Doesn’t matter what the headlines or the opinion polls say. Vote like democracy depends on it!
I voted for that bowl of tapioca once and I’ll do it again.
I’ll likely vote someone else in the primaries though.
This is the problem, DNC is refusing to hold a primary and is hell bent on forcing one of the only dem candidates who can lose to Trump upon us.
This is mostly about Biden’s ego - he thinks his legacy requires 2 terms. But what of his legacy if he loses the election, and democracy, all at the same time?! It’s madness.
Call your reps. Call the whitehouse. Demand a primary be held so this Titanic can avoid that MASSIVE orange iceberg, because it’s dead ahead right now and we’re barreling towards it.
Maybe their strategy for getting votes could be something better than “the other guy is worse”.
Wake up call for who? Will the Democrats ever wake up and give their base something to vote for, instead of “hey, the other guys’s worse, whaddya gonna do?”.
I think they do: https://www.whitehouse.gov/therecord/
I just think the Dems suck at advertising it. Hell, I think Biden is trying for at least some student debt relief.
You aren’t wrong, in a way. I’m nearing fifty and Biden is arguably the most progressive president in my lifetime. The problem is, that says more about the quality of presidents in my lifetime than it does about Biden, and with the climate crisis and encroaching global fascism, we don’t have anymore time to wait. The Democrats are doing more, now, because pressure from the left has convinced them that they have to, but the leadership is still dragging their feet in defense of corporate profits as much as they can. The fact that they are doing more doesn’t mean it’s time to lower the pressure - it means the pressure is working, and we need to dial it up.
I don’t really agree with you, but even if I did… “advertising it” is a big part of politics! It’s called messaging, and it’s important. You have to get people excited to vote for you. They need to feel like you’re fighting for them. If you can’t manage that, then don’t blame people for not voting for you.
He’s currently failing to handle the current most pressing international issue in a way that satisfies his voter base, though.
What the hell are you talking about???
The dems have absolutely given us things to vote for: infrastructure act, record low unemployment, union support with the pres visiting the picket line for the first time ever, we have the best inflation rate across all of the G7.
Yeah it’s not enough but that’s on the contrarians more than anything else.
The fuck you talking about
They’re repeating right wing propaganda, that’s what’s up.
Sorry, they are not repeating right wing propaganda. They are going outside and having yellow, asparagus smelling, liquid fall on them. Then everywhere they go Democrats are telling them it’s not piss.
I mean generally speaking, if you think the infrastructure bill, inflation reduction act, and billions in student loan forgiveness aren’t “something to vote for”, one of two things are true. Either you’re utterly delusional, or you’re a Republican.
I mean, who else but a conservative could look at these and say they aren’t accomplishments?
Mmmm, no. I heard that Biden and his ultra-centrist party have done nothing to stop deforestation in the Messia region of Mozambique. I’d rather have Trump and vote my conscience than allow globalists like Biden to ruin the Earth.
(just in case… /s)
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The Civil Rights Movement?
Biden could have done what’s best for the country and been a one term president. I’ll still vote for him but not because he’s some amazing leader or anything.
So they did it to themselves if they lose.
I see that point of view. Out of curiosity, though, do you think there’s an obvious next in line on the bench? The only person I can think of as a no brainer for electability is Michelle Obama.
How do you get MO as a no-brainer? I have never seen any indication at all that she ever wanted the job, and I dont understand why voters are trying to ship her with the office like she’s a CW tv show character.
Tats a really hard question. I guess Newsom or Whitmer if we’re talking politicians that seem to be up and coming. But I can think of many other candidates that I would like to see take the position even if they aren’t as electable. Tammy Baldwin, Mark Kelly, he’ll even Adam Schiff, even though he couldn’t win in the general.
Biden is fine but he looks and sounds horrible quite a bit of the time. There is nothing exciting about his policies and I feel he has way too much baggage.
Gavin would probably be the best pick. But if we’re making up scenarios, hell put Tom Hanks in there or Jon Stewart like that other commenter said.
Really I’ll always be bummed about not having Bernie but that ship sailed as well.
I’m not a super leftist, more of a left leaning no centrist. Still reason, passion, radical change for what a leader could and should be like really get me fired up. The policies are important but we all know that the president is a figurehead as much as it’s a powerful position. I’d rather see someone call the citizens of the country together and be a fighter for even the same type of incremental changes that Biden professes to embrace and maybe have a signature mission.
I do feel that his administration is chock full of smart and professional people. As a leader and a figure he’s just old and gross. Haha.
As other commenters have pointed out, anyone but a conservative would be fine. They all fuckin suck with their evangelical positioning and horrible policies. Trump being the nastiest of the pile.
At the beginning of his term, I’d have said they were lining up Harris; black, woman, young, and they made her highly visible in the first few months. I thought for sure they were going to spend 4 years lining her up for 2024. Biden would gracefully bow out citing his age, ride the 1/2 term election cycle, and badaboom: first female president.
And then she faded away. I don’t know what happened; she didn’t poll well, or do well, or polling showed D chances sank without an old white guy in front… but it makes me kinda sad, because I thought it was a good strategy, and it’d be nice to have a run of diversity in the White House.
She was the least (or very close to it) popular candidate in the primary and people are surprised she didn’t get more popular? She is very much the definition of diversity hire, what she is checks all the boxes, what she’s done is massively unpopular to the majority of democrat voters.
So sad that after so many failings, they still cannot learn! Do what’s right, not what’s personally profitable, you scumbags.
Do you want trump? This is how we get trump.
If you support biden, you are the scum bag.
Billions for bombs on Palestine, zero money for student loans.
I will never forget. And I will never vote blue again.
Billions for bombs on Palestine
And that’s wrong. But it’s better than a Trump presidency giving x10 the amount.
zero money for student loans.
It wasn’t zero. Biden was still able to get some borrowers off the hook, just not as sweeping as necessary.
And you’re ignoring SCOTUS’s part of this.
And I will never vote blue again.
Which is the exact type of decision that will lead us to another round of election lies, social safety net destruction, defunding of education, and corruption.
I’d rather haven Biden than live in Gilead.
Task: literally impossible.
unfortunately for us and the world:
Do you want trump?
Roughly half of voters: YES
The government would work a lot better if all the old fucks stopped trying to make everything a petty competition with winners and losers.
As opposed to all the Republicans trying to make it a competition with only losers.
Well, senate. We’ve know we were loosing the senate for 6 years, since these are the people elected in 2018 right when people started to come to terms that Trump wasn’t competent.
The white house will be decided by three groups of 12 people and the delegates at the RNC when Trump can’t accept the nomination in person due to being in jail. “What if all three find him innocent?” Then like the petulant man-child he is, he will do something right after the 3rd acquittal to celebrate being un-jail-able that will cause his immediate arrest.
My problem is that since the first time I’ve been able to vote, the Democratic party has shown they don’t care about who the people may want. They will actively suppress whoever isn’t their chosen one. And there are cases where they fund ads for their crazy opposition instead of building a meaningful case for their candidate. I voted for Biden originally, and I will not vote for Trump now, but I need more than “vote for me because I’m not the other guy”, especially the second time around. If Trump wins, it’s because the Democratic party shot themselves in the foot. Party cohesion is made by leaders who listen to their constituents.
To who? The convicted felon? Or maybe it’s that Florida governor who is pissed off the largest Media company in the world?
A question to American Lemmy users: from what I can tell you are Democrats for the vast majority : would you consider voting for a Republican president if you aligned with his ideas, or if the Democrat candidate was an unredeemable piece of shit? The two party system makes zero sense to me because it doesn’t seem, at first glance, that they’re a huge overlap, people are not willing to go to the other side often, it seems. … what’s the point of having debates and stuff then?
Before the Tea Party movement in the Republican party, yes I definitely could have been convinced to vote for a Republican candidate. I was actually intending to vote for John McCain for president because at that time in history, both parties really did still have their crazy branches, but the relatively rational adults who knew how to compromise for the good of the country still ran the show, and I was genuinely concerned that Obama didn’t have enough political experience to be president.
Then McCain nominated Sarah Palin for his Vice President. That was such a pandering, cowardly, caving to the will of the utterly ignorant, insane extremists in the Republican party move that I voted for Obama. And then the entire Republican party got so mad that a black guy was president that they collectively lost their whole fucking minds.
Republicans no longer want to govern. They want to break things and stay in power and that’s it. That’s their entire platform. There’s nothing to debate because they literally aren’t even trying to DO anything useful. Their entire political position right now is “do the opposite of what Democrats want.” They have nothing to vote FOR. People who vote Republican right now are doing so only because they’re voting against the bogeymen in their own heads.
I would absolutely vote Republican if they were just a bit to the left on abortions, education, and unions. Actually unions and teamsters would totally support Republicans if they weren’t openly hostile to them.
Right now they’re just different flavors of big government endlessly growing and I really think some libertarians need some wins to shake them up.
So, the issue we see is that the republican party has often run democrats, and then had them flip to republican after election.
I don’t trust most democrats either at this point.
The answer, unequivocally, is “Abso-fucking-lutely.” But, you phrased the question wrong because you assume that people that vote Democratic are Democrats. They are not. Something like 20-30% of people who vote exclusively or near exclusively Democratic consider themselves Democrats, whereas Republican voters are around 50-60% for their respective categorization.
This isn’t particularly strange if you think about the authoritarian vs anarchical political dichotomy these two voter bases lean to for more than a second. The real problem with that is that Republicans, as a general rule, would never align with socialist values. So, while technically they could, anyone that claims to be a Republican with my values is almost entirely likely to be lying.
But, you missed a big thing in American politics: The moderate voter. We have a large group of people who consider themselves moderate, for reasons that all range within the realms of apathetic ignorance to willful ignorance. These people have either no moral quandaries with either particular side, are general unaffected by politics in a way perceivable to them, or are people who lean one way but do have moral quandaries with that side. Debates between parties are for them, which is why it’s about presentation, media sound bites, and moderate views.
Anyway, hopefully that answers your question!
Right now? Absolutely fucking not. In the past? No, probably not.
Within the Democratic party, there’s debate about how to handle climate change. There are people who advocate for slow, cautious changes and still see fossil fuels having a small role to play in the future. There are others within the Democratic party that want more drastic action, and make a huge government spending program to try to rapidly move the US energy to renewables (even naming it after one of the biggest US government programs made during the depression). That’s normal politics. And it’s all within the Democratic party.
The GOP mostly deny climate change exists. A few GOP members suggest that climate change is happening, but is a natural event not caused by man.
The recent house drama from the speakership battle was caused because 10 nutjobs didn’t want to fund any social programs and wouldn’t approve the budget. Most GOP compromised and made a TEMPORARY budget proposal that the Democratic reps would vote for. This caused the hardliners to remove the speaker. Because he had the audacity to compromise on a TEMPORARY budget.
Removing policy aside and just looking at behavior, many GOP members do not believe in compromising to get things done. There’s attempts to not hold elected officials accountable (unless they are from the other party). It’s very little cooperation and more retaliation.
A single GOP senator didn’t like that the US military would reimburse a servicemember’s travel for medical care if they lived in a state where some reproductive treatments weren’t available. This one senator has single-handedly denied 360 military promotions and nominations to military positions. The Senate has historically tried to make it where being the minority party still had some power, so the rules let this happen (the other GOP senators on this committee weren’t blocking, just the one guy).
The Democratic senators became so fed up they decided to change the rules to prevent a single committee member from blocking promotions. While most GOP senators publicly condemn this guy, many said this rule change was too much. So it looks like the rule change vote will be along party lines, although the #1 GOP senator has said it might be necessary to vote through to get the military back on track.
The last GOP senator really known for being reasonable and wanting to work collaboratively (McCain) died. He was respected by both parties until Trump came along, and now the GOP don’t really hold his legacy in high regard.
Sorry, a lot longer than I intended, but it’s a pattern showing no desire to try to govern effectively. Putting all issues of policy aside, I think it’s a bad idea to vote for the GOP.
There IS some degree of factionalism within the two party system. It is much more pronounced in the Democratic Party. Ever since Reagan in 1980, the Republican Party’s factionalism became severely diminished. The Libertarians are kind of their most loosely held affiliation.
The primary system is largely designed help direct and influence the political platforms of the two parties. The two parties have made some significant pivots and switches over its history.
But far more importantly however: What has really happened is the Citizens United and lesser known Speechnow decisions by the US Supreme Court effectively legalized corporate buyout of the American electoral system.
And now we got fascists.
The two party system makes zero sense to me because it doesn’t seem
That’s because you haven’t seen it for what it is - a glorified “good cop/bad cop” routine.
Imagine thinking that Trump is in any way, shape, or form, better for you and your family than Biden.
Conservatives and Republicans: hate working class people, hate people that rent, hate minorities including women, want to privatize every last piece of American society so you’ll have to subscribe to your alarm clock and appliances.
I don’t understand how they can possibly put Biden forward again. He’s well past losing his marbles. Way too old to run imo. It’s disgraceful.
Isn’t Trump in the same boat? Trump’s 77, Biden’s 81. One may easily argue they’re both much too old to be running.
Ah yes, the obligatory “the other guy is worse” post. We know the other guy is worse. That doesn’t mean democrats shouldn’t pick better candidates.
Well besides being old he’s not really doing so bad tbh. Who else would you put up for election? Jon Stewart?
I like presidents who aren’t pedophiles.
So you won’t vote for Trump the pedophile. Got it.
A criticism of Biden isn’t praise for Trump, no matter how many times you people try to gaslight yourselves into believing otherwise. Yeah, Trump is a pedophile too, point being?
So I’m supposed to vote for the genocide supplier?
want to privatize every last piece of American society
And Democrats are not doing this?
Like it or not we are stuck with a two party system. As fucking awful as Biden is, and he is, Biden is the lesser of two evils by far. And that applies to democrats/republicans as a whole.
Both parties/candidates are to some degree cool with genocide and privatization, but only one of the two stands out as the worst, and the worst by a lot.
Don’t like it? Vote for local candidates/congressional candidates in primaries that will fix the two party problem. But in the mean time the better presidential option will be anything with a D next to their name.
I will not vote for the party of genocide supply. Aka the dems.
Local candidates are not going fix the two party system. That’s a national issue.
I don’t know the solution, but buying into the Dems bullshit “lesser of Two evils” AGAIN is not it.
Have fun being the same chump you were 8 years ago.
You want to ever vote again? Then take a long, hard look at what each party is trying to do about voting rights. If you want to stop genocide, a Republican in office is the worst-case scenario for you; and there is a non-zero chance that voting against Democrats in 2024 means that 2024 will be our last real election ever, after which the genocide would come across the ocean.
Think about the worst case scenarios here—in case of a blue wave, the worst case is another four years of lackluster governance and pretending to keep our hands clean of the worst stuff happening in the world, while winking at corporate greed and doing nothing about climate change. Not a great outcome.
In case of a red wave, we don’t have to guess about the worst case, because Trump is telling us what he’ll do: make anything but Christianity illegal, militarize the borders to turn away refugees, curtail the first amendment, hand Ukraine over to Russia, help Israel glass Palestine, make it harder (impossible if he can manage it) for people to vote against him, try to get an extra four years as penance for what he sees as a “stolen” election, retaliate against anyone trying to hold him accountable for his crimes, roll back environmental protections that will make climate change irreversible, nominate perhaps another SCOTUS justice who’s even more unhinged than the other three he installed, and vague threats of violence toward everyone who isn’t straight and cis. That is all stuff that he has promised to do at his rallies. And all of that isn’t even touching on the financial disaster that his tax policies actually unleashed between 2016-2020, and the regular horror of mass shootings and white supremacy that goes up under every pro-gun president, but Trump in particular. Not a survivable outcome.
This isn’t a normal election. Giving Trump (or, at this point, any Republican) a chance is off the table. He’s shown us and told us what he’ll do if he gets the White House again. If you want to vote third party to send a message, you have to contend with the possibility that there won’t be anyone left to hear it in 2028. Yes, people’s lives are on the line. So don’t let Republicans have the chance to step across that line.
Replace evey year you listed with 2012.
And replace trump with George w Bush.
These were the same arguments being made by Dems back then. I voted. And we still have genocide supply. The genocide we have now is unacceptable. Just because there is potential for it to get worse don’t mean I should accept they situation we have now.
Biden cut check to Israel with a smile on his face. So will the republican party and so will future democrats. None of them will be getting my vote.
You’re a genocide apologist when you vote blue.
I will not vote for the party of genocide supply. Aka the dems.
They’re both supporting the ongoing genocide. This isn’t helpful for deciding who to vote for.
Local candidates are not going fix the two party system. That’s a national issue.
Which is why I specified local/congressional. It’s going to take all levels of government to unfuck us from a two party system.
I don’t know the solution, but buying into the Dems bullshit “lesser of Two evils” AGAIN is not it.
Only one of these choices is actively trying to turn our country into a theocratic hell hole.
The “lesser of two evils” is fucking awful, but it’s true.
Have fun being the same chump you were 8 years ago.
If you can’t talk about politics without resorting to personal insults then you must know how weak your argument is.
They’re both supporting the ongoing genocide. This isn’t helpful for deciding who to vote for.
You are the one deciding between the two only, not me. I will vote for a candidate that has a platform I can support and nothing else.
It’s going to take all levels of government to unfuck us from a two party system.
The dems continue to get elected because of the Two party system. They aren’t going to change it.
Let me know when it does tho…
Only one of these choices is actively trying to turn our country into a theocratic hell hole.
Yes, and the other will happily participate in genocide, be unable to create real change in Any area I care about and then pretend they are the party of moral superiority.
You vote blue you will still have red on your hands.
The “Biden sucks” narrative is a little out of control at the moment. I hope his team pivots to highlight all of his successes around the time Trump is getting tossed in prison. That should hopefully be enough juxtaposition for even the most terminally online idiots in this country to not vote for the meme candidate again.
Part of the problem also is that centrist Dem voters are single issue queens and will refuse to turn out if they don’t get their way on certain issues, and a lot of them are drawing lines in the sand over Israel/Palestine right now. In case anybody hasn’t be paying attention, let me assure you, Trump will not end the war in the middle east. If anything, he will accelerate it. If you’re unhappy about Biden supporting Israel but calling for an end to hostilities, boy are you going to be upset if Trump takes the White House and endorses full-on genocide of Muslims in the west bank and complete Russian supremacy in Ukraine.
This mentality of picking between worst options isn’t very appealing. Better y’all vote for some third party (even if they don’t win as whole)
that’s almost the worst thing you can do in a two party system, short of not voting at all. It sucks that the system only really allows two parties but throwing away your vote on a third party is not the way to fix it
Why it is a two party system?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_splitting
Our election system is inherently biased against 3rd party candidates. So we’re stuck with two parties.
And money’s involvement in politics just exacerbates everything.
Appealing? No.
Necessary? Depends what the issues are and how they impact you.
It comes down to game theory. Voting against the lesser evil is advantageous to you because if they win, things will be slightly less bad. If you throw your hands up and say it doesn’t matter, you’re not giving any disadvantage to the greater evil.
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As someone who voted third party in the 2016 election, take it from me that you will feel more guilty if you know your vote could have helped prevent the fascist party from gaining power. The presidency is not the office to try to vote on morals, save that for state and local elections that decide things like state benefits programs, distributions of funds, and public works. The federal government is where you will want to vote for the people who are protecting your right to vote in the first place, and that is done by ensuring that the fascist party can’t get a majority or otherwise control a branch of the government.
If the Supreme Court were made up different, maybe, but ending up with an R president just gives them room to pack more courts and see a whole bunch more rights get removed.
As someone who voted third party in the 2016 election, take it from me that you will feel more guilty if you know your vote could have helped prevent the fascist party from gaining power.
As someone who voted for Clinton in 2016 but also supported Sanders in the primaries, take it from me that Clinton’s supporters blame you no matter who you voted for.
When their entire campaign was based on ‘we are not Trump’ then turned out they were exactly like Trump and his policies, they deserve to lose.
Demonstrate how they are exactly like Trump.
- Kept the trump tax cuts
- Same immigration policies
- dumping billions into war machine
- kept Trump’s tariffs
- DeJoy still running USPS, and nominated board of governors keeping him
- hasn’t done shit for wages or healthcare
- Net neutrality still fucked up
- Same foreign policy
- Debt through the roof
- Bidenomics is killing us
- healthcare still out of reach
- kicked millions off Medicaid
- cut billions from SNAP
- double child poverty
- etc etc etc
