I’ve heard it said that if you don’t vote with whichever party then you are a coward. I think that’s exactly backwards, and even reflects poorly all the person making that argument. It doesn’t take much courage to go with the group.
Instead I go the other way: no matter which party you might prefer in general, it takes courage to say they nominated a moron, and fortunately the other party also nominated a loser, so no matter what the US is going to slog through these next few years.
In my opinion the courageous position is to say no, you nominated a moron, and I’m not going to give you my vote. We’re going to be okay I guess, whether you win or not, but I’m not going to let you assume that you have my vote if you insist on nominating a moron. You should have nominated someone better. You should have nominated someone worthy of my vote. Do better next time.
That’s the state of #USPolitics . As South Park said, big douche versus turd sandwich. So screw both #Democrats and #Republicans. Neither of you managed to nominate someone worth voting for, so I’m voting for my dog.
To give either party our votes is to sign on to their nomination of garbage people. Let’s not. Let’s say that they need to actually nominate worthwhile administrators.
But more practically, let’s focus on #Congress. No matter who wins this election, they’re going to suck, but we can still express ourselves through our representation in Congress, and that’s honestly how it should be anyway.
Check out your representatives. See how they have actually been voting, and vote them out if they have been letting you down. That’s really where our focus should be anyway.
Not on which jerk ends up in the Oval Office.
(But thank God #Biden is on his way out, as he has been terrible for #science in the US, which has not gotten nearly enough attention from the press.)
@volkris Oh great, yet another insufferable both-sides-er. Just what we need. 🙄
@Acronymesis not at all! You completely misunderstand the point if that’s your takeaway.
It’s not both sides, it’s either side. If either side gave us somebody worth voting for then we should. Unfortunately neither did.
So we should withhold our votes.
Volkris, I'm disappointed.
You know better than that. :(😞
Another thing that people can do is third party. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that that third party is going to win! But I've seen it before that if your party of choice isn't giving you what you want, and enough people vote for the third party, then the party of choice might start looking at all those votes and realize "hey, I could have gotten all these votes. Why did they get those votes and not me?"
People don't think long term, and you can see it in these terms -- a congressman in the US is only in power for 2 years, president for four, a senator for 6. Despite that, people act as if every election is a lifetime appointment.
Of course there's some people who are acting as if the current president will refuse to step down, and honestly even if that were true and I don't think it is, you would also need to have everyone agree to that, and considering that for example Vance has a pretty good shot at being the next president, I don't think he's particularly interested in supporting violating the Constitution to keep Trump in. I think that if push came to shove, the courts have already shown that they're not going to stand by and allow that, the house of representatives isn't likely to allow that (since it damages their power), the military isn't likely to allow that, so we're looking at 4 years for this guy.
Personally, I don't want to see Republican hegemony, so I'm hoping that the Democrats take the next 4 years to go back to the drawing board and figure out why people are playing Halo instead of voting for them. I don't think it would take a whole lot to become palatable to the majority again.
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Yes, exactly. We have so many promoting the norm that a voter HAS to vote, and if they don't then they're actually voting for the other guy.
If only we could push back against that common rhetoric we have a good chance of getting better candidates and better government in the end.
When the norm is that the parties have to actually run people worth voting for, or else voters will stay home, then they'll be motivated to stop running such trash candidates.
You can see how we ended up with #Trump vs #Harris as the two parties relied on opposition to the other rather than actually putting forward quality candidates.