this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2026
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Trans journalist Erin Reed has published a list of Democratic midterm candidates with anti-trans records, and the question she is forcing is one the party would rather not answer: if trans voters keep rewarding Democrats who harm them, what signal does that send? The calculation is real, the stakes are high, and there is no clean answer.

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[–] frisbird@lemmy.ml -1 points 2 weeks ago

So let's answer your question. I expect to gain nothing. Which is exactly what I expect to gain if I do vote for them.

There's a sense in which the process of "power" shifting from one brand to the other brand is much like people buying store brand vs name brand of the same product made by the same manufacturer. People buy the one or the other en masse because of larger economic trends driving their buying behavior. Individuals making deliberate choices to "not pay the brand tax" is such a small component of aggregate buying behavior it's not even worth modeling.

In this way, the old adage "it's the economy, stupid" is saying that people don't really win elections because conscientious voters who are thoughtful and strategic do things - people win elections because of larger economic and social trends. Yes, in individual small swing districts conscientious voting can sometimes become large enough to have a measurable impact, but not in most races, not in most districts, and even among swing districts, not that often.

Instead what's happening is the 2 brands work to temper the psychological needs of various groups of the American population, serving to create us/them dynamics within the population that serves to divide them against each other and enlist them in maintaining the very powers who oppress them.

Like what happens in these discussions. We are all being oppressed by the entire political system, and yet some of us believe that others of us are paid Russian or Chinese trolls or that we're actually Republicans because we are trying to keep the focus on the total political system. What we need is to band together as a single group, not as separate groups who fight on the terrain of ballots, but a single unified group of the people against the oligarchs and that means fighting against their mechanisms of control. Party politics is one of those mechanisms.