The last panel should be the deer bumming around on the couch instead of voting, with some kind of line like "the trees just don't excite me'.
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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Well election is over, the time to start building up a third party is NOW
Didn't Trump basically promise "no more elections if I win"?
Oh yeah, he did. A few times, even.
People letting him do it is what's gonna make it come true.
3rd party voters didn't swing a single swing state. That is a demonstrable fact. It's time to stop punching down.
People will, in a single breath, tell people to exercise their right to vote in democracy and also that voting for the person/party that best represents them is wrong if it's not a Big Party.
Yeah, that's right. You have the freedom to make bad choices and the government can't stop you. But other people can still make fun of you. People calling you dumb because of your bad decisions isn't a violation of your rights.
It doesn't matter who you vote for, just go vote.
Yeah it does. Don't vote for Nazis
Corrected. Your vote doesn't count if you vote for Nazis. Don't be a literal Hitler.
Usually in a democracy the people are represented by parties which they align most with. In my country I can vote for one of seven, which get proportionally represented by a number of seats in parliament. The winning party rarely has more than 50% of the vote, if they do, all the losing parties will become the opposition, and if they don't they have to combine with another party to have at least 50% of the votes. This assures that the winning party or coalition still has to negotiate their position and decisions every single day. If one party would want the power the current administration in the US has they would probably need 80 or 90% of the votes.
Is it complicated? Yes. Does it make sure the people are represented? Also yes.
In the US if a state votes 51% one way, 100% of the electoral votes go to that party, causing a reality where a party could get less than a majority vote and still win. This alone is proof that the people are not fairly represented and isn't a fair democracy. In local elections you'll have a much more nuanced choice but at a federal level it's antiquated to say the least.
I will say that in a fair democracy, you should vote for your representative, in the US you have no such choice. Be it by living in one state counts as more than another, or the fact that a third party has little to no representation post election.
Just as a side note, those models are not invulnerable to manipulation. In my country it's the same, but the central government is ruling from one of the flimsiest coalition governments, with the same lack of power that goes along that dumbasses still claim they are solely responsible for. The opposition claims they 'won' because they got more votes than any other party (which should have also made it easier for them to form their coalition and they weren't able to) and now it is getting so bad and stupid (and troll factory brigaded) that people getting convinced by the rhetoric are trying to pass off the US electoral system as a success story.
It provides more representation, but it does not provide infallibility. I think we have the technology today to do considerably better than what we had several centuries back - in fact, to a large extent we could be voting ourselves on key issues instead of letting it fall back to representatives and false promises if we wanted to. The biggest problem isn't that people in a democracy aren't on equal grounds when grasping different issues and yet they can be radicalized to vote out of rhetoric more than those who would and should be more informed. I think we could have better democracies if we shifted to meritocracies, where you could vote on issues only if you certify you were more informed and the history, reality, and minutiae that govern those issues through exams. But that would also create a system that could be gamed.
Any system can be corrupt, and in democracies it's not just the political candidates but society as a whole when it becomes complacent, ignorant, yet loud and willing to break the system for those that manipulate then into doing it.
The issue in the US is that it IS against your political interests to vote for anyone but the least bad option.
The first past the post system simply doesn't allow for a diverse political landscape.
Its so hilarious how this ridiculously toxic culture around blaming third party was developed, worked on for months, and then when it came time, the impact of third parties was so utterly irrelevant as to be laughable.
The real beef was with stay home single EDIT issue folks who would otherwise be Dem voters.
Edit for clarity: the above group are historical, nominally Dem voters, who stayed home abnormally this election.
3rd party "voices" were annoying because they only punched at Dems, never at republicans. Interestingly, a few of them migrated to libertarian and conservative instances now
Don't blame the people staying home. Blame the Democrats for doing nothing to earn those votes but say "Orange Man Bad". They did the exact same thing in 2016. Democrats ran on maintaining the status quo at a time when no one is happy with the status quo.
The Harris campaign should have campaigned on issues that would attract progressives and others on the left. Instead they tried to get conservatives to leave their cult by touting the endorsement of Dick fucking Cheney and his incredibly unpopular daughter and saying they'll close the borders and continue funding Netanyahu's genocide. It's like Harris didn't want to win.
If Democrats want to win they need to stop being Republicans.
Edit but in the spirit of conversation: Biden AND Harris are lame candidates that absolutely only maintain the status quo. As you say, voters are unhappy with that.
Edit restructure
I disagree with the conclusion that OMB isn't valid reasoning. But it's just one dudes opinion that I've laid out in the thread.
Orange man bad was more then enough to pick a rock with a smiley face on it as alternative
People will learn the consequences, regardless of what brought them in our kept them home.
If folks fundamentally can't play out the math on 2 choices in a FPTP where one is a serial rapist, anti abortion candidate, who is on record for wanting to accelerate Gaza, then I dunno what to say on that. "Status quo" starts looking pretty shiny, which is terrible, but the world we live in.
But now we have trump, and a lot of folks get to say "they didn't attract me"
Orange man bad was more then enough to pick a rock with a smiley face on it as alternative
It's a logical argument and it's a correct argument. Unfortunately it's demonstrably not an effective argument, especially when it's all you're doing. The same thing happened in 2016 with Clinton thinking she was owed votes because Trump would be (and was, and will be again) a disaster for the US. Yet they still went with the same strategy anyway.
I say this as someone who did make the "correct" choice of voting blue despite my moral objections to a lot of what she was saying. We will now all see the consequences of only barely trying to win an election against fascists.
I am aligned with you here. Well put.
To be clear, I have no love for the dnc or their strategies. I am not championing them as a model. Other commenters seem to think I'm simping for "blue maga" or some other shit.
I've consistently argued for harm reduction in a limited outcome system.
I agree with the harm reduction strategy, but I also understand people being apathetic with the choices they're presented.
Of course this means people should be more active and now is the time to start really pushing for ranked choice voting so we can maybe do something about the dominance of the two-party system.
Screw trying to convince Democrats they need to start looking left. Force them to with the threat of new, actually progressive, parties.
This is all just the same toxic projection that I've been pointing out in this thread.
You want to blame third parties but there is basically 0, practically negative evidence for it.
No, I haven't discussed 3rd parties at all in my comment. I said 3rd party "voices", reading comprehension meaning "commenters/online personalities" because I noted their movement to new instances.
Edit also note I had a typo in my above "single party" to 'single issue"
None of us would "otherwise be dem voters". What part of "I'm not voting for you because I don't support your policies" did you not understand?
Many "normally / historically" Dem voters stayed home. That's the group I'm referring to by "single issue" section.
I don't know who you "us" are so why would I speak for you?
Because you've been so civil in your reply, I'll throw an edit on there just for you.
Just because someone voted Democrat before doesn't mean they would necessarily do so this year if it hadn't been for that pesky genocide they are doing.
By us I mean leftists, party voters, and people who did not vote
That's fine, I clarified I'm not discussing leftists.
Registered party voters represent millions and millions of voters. That type of "historical" voter is not an anomaly.
doesn't that mean it worked?
No, it was just part of a broader culture of infantalism demonstrated by Democratic apologists. There was no there there. Just people desperate for something to blame for their incompetence.
but like... if everyone is saying "don't vote third party", and the amount of third party votes significantly drops as a result, isn't this what the result would look like?
There is a term for the act of only looking for evidence that confirms your bias. If the "strategy" worked, then why isn't Kamala Harris president?
And if that wasn't the goal of the strategy, what point is it that you think was being made in the first place?
i have no idea what the strategy of the us democratic party was, I'm just reflecting on what i've on social media over the past month or so (a constant barrage of "don't vote third party") and comparing it to the results (very few people voting third party). of course there's no way to know how much of that was due to said barrage, but we can for sure say that the people telling people to vote third party failed.
What if the deer lives in one of the 43 states that do not matter?
Supposedly if every single liberal-leaning person were to vote Democrat, they (edit: some of them) would have become swing states.
But I think it's more that people just want an easy target to punch, which makes people feel more in control. Like, it's not our glorious leader(TM)'s fault, it's "those" people, over there. And the number of Internet searches for what happened to Joe Biden on the very morning of the election should legit be worrisome to us all imho...
Ngl, I was kinda impressed by storing told about Kamala's campaigning and dedication. (Or was that simply part of the spin machine?) Maybe she could - no, surely she could have done better? But she also gave it as much as "the establishment" would allow, and came up short.
So now we can either roll up our sleeves and try to fix things... oh who is anyone kidding we'll just take whatever handouts we are given, as always.
Is this why coffee is often served as molten lava? Because all yall blow on your coffee before every sip? I despise all of you. I just want to drink coffee like any other drink
This is one of my favorite things about using an Aeropress. I use half the water to brew the concentrate, which will be just off boil, but then the water I use to dilute to final strength can be any temp I want, so it is immediately drinkable. There are many other advantages, especially if you like to experiment, but this one to me is huge.