So many tears…
*liberal tears
That’s the issue with the FPTP voting system, it always eventually leads to a 2-party state like the US and the majority of the population votes for someone other than the winning party.
This happens in literally every country with the same voting system as the US.
This is misleading.
According to those stats, the majority of people voted for someone other than Harris as well.
The real takeaway here is large percentage of people that don’t vote.
Your vote only matters in swing states. The whole electoral college thing is fucked.
Yeah, it’s pretty dumb. The popular vote is what should matter. That’s the only way each vote counts as much as any other vote, which is like a basic principle of democracy.
Those who didn’t vote, who thought their vote didn’t matter, that no matter which politician gets elected to whatever office… they’re complicit.
The only significantly statically impactful group of “non voters” is the population that was unable to or inconvenienced heavily by voting.
Meaning the major majority of voters that didn’t vote were either unable to because of other obligations (work, childcare, etc) with a small subset of that being people that were no motivated enough to deal with the inconvenience of visiting a poll line (4hours in line) after a 10 hour shift.
These are the vast vast majority of people that did not show up. Beyond that an even smaller percentage was the "protest voters’ that even if 100% of which went to Harris she still would have lost.
I guess I just want to say “in conclusion” that the vast majority of voters that didn’t vote were giving you your Starbucks or your Taco Bell.
I think we should spend less time blaming voters and more time being critical of the politicians and party that gives zero reason for the working class to “risk” their shift for.
No one’s gonna “risk a shift” for the policies and messaging that Harris communicated. You don’t get people to “risk their shift” for voting for a lesser evil.
the population that was unable to or inconvenienced heavily by voting.
Voting early or by mail was available to:
-Alaska
-Arizona
-Arkansas
-California: All active, registered voters automatically receive ballot.
-Colorado: All active, registered voters automatically receive ballot.
-D.C.: All active, registered voters automatically receive ballot.
-Delaware
-Florida
-Georgia
-Hawaii: All active, registered voters automatically receive ballot.
-Idaho
-Illinois
-Iowa
-Kansas
-Maine
-Maryland
-Massachusetts
-Michigan
-Minnesota
-Montana
-Nebraska
-Nevada: All active, registered voters automatically receive ballot.
-New Jersey
-New Mexico
-New York
-North Carolina
-North Dakota
-Ohio
-Oklahoma
-Oregon: All active, registered voters automatically receive ballot.
-Pennsylvania
-Rhode Island
-South Dakota
-Utah: All active, registered voters automatically receive ballot.
-Vermont: All active, registered voters automatically receive ballot.
-Virginia
-Washington: All active, registered voters automatically receive ballot.
-Wisconsin
-WyomingI’m not saying people don’t have tough lives, but it has been made pretty available to a lot of people at this point.
Note that there’s some asterisks on there.
Some of those states require you to get your ballot notarized and/or signed by witnesses. Incidentally this opens the door for voter intimidation since your witness is likely to be a spouse.
Also, you have scenarios like NC where they are trying to retroactively toss ballots that were counted, and mail in opens the door for “something wasn’t quite proper about the ballot, discard it”.
If you absolutely, positively, can not vote in person at all, then try your luck with mail in ballots, but if at all possible vote in person if you want the best chance for your vote to count.
Sometimes i get the feeling that voting on a tuesday is working as expected: to keep working an poor people from voting…
Germany has voting per defintion only on sundays, and (at least where i live) the voting booths are everywhere. You can vote either per mail, or from 8:00 to 18:00 at a booth, and i never had to wait in a line to vote, and i’m in my 40s
Man if only there was some huge portion of left wing constituents demanding change over a tax funded genocide that the democratic party could have easily pandered to and gotten that extra 1% boost of votes.
But like such a group would be too small to make a difference amirite.
“69.16% of Americans are okay with fascism” isn’t really a resounding defense of the health of American democracy in the face of fascism, though.
You can’t just blame a group of people for anything though, it’s not like geographic boundaries determine morality.
Instead you gotta look at what happened this last election. Yeah there was inflation, and the polls point to that as a thing that swayed a lot of people. But the bigger factor was media capture by far-right oligarchs. The top cable news station, the top podcast, and the top social media network for news were all turned into maga propaganda this election. In that environment, the only question is why was it so close?
And unfortunately, until that changes the next elections are going to be the same. Trump’s approval is down, but it’s still higher than it was at this point his last term.
More people didn’t vote at all than let this demented rapist burn everything down.
Fucking idiots.
I voted for Harris. But let’s be honest. There were two choices on the ballot in 2016, 2020, and 2024:
- Fascism
- Slightly delayed fascism.
I’m glad you voted, but i don’t agree those were the two options.
I think it was a functioning government implementing more progressive policies vs. absolute shit-spewing catastrophic chaos.
And as that has already been borne out in the first, what, thirty seconds? Those people who refused to prevent it can get fucked.
Those really were the options though.
When Biden won in 2020, I distinctly remember saying, “Trump is going to win in 2024.” I saw it clearly. It wasn’t hard to predict.
Trump didn’t come from nowhere. Learn history. What we are experiencing now is not unique. Whenever wealth inequality gets too great, people demand action. And if those in power aren’t willing to move the needle and improve the lot of the working class, then they will turn to demagogues. This happens again and again in sclerotic democracies. It happened in Rome. It happened in ancient Greece. It happened in Revolutionary France. People turn to demagogues who promise to ram change through if they are not taken care of. Yes, it’s fucking obvious that Trump isn’t going to actually help the people. That’s the definition of a demagogue. Yet demagogues crop up again and again whenever democracies face the challenges we are facing now.
Democrats have proven themselves, time and time again, to not be willing to actually move the needle. Imagine if Biden had showed even half of Trump’s willpower, except for good rather than evil. Think of where we would be now.
This is why the choice was “fascism” or “slightly delayed fascism.” Kamala wasn’t going to meaningfully move the needle either. If she had won in 2024, Trump or another fascist demagogue would have won in 2028.
Merely holding the line is not a viable strategy. If you are running against fascism, and you refuse to do anything to meaningfully fight it when you win, you are responsible for getting that fascist elected.
Trump is responsible for his own sins. But Democrats are the reason he is currently in the White House. He’s doing the evil, but they are the ones who put him there.
Yeah that’s not how I see it. If we cheated like the republiQans, packed the courts with 15-year old fanatics for us, redrew all the maps against court orders, plowed billions into vote suppression and propaganda, we could end up with enough Democrats in Congress to get big things done.
We’d have done it fraudulently, as the republiQans have, but we’d all be better off.
Instead, we try to win honestly with well reasoned arguments and we lose by 1-3% every fucking time and have to govern with incompetent Qanuts who bought their seat with daddy’s chicken plant money.
Then a new crop of supergeniuses who just got out of polisci 201 light up a phattie and decide this is all part of the plan, man and we’re not gonna participate in this crooked show!
By the time they’re old enough and experienced enough to laugh at that, it’s been 20 years more of unrelenting Christian Nationalism and Gross Corrupt Incompetence.
I’m all for the Democrats Fixing It All (again) but saying they’re fascism-lite is stupid. We failed to elect them because we sat at home, and now it’s all on fire. As we’d spent the last year explaining it would.
If we cheated like the republiQans, packed the courts with 15-year old fanatics for us, redrew all the maps against court orders, plowed billions into vote suppression and propaganda, we could end up with enough Democrats in Congress to get big things done.
And they still wouldn’t, because they don’t want to. Not with the neoliberals in charge of the party.
The one thing – the one thing – that would’ve saved American democracy would’ve been the Democratic Party giving the middle finger to their crony-capitalist major donors and deciding to follow Sanders/Warren/AOC/etc. and meaningfully help the working class instead. But that was precisely the one thing that they abjectly refused to do.
Don’t insult people. Do not assume people are young or inexperienced. I’ve been voting for Democrats since 2008. And they’ve failed again and again. I fully understand why people would just throw their hands up and refuse to vote for the traitors. Don’t belittle people who are simply sick of the bullshit and decide “a pox on both your houses!” It’s not youthful inexperience, it’s disillusionment and exhaustion. People are fucking done with corporate dems. And honestly, the best long term strategy might be just to let the entire Democratic Party be burned to ashes.
We’re not the first country in modern times to fall to right wing autocrats. And one common thing? It’s not the captured opposition nominally liberal party that actually drives the autocrats out in the end. Usually the equivalent of the Democratic Party needs to be completely eliminated before the autocrats can be defeated. They suck up all the oxygen and prevent a real opposition party from forming. Typically, a popular front needs to be formed that completely sidelines and crushes the traditional liberal party and the autocrat.
Realistically, we are probably going to have to let the Democratic Party go the way of the Whigs. There’s really no other realistic way we end up defeating MAGAism. A feckless and useless opposition party is often far worse than no opposition party at all.
