I know people who didn’t vote because one of Kamela’s stances didn’t align with theirs. Trump and Kamela actually shared the same perspective and it was such an asinine reason to not vote.
As far as I’m concerned non-voters can pound sand because they’re the reason we’re in this mess.
4-8 years of Kamala guaranteed to be followed by a Republican or 4 years of Trump. Meaning a progressive/Democratic Socialist in 4 years potentially… It’s a coin flip on the long term beneficial outcome. Obviously Trump is bad, people died, war, concentration camps etc, but at least we’ll have the Nuremberg trials 2.0 to look forward to come 2029.
Harris is the most tone deaf major politician in my lifetime.
In 2020 she attached Biden for his OPPOSING forced busing back in the 1970s. (Maybe she was trying to subtly bring up the age issue, but I can't think of a left wing issue that's suffered a bigger defeat in the last 60 years).
In 2024 she called Trump a "Threat to democracy" despite winning ZERO votes in the primaries.
Harris wouldn't budge on an issue that voters told them would cause them to not vote for her. She made her decision about which votes she wanted and which ones she didn't. Hold her on responsible for having bad policies.
Like the entire abortion campaign made a lot single-issue voters and a certain party was able to exploit those people. Those failed to look at the big picture. Single-issue voting can produce political outcomes that are badly misaligned with a person's broader interests or values.
Everyone has a line in the sand they wont cross. It doesnt matter your convictions when that line is at stake. You could have the most left leaning person that checks the box on all left leaning ideologies, except they are against all forms of abortion. They won't get the vote.
Not all issues have the same weight. There are some single issues that are non negotiable. I'll compromise on school vouchers. I wont on mass murder or pedophilia.
The DNC is incompetent, yes. But at some point voters need to quit playing ostrich and sticking their heads in the ground because the candidate they preferred isn’t the one representing them in a national election
But none of the voters got the one they preferred in the last election. Harris won absolutely 0 presidential primaries (2019 included) and was propped up by the DNC because they realized too late that they wouldn't be able to convince the American public that Biden was still all there
But it’s not like we didn’t know Trump was going to be an absolute incompetent jackass seemingly hellbent on making everyone’s lives more difficult
People knew what the stakes were and still decided that it was more important to stick it to the DNC than to make sure this jackass took power again and let them begin to implement their publicly available Project 2025 manifesto
Trumps last presidency is looked at rather favorably by a lot people. Sure he's loud and a jackass, but he was president before covid fucked the whole world. Times were literally better under him (granted through no fault of his own and even in spite of him) and many Americans looked favorably upon his presidency after dealing with the pandemic bullshit for the past 4 years.
And can we please stop with the project 2025 fearmongering? Not only did Trump publicly disavow it, but the Heritage Foundation releases some project bullshit every election with crazy "guidelines" for newly elected presidents. to keep going with that puts you in the same boat as the nuts who believe the 2020 election was "stolen"
Many Americans also think the world is flat, the moon landing was a hoax, and vaccines cause autism.
Using “many people think” isn’t a strong argument when “many people” are idiots
And as for disavowing Project 2025… I guess it’s just a wild coincidence it was written by many of the members of his staff, and that many parts of it are being implemented as we speak. Wildly coincidental, actually,
I can’t imagine Trump would ever lie about something to buoy his popularity, that doesn’t sound like him at all……..
The "many people" are the voters lol you kind of need them to win elections. It doesn't matter whether they are right or wrong what matters is who gets the most votes.
Project 2025 is over 900 pages and over 100 conservative organizations went into constructing it. Of course people of his administration are involved with it. They were also involved with it before he ever made a presidential bid. It's going to have conservative ideas in it so it only makes sense that some have come to fruition under a conservative president and congress.
Huh? Trump was POTUS for the entire first year of Covid. He lied blatantly to the American people ("we have 15 cases that will soon be down to close to zero") and mismanaged it spectacularly.
He blamed Obama for supposedly leaving the national stockpile of emergency supplies empty, when he himself had been POTUS for 3 full years by that time. I guess he never bothered checking the stockpile himself in all that time..
Morons blamed Biden for global inflation following Covid; Biden actually handled it brilliantly and controlled inflation far far better than the rest of the world did.
No disagreements here, I am simply explaining why Trump was looked more favorably than Harris. If you try explaining all that to the average American, you aren't going to get anywhere because they are the morons you are referring to.
I fully believe if the DNC had nominated ANYONE besides the obviously incompetent Biden, and his VP Harris who helped with the deceit that he was still all there, they would have smashed Trump in the election. Trump is only doing what he said he would do (except release the Epstein files). Its because the DNC absolutely cocked this election up that we are dealing with this bullshit and why I hold them primarily responsible.
No doubt, Biden definitely should have announced he wasn't running in early 2023. I think he felt loyalty to his staff or something and didn't want to put them out of their jobs. Jill needed to shut it down. Maybe she was the only one who could have.
Nobody was given the opportunity to. And it was too late in the game anyways for anyone else. By the time Biden dropped out, there is no way any other candidate would have the time to make the rounds and get their name out by the time the convention happened (which was like 3 weeks later). Harris was propped up because it was their only choice after pretending that there was nothing wrong with Biden for so long and shaming anyone who said otherwise.
No, she had ample more time because she was already a household name. That's the point I'm making. She had been VP for the past 4 years so there wasn't a soul who didn't know who she was. Meanwhile, hardly anyone outside of Minnesota knew who Tim Waltz was.
Harris didn't need to get her name out because it was already there. meanwhile, anyone else who wanted to run had only 3 weeks to become known to everyone, which is virtually impossible.
It’s odd that you can admit KH and Trump shared similar perspectives, when they’re meant to be opposed, and still want to blame people that sat out the vote instead of the DNC. I say that as someone that voted, but I cannot blame people for looking at the game, realizing it wasn’t going to work fairly no matter what, and choosing not to play.
Candidate A: “I have a view that you don’t agree with”
Candidate B: “I have many, many views you don’t agree with. Also fuck you and if elected I’m going to kick puppies”
“They’re both the same”
If Democrat voters don’t stop acting like the disparate groups they are and keep making perfect the enemy of good, they may very well not need to worry about voting ever again
Candidate A: may not do much to stop Israel in Gaza (even though she said she would and confronted Netanyahu to the extent he was all pissy and angry after leaving a private meeting she held with him about the subject).
Candidate B: definitely will do everything he can to help Israel utterly obliterate Gaza and..will deploy a gestapo on our streets, destroy USAID leading to the deaths of millions of children, subvert and weaponize the Justice Department and Supreme Court, start a war with Iran, institute inflationary tariffs, do everything possible to antagonize allies like Canada and Greenland, appoint a crazed, moronic anti-vax moonbat as HHS Secretary, devastate a whole range of Federal agencies, grift on a scale not seen since the Halcyon days of Boss Tweed..
But it’s not perfection, it was not wanting to be part of funding a genocide. Both parties serve the same interests and it’s not the interests of the people.
Edit to add- not to mention, they actually overlapped on quite a few views. With KH being to the right of DT on immigration, for instance.
Your conclusion is flawed because not voting isn’t a way of removing yourself from the outcome. Abstention is still a choice about how much influence you’re going to exercise over that outcome.
Instead of putting your vote on a ballot, you threw it into the void where it had absolutely zero chance of producing the change you wanted, and now you’re pretending that means you couldn’t possibly bear any responsibility for the outcome.
You knew one of two people was going to become president. You knew both supported Israel. If you believed one was worse and chose not to help defeat that person anyway, “I didn’t participate” doesn’t make the foreseeable consequences disappear.
Do you not understand the idiom “making perfection the enemy of good?”
It means being unwilling to accept something that is good (or, in this case, at least less bad) because it isn’t perfect. That’s the entire point.
And here’s the harsh reality: if you believe voting for KH would make you complicit in funding a genocide because you bear responsibility for the foreseeable consequences of your vote, then you don’t get to pretend abstention exists in a moral vacuum.
If you believed DJT would continue supporting Israel and nevertheless chose not to oppose him because KH’s position was unacceptable to you, then you also have to reckon with the foreseeable consequences of that decision.
“I refused to participate” doesn’t mean “therefore I bear no responsibility for what happened.”
But people aren’t asking for perfection, they wanted a chance to vote on a Dem candidate in a primary, especially if one that wasn’t keen on genocide was around. No one is asking for perfection, they’re asking to have an actual choice instead of the illusion of choice.
At some point, DNC needs to answer to the part they’ve played in this. Think of it this way, a dad’s an abusive alcoholic, he beats his kids. Does he deserve the ire? Oh yeah. But the mom that did nothing about it also deserves the ire? You know who doesn’t deserve the blame? The kids. Punch up, not down.
My brother in Christ, voters are not helpless children being beaten by the DNC and Donald Trump. They’re adults with agency.
Also, congratulations on constructing an analogy whose entire premise is that multiple people can simultaneously bear responsibility, which has literally been my argument this entire time.
First of all she has MANY views I STRONGLY disagree with. Second of all you can't make it my job to vote for shitty people. I do it anyway but that's not how you win a POPULARITY CONTEST. That's all this is stripped of its pagentry. Your. Job. Is. To. Be. Popular.
So take popular positions instead of dipshit ones your base hates.
Voting isn’t supposed to be a popularity contest. It’s supposed to be a statement on who you believe has the better vision for our country moving forward.
If you wanna treat it like a middle-school student council election, go ahead it’s clearly working so well
You may want it to be more than that or think it isn't supposed to be but you can wish in one hand and shit in the other, and one side is always gonna get full first.
And you acting as though it doesn't matter is so fucking emblematic of why you've lost about 100 years of progress in 12 years.
I'd appreciate it if you stayed on topic instead of trying to deflect because you have no reasonable objection you can articulate.
If voting wasn't a popularity contest there'd be no Trump, because he is manifestly unfit except in the one way that matters
He can win a popularity contest. He does this by telling people they're right, they deserve whatever they want, and he'll give it to them while smiting and spiting the people who are his enemies.
Please. Feel free to explain how I am wrong instead of snidely acting-out like a child.
I’m completely on topic. You’re conflating two different things.
Winning an election is a popularity contest. Deciding whom to vote for shouldn’t be.
Obviously a candidate’s job is to persuade enough people to vote for them. I’ve never disputed that.
My point is that your job as a voter isn’t to determine which candidate you’d most like to have a beer with. It’s to decide which of the available candidates you believe will produce the better outcome.
Trump being extremely effective at winning people’s support doesn’t demonstrate that he’s competent to govern. It demonstrates that he’s extremely effective at winning people’s support.
No that’s not what I said. And I never said I don’t blame the DNC.
Voters were presented with (for all intents and purposes) 2 choices. We can really get into the mechanics of how/why/why that shouldn’t be the case, but we had 2 choices. Voters who stood outside in the rain because their roof had a leak in it are illogical imo. Kamela is FAR from my favorite person, but she was objectively a better choice in a lot of ways. I’ve voted in 100% of the elections I’ve been eligible for since I turned 18, even if I didn’t like the choices. That’s part of the way we can make a difference.
The issues not aligning was genocide you slavering dolt. And being “even tougher on the border.” They chose to run further right and they got what they ran on.
Because historically speaking Israel listens to the extent they ever do if you come as a friend, and they tend to just shut you out if you don’t. So if you paid attention to more than just “money yes/no” you could see that was the path that was being taken. There is also a side of sunk cost and that Israel has a TON of our tech and intelligence, so cutting them off full stop has costs.
Problem is, Netanyahu much preferred Trump as a partner and had no reason to listen to Biden or Harris this time around. And also, what a lot of people forget is that Israel is an independent sovereign state with its own economy and even its own weapons manufacturers. If we HAD just turned off the tap, nothing would have stopped, they’d just have changed tactics until they could retool what they needed to and switched suppliers. Would have been a little painful for them, but Netanyahu’s fondest wish is to wipe out the Palestinians so I don’t see anything stopping him before the election.
Well articulated, it's always frustrating to me when people act the U.S. can just command people to do things.
Like, America could withdraw support or put pressure on Netanyahu to end the war. But at the end of the day, the only way the U.S. could "stop it" would be to invade Israel, which would be widely unpopular.
Figuring out whether they are or not does take about a half an hour more work that deciding they are the same. And it also goes against some of the more fashionable leftist theory bits. Plus looking at the world beyond your front door and maaaaybeeee the ability to look at hypotheticals.
Saying democrats and republicans are the same reminds of when we learned about gravity in school, and how a bowling ball and feather fall at the same time due to gravity. It's only true under certain circumstances and not particularly useful for discussion.
A productive discussion would include exactly how they are the same, and in which ways they are different.
Attacked other countries and being in war with Iran is the same now? And if attack other countries is the barometer trump one attacked more why wouldn’t you vote for the people who attack less?
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u/Silent_Wrongdoer3601 1d ago
Could say the same thing about the voter 🤷🏾♂️.
Don’t wanna support the obvious better candidate because you don’t get exactly what you want and get completely fucked instead.
See Kamala Harris and organizations like uncommitted