in some places you can vote by mail pretty easily, but with all the barriers around voting in general, it's not a good assumption that people (in the millions) will necessarily give up valuable labor time to wait in line to vote for a third party candidate they know cannot win, purely for symbolism...

[–] GlueBear@hexbear.net 2 points 6 days ago

That's what's going to happen. Fewer and fewer people will find any kind of justification to vote in future elections as time progresses.

But to libs not voting is voting for trump, so it doesn't matter anyway.

[–] Dimmer06@hexbear.net 3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

At most Kamala only "lost" 2.1 million voters to other candidates this election (realistically it's probably around a million). If that's the case then 5.9 million voters voted for Biden in 2020 and nobody in 2024 but still casted a ballot. Now maybe that's because of Gaza but from my experiences with the American electorate I highly doubt that the majority of those people are refusing to vote for Harris because of Gaza, refusing to vote third party, and yet still voting. I think if Americans had coherent anti-genocide politics then the anti-genocide candidates would have seen more growth than 5% of Harris' losses. I don't believe Americans have coherent politics though so I doubt most of those voters were taking a principled anti-genocide stance when they didn't vote for anybody.

This isn't to say that abstentions or votes for other candidates because of the genocide could not have played a significant role in the fucked up math of the American electoral system, merely that it didn't drive her huge loss in the popular vote from Biden's victory in 2020.