this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
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In our electoral system, a vote for a third-party is a waste, and any resources dumped into them is a bigger waste.
A socialist is going to prefer Harris over Trump, but by voting a third party instead of Democrat they're effectively supporting Trump. When the election comes down to the wire, they'll be the ones responsible for a second Trump term.
This has already happened. People voting for the Green party over Al Gore are the reason we got 8 years of Bush.
I don't mind the odd asshole who refuses to play ball, so far up their own ass they think they're so special and that the spoiler effect doesn't apply to their vote.
If that is, they're silent about it.
The second they start advocating for others to join them in their stupidity, they go from a harmless idiot to an active threat to democracy, exactly as bad as the MAGAt they likely are.
Maybe you can't speak for what socialists prefer. It's really odd to say it's third party voters' fault your preferred candidate didn't win rather than your candidates fault they did not attract enough voters.
If everyone left of the Overton window promise to vote for the Democrats regardless of what policies the Democrats propose, what prevents the Democrats from moving to the right?
All the other elections every year. The party pays attention to the local and state elections. It matters tremendously. And in the mean time you are improving your local government that effects your everyday life.
Voting 3rd in the presidential election is a waste if the party hasn't spent any time building support in existing government structures of power though.
Does a third party have some special avenue around an obstructionist house and senate that we all haven't seen so far?
People can vote for the candidates they like locally even if they don't like the top of the ticket. I didn't say anything about down ballot elections.
And you still don't have any answer for my question.
No.... THAT is my answer. You asked what would prevent the Dems from sliding right and that was my answer. It's the same thing that caused the Republicans to slide right.
You have the example in the Tea party movement to see how it effectively changes the party when down ballot voting shifts.
That's how it's done. There's recent proof of it.
PS: You didn't answer MY question.
Nobody said that a third party would win the presidency, so that's a weird question. The answer is no, but you already knew that.
The tea party is a great example of Republicans listening to their base. Democrats should do the same. I don't see anyone telling the far right they HAVE to vote for Republicans even if they run a liberal candidate. Democrats don't own the votes of the Left either.
Voting for progressives down ballot is not a real way to influence the party, and I don't believe you really think it is. Also, like I said, many progressives do that.
It's just another line from the DNC to tell the progressives to shut up. When Dems start treating progressives like Republicans treat MAGA (worship, adoration, and fear) then you can expect that progressives will vote for Dems at the top of the ticket.
So you are knowingly throwing your vote away then. Ok. If your voice matters so little, no need to engage on a forum. Look in the mirror and ask what the point of wasting your moments literally telling everyone you don't value your own vote.
Worthless...
Voting for genocide is much worse.
Pathetic. You can't even see that's exactly what you're doing even after so many examples. We've seen this play out before.
You don't exist in a country with a voting system where abstaining from participating in the 2 party system makes you not culpable for the outcome when 1 party has vocalized their intent for violence.
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
My vote isn’t a waste. It is counted like any other.
My vote for psl isn’t support for trump. It doesn’t count towards trumps total. Would you say the people unwilling to vote democrat are more responsible for the events of a trump term than the people who didn’t vote at all? Than the democrat party for running a bad campaign? Than the administrative regime that puts its plans into action?
You are mistaken about bush v gore. The Supreme Court installed bush and the Florida recount wouldn’t have changed the result because it wasn’t the whole state recount needed to actually flip the electoral college. Gore won Florida but the recount wasn’t in enough precincts to show that. I have no love for the greens, but they’re not why we got bush.
By voting for a third party you're worse than someone who doesn't vote, because you use resources that could be directed to literally anything else and be more effective. Taking all that third party campaign to a casino money and betting it all on a double-zero is more responsible use of the money than spending it on a campaign that will serve no purpose but wasting resources and pulling voters from a candidate that may actually win.
The only excuses to support a third party candidate are being an idiot or a bad actor intentionally trying to spoil the vote. Which one are you?
What resource am I redirecting?
What isn’t effective about a third party vote?
How are third party resources a waste?
They have a literal zero percent chance of winning. Hell, most aren't even on the ballots. Therefore any effort or resources used on their campaign is waste. A vote for them is a waste because it's impossible for them to win, and that vote could be used to support the better of the 2 major party candidates.
I think you’d have a good point if winning was all that mattered in an American election.
Winning isn’t all that votes decide.
Poll turnout is used to decide ballot access, funding, event presence and of course for the two major parties policy triangulation.
That’s not even touching the amount of public awareness that will be built by a third party making a strong showing.
The most famous Democratic Socialist who does the most for the movement and achieves the most for the country is Bernie Sanders.
Note that he runs on the Democratic ticket in order to stay relevant even though he and the party aren't always in alignment. And when he didn't get nominated in 2020 he threw his support behind Biden even though he could have easily run third-party. He knew that running third-party would have guaranteed a Trump victory.
Ralph Nader ran for the Green party and spoiled the vote when Al Gore - the most famous environmentalist in Washington -was running and handed the election to Bush.
The GOP doesn't actually want Trump, but they know 100% that he'd run third party without the nomination and kill the GOP, which is why they back him.
The spoiler effect is real and, until we have a better system, running or voting third-party is political malfeasance.
You’re mistaken about bush v gore. The Supreme Court gave us bush because gore didn’t want to do a whole state recount (which is what would have been necessary to show that Florida went for him, which it did. the handful of counties they settled on wasn’t enough to change the results by themselves).
Why are you talking about sanders? He’s not running and if he were I wouldn’t vote for him.
Bush defeated Gore in Florida in the final count by 537 votes.
Nader received over 97,000 votes. Had he not been in the race, his supporters would have overwhelmingly preferred Gore to Bush. Yeah, some of them would have chosen not to vote. But even if 99%of them had stayed home, that remaining 1% would have been enough to win Gore the state in a manner that would have kept it from ever going to the Supreme Court.
The Bush administration was a horror show for the US and the world. The economic, diplomatic, environmental, and human cost of it is unimaginable, and people like you are why it happened.
You are, as I have stated several times, mistaken about bush v gore.
Every post-hock review of statewide ballots that I’ve ever heard of has had gore winning by a narrow margin.
Just the butterfly ballots alone would have tilted the pre-recount tally in gores favor.
Nader didn’t give us bush, the Supreme Court and the weak recount of only a few counties did.
Would gore have been significantly different after 9/11? I thought so back then, but now I’m not convinced. The preparations to invade Iraq again were being made during the end of the Clinton administration and there was enough personnel carryover from Clinton to bush that I believe it would have been the same but with different graft.
I asked earlier if people like me were more to blame than non voters, than the parties who failed to convince us or even recognize that they needed us and the administrations who actually perpetuated the myriad war crimes of the bush and Obama administrations. Are we?
Break it down here, what precise volume of Iraqi blood is on my hands?
It never would have reached the point where it went to the Courts if Nader hadn't run and the recounts not occurred. And the recounts that did occur likely would have turned out differently because Bush would have been further behind in the rest of the state's numbers.
Nader gave the Court the opportunity to put their thumb on the scale.
Wait, so you think it’s more naders fault than the unjust, undemocratic system that installed bush or the gore campaign for pushing a partial recount open to an equal protection ruling (that’s the bush v gore basis) that it couldn’t even win or for not realizing that it needed left voters and adjusting its platform appropriately?
When is it the fault of the democrats for running a bad campaign? For running on a bad platform?
I'm saying that Nader, knowing full-well he has zero chance of winning, intentionally ran a campaign that could do nothing but harm Al Gore's campaign and help the GOP.
The Green party did now fandango to the environment in that campaign than can ever be offset by them. They're an environmentalist party that doomed the planet of of arrogance, stupidity, or duplicity, and I don't care which. I blame them and anyone who voted for them for the current state of the world that they enabled with their irresponsibility.
Evil people are gonna try to be evil. When there's an enemy at the gates we need to put aside our minor differences and work together to defeat them, not stab the other guards and let the city get overrun.
I’m no defender of the greens and I don’t think people should vote for them, so please bear that in mind before you read this:
You blame the self proclaimed environmentalist party and their voters, a tiny proportion of the electorate by comparison, for 24 years of the two non environmentalist parties devastating the climate while in power which they reached by receiving in every case several orders of magnitude more votes than the ostensibly environmentalist party did.
You blame them more than the foolishness of the gore campaign for not choosing the full recount it would have won, and the undemocratic system it was operating under for stopping the recount and installing bush.
Do you think that responsibility for the actions of people in power ultimately rests on their shoulders? Do you think that there was some deficit in the gore campaigns environmental policy and that the Green Party shaped itself to fit that niche?
I literally think people shouldn’t vote for the greens though, so why not talk about what I do support, voting psl?
Gore couldn't do a full recount because there's a federal deadline (first Tuesday after second weekend of December) by which the delegates must be selected so they can vote for President. That's what Bush v Gore was about - whether or not the recount could go on past the date the electors were required to select the President. The Court ruled that the election date couldn't be moved, so the recount couldn't continue.
The ruling was that to allow only a partial recount (which gore would have lost!) would constitute a violation of the equal protection clause and that because the state couldn’t do a full recount in the three days remaining between when the Supreme Court heard the case and the safe harbor date that the stay would be granted and as a consequence, bush installed.
Once again: do you assign more blame for the events of the last 24 years to the people who voted for the self proclaimed environmentalist party than the major party that didn’t appeal to those voters, the undemocratic systemic failure at the municipal, county, state and federal level, the decisions made by the people in power during those times to perpetrate the actions of this nation and the administrative state actors who went along with them?
If you would prefer not to answer that question:
Why not abandon talking about the greens, a party I do not support or want people to vote for and instead engage with what I do want, for people to vote psl?
The GOP is gonna GOP.Blaming the enemy for being the enemy doesn't change their behavior. Anyway - they're a minority and should be easy to stop. Since the 90s, they've received a majority of the popular vote 1 time.
But they've managed to hold the White House for 14 years in that same time period and have gerrymandered the shit out of the Congressional map. Texas had a majority Democratic delegation to the US House from the Civil War until 2005.
Hiw have they achieved so much? Easy - they're organized and put forth a unified front while the rest of us flail about chasing perfection, sabotaging and resistance, and get crushed.
Asking the GOP to stop winning is dumb. That's their goal, and I can't really expect them to not try and win. What I can expect is for those who oppose their policies to get their heads out of their asses and vote for the people who can stop the GOP. We can work on making the Dems better later.
Right now we're being stabbed to death by the GOP, and instead of fighting that third-party voters are focusing on a hangnail.
Good to know you don’t hold me responsible for the last 24 years of American policy.
I am not chasing perfection. There’s a lot I don’t like and have to look past about psl.
I’m not asking the gop to stop winning
It was a real stretch to read your response as a reply to me. Did you reply to the right post?
If you're claiming to hold an ounce of socialist leanings and you don't oppose the GOP, you're an idiot. They need to be stopped before any progress can be made. Look at the GOP as cancer and the Dems as Chemotherapy. You may not feel good about the Dems, but the GOP will kill the country if left unchecked.
Supporting third parties is like trying to cure cancer with a chain letter. It achieves nothing, wastes resources, and is super annoying.
Be careful with insults on world communities. I expect they’ll tolerate fewer and fewer qualifying words as the rhetoric heats up going into November. You’ve also spoken to me enough for a discerning eye to recognize that as a direct insult.
My vote for psl is by definition in opposition to the gop, although I don’t hold the same ideas as you that opposing the republicans a fundamental communist principle.
If the republicans were killing the country then it’d be dead already and good riddance. Democrats have consistently tacked right for the last 40 years and the country’s not dead because of it. Harris is running to the right of Regan. I have trouble thinking of a metric by which the country is dying that can be attributed to the Republican Party.
You keep bringing up what voting for a third party is like. Neither of us live in a world where the gop is a cancer. The gop doesn’t have to be stopped before the country can improve.
I actually don’t believe that America can have a communist future without some body representing the small bourgeois (closest thing I can think of to the land/local and regional capital axis that best describes the republican base) in the transition to socialism and eventually communism.
You and I don’t want the same thing.
You are acting in a manner that strenghthens the party that outlaws workers unions. How is that in anyone's interest except the bourgeois?
I don’t see how my actions strengthen the republicans but if the republicans benefit from a person voting psl then shouldn’t the democrats try to appeal to that block of voters in order to get their votes and remove that benefit from their opponent?