“My experience is that most of the people who get really upset about the current leadership of our nations tend to be folks who haven’t spent much time either as an activist or as someone working for a candidate. What happens instead is they immerse themselves in on-line news and commentary.”

  • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
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    6 months ago

    As I said to him, “in the US you don’t get to vote and get someone better than Joe Biden

    Actually, write-ins are a thing, so you literally can vote for anyone else than him and Trump.

    This rhetoric that a vote for someone who represents you is a waste if they do not have a realistic chance to win, would equally apply to an unequal match-up of Dem vs Rep, but it’s never deployed that way; it’s only used to argue against smaller candidates. You never see people arguing that Democrats should have voted for a Reagan because a vote for Mondale, who had a 0% chance to win (he only won one state- his home state of Minnesota), was “a waste”.

    Voting has to be about political representation, otherwise Democracy is just a veneer for selecting a plutocrat or oligarch to be the new figurehead for a while. Half of Trump’s appeal was his (fake) rhetoric that he wasn’t that, which Republican voters actually acknowledged they’d been selecting for years. Too many Democrats have yet to admit this to themselves about our party-preferred candidates. Obama won with record numbers, both terms, because he wasn’t this.

    Obama was one of those ‘0% chance’ candidates early in the primaries according to political pundits in 2008, too.

    But I also believe that it is tremendously wrong-headed to insist that people should vote for candidates who have absolutely no chance of winning

    No one has a chance to win until people actually vote for them.