A few things.
Firstly, we can dismiss the notion that the candidate can't be moved. The citation for that is Biden in 2020, who effectively campaigned during the primary as a moderate Republican, and until the southern states which we're never going to go blue anyways weighed in, was getting his ass handed to him. The Sunday before Super Tuesday, the rat-fuckening, Oblivious Warren. All that old history.
And then something remarkable happened. Biden opened the doors to the tent and invited the progressive wing of the party in. He handed the Bernie-crats the platform and said "have at it hoss". And it worked. Instead of disenfranchising the activist base, he embraced them, or at least, extended an olive branch by giving them the platform, without which he assuredly would have lost.
So: Candidates can be moved.
Second:
Again. And I'm singling you out because you responded and well, here we are. This is an obtuse, bordering on bad faith interpretation of the argument being made. You aren't arguing with me. You are arguing with the millions of voters who stayed home for Kamala but showed up for Biden. And you moralizing about an objectively misguided application of strategic voting didn't/ doesn't/ won't/ change their votes. When your "strategic voting" strategy results in losing you the election, explain to me how and why its strategic?
You don't/ can't move millions of voters to a new position. Or at least it hasn't been shown to be possible (2016, 2024). Asking voters to "vote against" instead of "voting for" doesn't work and we now have so many receipts, that they will write text books on the matter. What can be done, is that the candidate can be moved. Its also been shown through an evidentiary process to work.
To summarize, candidates can be moved. Biden moved and won an election because of it. When you moralize about your own, demonstrated-to-be-wrong conception of strategic voting, you aren't arguing with me, you are arguing with the literally millions of people left on the table by the Democrats. A strategy that when examined before hand will clearly lose, the insistence of then implementing it becomes a "burn the world down" moralization to wash your own hands: Democratic voters who reliably show up, but did not, because the DNC got a hall pass from those making the exact arguments you are making here. They did not need to respond to criticism because this argument you are making shielded them. And it cost us all, practically everything.
Further evidence that the democrats can be moved if we don't let them maintain the delusion they can win while trying to be republicans: The entire party told Biden to drop out when it was clear he had no path to victory.
Sadly Kamala was allowed to believe she could win while embracing the same policies and messaging that killed the Biden campaign. Instead of screaming at the party to campaign on overwhelmingly popular left policy necessary to win the election and use every power at the democrat's disposal to accomplish it, blue MAGA told anyone pointing out that we're headed back towards the waterfall to shut up and paddle harder.
Not voting for them has never once, in the history of history, gotten them to change. It actually causes them to pull further right.
Yeah, they probably think, well the right is doing so well so that's probably what the country wants. We need to move further right!
Exactly.
Yep. Every time they've pulled farther right and lost, they've blamed the leftists for it for being too extremist in their policy demands or claiming that their issues aren't as important, like in the case with Millennials and housing costs, student debt, climate change, etc. Despite trying to make some headway on those issues, they've always refused to campaign on them.
I'm not American so nobody got my vote, but seems to me like the issue is with the swathes of people choosing facism rather than progressives who chose not to vote.
Choosing how to act in a world like ours is tricky, anyone following a sense of right and wrong (even if I disagree with their judgement) instead of fear, hate, greed or whatever gets a gold star in my book.
Inaction is still a choice, though. I totally understand the sentiment behind that choice and even agree that we shouldn't be forced to choose genocide, but the alternative that we got is a man who not only wants the same genocide, but wants to accelerate it, put American boots on the ground to assist in it, and then turn the bloodied ground into resorts while also wanting to worsen life across the globe. So, by refusing to act, they didn't oppose that man getting into power. They cared so much about genocide that, ironically, they enabled making that genocide worse by not acting against that possibility.
The biggest issue, though, is with the people who couldn't be bothered enough to vote. Some, what, 40% of Americans never vote? Of course, there's plenty there who can't due to things like gerrymandering, but there's a huge swathe of white suburbanites who simply prefer the status quo to actually improving things.
you can refuse to vote for a Democrat and still oppose the man getting into power.
But thanks to the two party system, what effect does it have? And I'm specifically talking about the voting day of the presidential election here, not primaries or other elections. Because that's where those efforts will have the most impact. Not that the Dems deigned to give us even the illusion of a primary this election (or in 2016, truthfully), but so many of these people seem to shake their fist once every 4 years and then go to sleep like cicadas awaiting the next presidential election.
I don't blame people for hating the weak candidates that the Dems consistently push forward to maintain the old guards' leadership positions, but I do blame them for looking at the alternative and saying "I'm okay with the possibility of that man winning if I don't vote or vote third party." The chance of a Trump victory and all that it entailed was a line in the sand that they were willing to cross.
As a trans woman, I blame them for saying, "Your life is not worth biting the bullet for."
I don't believe voting for Democrats is an effective way to save anyone's life.
Biden also surpressed student protests. This isn't the gotcha you think it is
Putting Genocide Joe in scare quotes. Libs are going fully mask-off in this thread.
Blue MAGA
If the Democrats wanted me to vote for their candidate they should have picked one that didn't suck balls
I feel a lot of people do a lot to justify stupid behaviour. "Saving is too hard" or "exercise is too hard". There's legit reasons to not be able to save, or exercise or being able to vote 🤨.
However there's a lot of bullshit that people were spouting. It's either a coordinated campaign or just dumb shit. What annoys me is everyone piling on Joe and then they did what people wanted and swapped to Kamala and they're still upset that the Dems "don't listen". Whatever, they're all full of it.
I fucking hate the Democrats but you have to be completely psycho to justify not-voting for them.
To be clear, I'm Canadian and I'm directly impacted by this now. So fuck all of those people.
Why are we still talking about this? It's over, and we can't undo the results.
While I did vote blue conservative (for the last time), they were not worthy of that vote because they did not represent me. That's how representative democracy works. What you advocate for is not representative democracy, it is a hostage situation and should be treated like the crisis that that entails.
Why are you okay with people being underrepresented at the voting booth? Are you actively working to replace First Past the Post voting in your state? People should have the freedom to vote for the candidates they believe are best, while still ensuring their votes count against those they don’t want in office.
It's not as though democrats are just now learning of the mathematical flaws of FPTP. Every election I've seen the same bullshit excuses to take people's inalienable right to vote how they want. Democrats in blue states made a choice to leave a huge portion of the population unrepresented, all for safe states and easy elections.
We don’t need to wait for a miracle from Congress, we can pass election reform one state at a time. Should we have more elections, we must remove the democratic monopoly on this fight against the republicans. Don't worry, blue conservative, you will be free to vote for your preference under a more representative electoral system. Because who would want to deny someone the right to vote for the person they feel is best? You apparently.
Alaska has already abolished FPTP voting. After Ranked Choice Voting kept Sarah Palin out of office, Alaskan Republicans tried to pass a referendum to revert to FPTP, but the people voted to keep Ranked Choice. Why would you want to use the same voting system that Republicans favor? Do you support democracy, or do you get off on forcing people unrepresented in government to vote for your preference?
Videos on alternative voting systems
First Past The Post voting (What most states use now)
Videos on alternative electoral systems we can try out.
STAR voting
Alternative vote
Ranked Choice voting
Range Voting
Single Transferable Vote
Mixed Member Proportional representation