Political Discussion and Commentary
A place to discuss politics and offer political commentary. Self posts are preferred, but links to current events and news are allowed. Opinion pieces are welcome on a case by case basis, and discussion of and disagreement about issues is encouraged!
The intent is for this community to be an area for open & respectful discussion on current political issues, news & events, and that means we all have a responsibility to be open, honest, and sincere. We place as much emphasis on good content as good behavior, but the latter is more important if we want to ensure this community remains healthy and vibrant.
Content Rules:
- Self posts preferred.
- Opinion pieces and editorials are allowed on a case by case basis.
- No spam or self promotion.
- Do not post grievances about other communities or their moderators.
Commentary Rules
- Don’t be a jerk or do anything to prevent honest discussion.
- Stay on topic.
- Don’t criticize the person, criticize the argument.
- Provide credible sources whenever possible.
- Report bad behavior, please don’t retaliate. Reciprocal bad behavior will reflect poorly on both parties.
- Seek rule enforcement clarification via private message, not in comment threads.
- Abide by Lemmy's terms of service (attacks on other users, privacy, discrimination, etc).
Please try to up/downvote based on contribution to discussion, not on whether you agree or disagree with the commenter.
Partnered Communities:
• Politics
• Science
view the rest of the comments
The funnny thing about elections is that politicians do the things people vote for. Literally no one gives a shit about people who don't vote. Everyone who sat out and couldn't even be arsed to vote third party just helped move the country to the right. Everyone who sits at home during primaries let's the rest of the country have its way.
Democrats don't implement the things that you want because you don't vote and therefore you don't matter. Republicans don't implement the things you that want because you don't vote and therefore you don't matter.
"Waah, waah, there's only two parties." More than half the country doesn't vote. That's enough to elect a third party candidate. Instead millions of idiots sat at home complaining that they can't get everything they want today, and moving the needle is too much work.
After that, they say things they think the people want to hear.
And blameing the public over not voting for somone they don't want to vote for, seems backwards. Politicians aren't entitled to any votes. They need to earn it.
What horseshit. They didn't write in any candidate, like there was no one in the whole world they could think of that they want as president.
Do you think there's one ballot in this whole country that has a single question on it - like there was nothing out there worth voting on other than the presidential race?
Saying there's nothing to vote for is an excuse to be lazy. If you couldn't find one single thing on your ballot to vote for in this election, then you're never going to vote, for any reason. Everyone knows it, and therefore no one cares what nonvoters say. So sit here and do what you do best, blow hard on the Internet. You can post your little commets, that no one will read or care about, because at the end of the day they know no matter what they do or say, you won't go to the polls to stop them.
Who said there's nothing to vote for?
"And blameing the public over not voting for somone they don’t want to vote for, seems backwards."
You are implying that there is no one to vote for. There are more than two candidates, and you can write in anyone you want. And there are many questions on the ballot. No one is blaming anyone for not voting for someone they don't like. They're blaming them for voting for nothing, at all, among many important races and initiatives, with the possibility of writing in anyone, then saying "You can't blame me; there's not something I want to vote for".
Not at all. You even quoted me saying someone, not anyone.
I guess I'm assuming they don't like either of the possible winners, I didn't think of the others, because they don't matter.
I've never seen that. Do you see it frequently? How many times this week?
This is why elections famously always have the same amount of turnout.
What bugs me about this election is that turnout of GOP and independent voters surpassed Dem turnout.
This makes me wonder if a bunch of former Dems switched parties between 2020 and now. Which would suggest that voters themselves are swinging rightward.
Consider that he's gained in previously blue strongholds, like in Beverly Hills as per https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-07/trump-victory-by-the-numbers/104573034 and even in Brooklyn as per https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/06/trump-voter-gains-new-york-00188078
To me, this seems to justify the Dems rightward swing - they are following the voters. No wonder Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney at her side.
But, it also makes me feel kinda sick inside. If the country as a whole is swinging rightward, that makes me wonder where I fit in - or even if there is any room at all with someone with my beliefs.
What a ridiculous takeaway. They moved right and lost, but somehow this shows that moving right was the correct decision? That's nonsense, it shows the exact opposite.
The Cheneys do not represent any substantial constituency. Virtually nobody likes them, right or left. Kamala went chasing after the mythical "moderate republican swing voter," and they told her go fuck yourself the way they always do, and in the meantime she neglected her actual base which meant less enthusiasm and mobilization.
The democrats have tried this shit over and over. The people who like right-wing politics already have a party catering to them that they're happy with. How many times does this strategy have to result in abject failure before you start to question it?
Not the first time I've heard this bullshit either,. It's a surprisingly common talking point among centrists, even though it's so blatantly stupid. Oh, the Democrats are going to the right because the left won't vote for them? Well, the right won't fucking vote for them either, so why are they still moving right? Why is courting the right a reasonable and smart thing to do, while courting the left is dumb and bad? Especially when they keep courting the right and they keep fucking losing?
Could be that they were shut out of the primary process, and wouldn't have chosen Harris.
This would make more sense if they just sat it out and didn't vote (or say voted third party).
But this doesn't make sense if they switched parties and voted for orange voldemort. All the reasons not to choose Harris (such as not being strong enough on Gaza) would apply even more strongly to that guy..
That's exactly what happened. Trump's turnout was about the same, but Dems turnout was 15 million less than 2020. That shows not that people are going more right ward and voting for Trump, but that Dems turnout was depressed due to apathy or something else.
Oh, interesting. Do you have a source regarding the turnout? What I've been reading elsewhere suggests that turnout wasn't depressed except compared to 2020 - which may have been a fluke due to the pandemic - but the sources I have (such as https://dailyiowan.com/2024/11/06/2024-election-reaches-second-highest-voter-turnout-in-the-past-century/ ) aren't clear on hard numbers or stats.
A different commenter on this thread (see https://lemmy.world/comment/13325248 ) claims that orange voldemort actually got fewer votes in this election than in 2020. No source was provided and I'm a bit skeptical, but if you both are right (contradicting the sources I have pointed to in my other comments) then it suggests a) that there was no such shift and it was merely a turnout issue and b) that more leftist or progressive policies might do the trick!
Which are much easier problems to solve than to deal with folks actually moving their beliefs and votes to the right.
I think you're right that turnout in 2020 was kind of an anomaly from being higher than normal. The stats I found, and this is just what I am seeing referenced so I'll keep trying to find a source, is that Trump had 4 million less than 2020 but Democrats had 15 million less. So a general depression of turnout but way more from the Democrat's camp than Trump's.
But either way, if people are moving right, I think they can also be moved to the left, too. I tend to think that it happens when current times are bad, than they stop wanting to move forward and they look for scapegoats. We just need a more equitable economy that works for everyone, and not just the rich.
There's a really good repost at https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/18340229 which shows that actually turnout was higher where it mattered almost across the board, though alas it also doesn't cite a reference or source for the numbers. (Remember though that even an extra 81 million votes for Harris in California wouldn't have made a difference in the EC, but split 15 million Dem votes evenly across the seven swing states, and Harris would have won.)
This suggests that there wasn't much of a depression of turnout - perhaps only in the safe blue states, which wouldn't have been impactful.
Of course that's based on an estimate, or guess, on how the total popular vote count will turn out, which is still unknown. We'll see, I guess.
You're right about being able to get voters to switch back to blue. But that's what puzzles me - why did they switch from blue to red in the first place?
But actually you answered this already - it's the age old "it's the economy, stupid." Maybe this was unavoidable then? Biden and his Dem replacement would have always taken the hit on the economy no matter what. The only one eligible to run who might have been able to avoid that stain would have been Sanders.
I am registered unaffiliated because I'm left of our Democratic party, not right of it. I can't be the only one. So some of those independents are progressive.
So I think being a more-left independent is fine (though I'd personally want to stay registered as a Dem just so I would have a chance at voting for the most left Dem candidate in primaries).
But could any of these folks such as yourself have voted Red on the big day? And if so, why??
I totally understand Harris not being the ideal candidate for such voters, but to vote Red instead? How is that an improvement?
I cannot imagine that. The people I know who voted for Trump are either victims of the right wing media bubble, or worried about very specific individual issues - one about guns, one about gas prices, plus I think low information voters who have short memories, I heard a lady on the radio saying "he's a businessman and I am an entrepreneur, I think he will be more friendly to business".
Here, the leftmost are mostly better informed, I think.
Actually I'm starting to move against this view as well. https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/18340229 shows that turnout was even higher than in 2020 (though still waiting on sources for those numbers, which in any case are estimates and not the final count)
Rather than Dems majorly sitting it out or switching sides, it is actually starting to look like all the GOP folks who sat home in 2016 and 2020 finally decided to turn out for orange voldemort. I wonder why though... I guess, they finally thought the economy had become bad enough to punish the status quo leaders.
Yeah, I agree. People think of parties as these static things, but parties are made of people, and the people in the parties change all the time. Republicans freed the slaves and gave women the right to vote. Those aren't the people in the party today.
The Democratic party is going to take on the former GOP people. It won't be a huge shift, but it will shift. The people that voted for people like Cheney are going to become Democrats. The people that were in the Democratic party are going to get pushed to the edges. Because no one votes for them. These petulent children complain that the candidates are not perfect, and didn't "earn it", and "if they're not perfect, then I'm just not going to play the game at all".
It's a lot of talk, and zero action with these people: all excuses - money influences politicians, we don't have a choice.... Two of the questions on my ballot were initiatives, just straight up votes that would directly change how the government is run here - no politicians, no money trail, you just vote on it and the law changes. It's utter bullshit pretending this is a waste of time, and it's everyone else's fault. They sound like a bunch of little piss babies crying in their milk.
The relationship between slavery, women's suffrage, and the Republican party is a little more complicated than that. People fought to end slavery and people fought for women's suffrage.
And it's a similar story with the civil rights movement, Democrats didn't give anybody anything. People demonstrated and organized for their rights. Likewise for workers' rights during the Great depression.
Though I agree with your point, parties do change and nothing is static. But it's pressure that changes them. And with left activism basically dead in our country right now, it's election financing that mostly calls the shots.
Yeah, pressure from voters. Not voting isn't pressure. Don't vote, dont care. Half the country doesn't vote. Financing is bad, but you can't act like it's so bad that 150 million votes couldn't overcome it. And certainly you can't act like 150 million absolutely nothing has any chance of overcoming it.
Financing from corporations affects voter turnout. People are tired of the duopoly. Look at Bernie's campaign in the 2016 primaries compared to Kamala's. It also causes right wing drift in the Democratic Party. Which doesn't get people excited to vote for them.
And the ballot box is dead for the next two years, possibly much longer. Our only hope is the filibuster and left organizing (strikes, protests, marches, etc.)
Shaming people for not voting on the internet isn't going to help anyone. And it's not going to slow our descent into fascism.
We need collective action and direct pressure. And courage. Because the authoritarian regime is likely to counter with state terrorism. And blood is likely to spill.
In any sane system without FPTP and with RCV or similar, though, those who got pushed out could easily form a new party. I could easily see one lead by Sanders and AOC.
But under the system we've currently got, they're both pushing voters for Harris instead. Because there's not really any other choice. They're right, but so are you. There's no place left for folks like us - we'll hold our noses and stick with the Dems because they're the least bad option, but so many transformative ideas are going to languish.
I was hoping that this was just because of the EC and gerrymandering - that the issue was structural and thus the votes that counted didn't accurately reflect what the country as a whole wanted. Meaning we could fix this by fixing the structure (e.g. abolishing the EC). New data however, suggests there is a real rightward and rightwing shift in this country, which is really painful to process.
I agree. This is eye opening, not just the support for a felon, but also the huge number of people who do nothing when given multiple opportunities to do something. I don't want to help people whose idea of action is complaining on the Internet about how they can't do anything, and sitting at home during primaries and general elections.