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Sure, man. Voting for Kamala somehow equaled a vote for Trump. Not sure how that tracks but if you say so. 👍
Keep missing the point and keep throwing elections for us then.
Which point?
Honestly, if you really need it explained to you at this point, I have to assume you are asking this in bad faith.
Go ask @SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world to explain to you how you've become the villains of your own narrative.
And in the most superficial terms, the exact kind of framing you are using right now is what was used to hand Trump the election. If not for people doing exactly what you are doing now, we probably could have gotten Harris over the finish line to a W, but for the reasoning you are using right now. And since its been so well studied and is incredible obvious now, we must simply assume that those asking/ following that line were never interested in a Harris W, and that it was always in bad faith.
Not bad faith, I just want to make sure we're saying what we each think we're saying. Because I don't think you're quite responding to what I'm actually saying, at face value.
I'm not saying she ran a good enough campaign and everyone should have been enthusiastic about her. She absolutely made bad choices by letting the DNC machine make bad choices for her, and I absolutely recognize that those cost her votes and that. I'm not saying the primary process was totally the awesomerest best one we could have possibly hoped for, because it wasn't. But I think the media coverage of the 4% primary voter turnout for Uncommitted, which surely had an impact on Democratic donors putting pressure on Biden and the party to change course, just serves to validate my belief that if we actually all came out and voted, we'd have a more representative government. Enthusiasm for the Harris/Waltz ticket was sky-fucking high at first and then it was squandered with milquetoast status quo. No argument from me about that.
What I am saying, is that in isolation, come the general election in 2024, voting for Harris was the only action that would have prevented Trump from winning the 2024 general election. I feel like that's just incontrovertible math. If you're saying to me, in response, that looking solely at the singular event of the general election in 2024 (not the primary season, or anything that happened on the campaign trail, just the general election itself), that my vote for Harris in the 2024 election helped Trump win the 2024 election, then I think you need to show your math because it sounds truly insane.
But I don't think that's what you're saying. So I'd like a little more clarity on what you're saying rather than making assumptions and inferences.
Okay, so you are approaching this in good faith, which I appreciate and acknowledge and will invest the time it takes to have this conversation around. But as this is the case, its important to note that this conversation isn't happening in a vacuum, that I've had this conversation or variants of it almost continuously since 2023, and that context informs this current conversation; that they are inseparable.
There's no real point in beating around the bush and this sentence highlights my core criticism; I identify it as a fundamental component to why Harris (and honestly, Hillary before her) lost. You're effectively making one leg of the argument around strategic voting, or at least a summarized version of it. And that is pretty squarely where my criticism lands. The conclusion of those advocating for strategic voting, or rather, the idea that voters had no other choice, or that the most "rational" choice for voters should be Harris, was well represented and communicated during the campaign. And the problem which, by its on acknowledgement it creates, is that it ignore the fact that voting in a two party system, however much the proponents might resist, is not a binary.
Voters always have another place to go, and this is fundamentally the damage that this advocacy does and the problem it creates, is that it ignore the fact that voters can choose to not participate in-lieu of accepting your framing of what you consider the smarter choice to be. The downstream impact of this is voter disenfranchisement, and that also, campaigns recognize and are paying attention to whats being communicated. They also see and understand your communication that you see this act as being the only "rational" choice and they adjust their actions accordingly.
When political projects recognize your vote as a given, or see themselves as the only "rational" choice in the matter, they understand to themselves that they do not need to earn your vote any longer. And we saw this play out in real life in both 2016 and 2024. Both campaigns recognized the limited suite of choices, and rather than engaging less than likely voters to become engaged, they instead chose to focus on attempting to bring "across-the-aisle" voter to their side. The problems with this are multitudinous and obvious and I don't think need additional explanation here as others have done better and in greater detail elsewhere.
The problem is that the "strategic voter" cuts against their own cloth; "strategic voting" as an electoral strategy has been demonstrated, over and again, to lose elections. As a voter you should never be communicating to a campaign that "they've got your vote" or that "if voters were smarter, they'd have voted Harris", because in doing so, you do two kinds of damage to that campaign. First, the campaign understand they no longer need to compete for your vote, and what you need to recognize, is that when a campaign is competing for you and your voice that you are using, there are 2-3 additional people they'll convenience if they recognize that they need to focus on you and meet your need to get your vote. The second kind of damage is that you disenfranchise people when communicating this, that they only have some kinds of choice, when they do know that they actually do have more choices available to them. They can just not vote. And this is the choice Americans made as Harris understood and was communicated to that she didn't need to "go get" Democrats votes. She thought she could focus on getting Republicans to vote for her, and it utterly failed. And many of us, my self easily one of the most consistent and outspoken voices on this matter, worked to communicate that this strategy would fail months before it ultimately did. And we were met with the consistent repetoir of "Well the only way to stop Trump is for voters to vote for Harris".
And what this belies is a fundamental misunderstanding of the mechanisms on which politics operates. You can't just "move voters" to a candidate. But you can move candidates to where voters are. And I say that softly. Obviously, over time, you can convince voters of things, but in the course of a campaign, this is somewhat ridiculous. Campaigns are short and attention spans are shorter. Its far more effective and strategic focus on moving a candidate, rather than an electorate, in the course of a campaign. And you can't move a candidate if you've already acknowledged you'll vote for them regardless. And strategic voting is effectively an opposing frame work to what I've outlined.
A similar conundrum exists in recycling or with climate change. We were propagandized to that your individual action is what needs to change to change the course of things in this that or the other matter. But actually, it doesn't work. You can't just ask voters to do better and then expect them to. Like with pollution, you need to focus on where the power is; in industry, at the political agent/ player level. You can change those people and move them to better positions and get better outcomes. But just expecting voters to "do better" according to whatever your recipe for that is, is to cultivate disaster.
So .. that's all what I thought you were saying, so thanks for that. And I do you get your point about the long term strategy of how we vote in year N impacts the campaigns in years N+2 and N+4. But none of that changes the fact that in any given election, there will be a winner regardless of the number of people who vote. A candidate will be declared a winner, period. In the case of president. To take it an absurd extreme example, if there was literally 11 votes cast for president in the entire country, with one person total from each of Ca, Tx, Fl, Ga, NC, NJ, Pa, NY, Oh, Mi, and Il all voting for the same one candidate then they would have 270 electoral votes and be named president. The other 189.5M registered voters sitting out the election wouldn't have stopped it. So from a very raw mathematical perspective, I just don't see how anyone can claim there was any way to prevent Trump from winning on election day other than by voting for the Democratic nominee (considering that no 3rd party presidential candidate has received a single electoral college vote since 1968, even Ross Perot in 1992 with basically 19% of the national popular vote had zero electoral votes I don't believe we'll have viable third parties anywhere that doesn't have ranked choice voting). And at least in the 2024 election, I personally think that stopping the faction that was literally advertising their very unapologetically white nationalist Nazi-inspired platform fronted by the guy who said repeatedly he wants to be a dictator and that if we voted for him in 2024 we'd never have to vote again, really could have been a more important goal than trying trying to position for a better 2028 campaign at the expense of the now. Most other elections, I would feel a little different. But not this one.
Both things are true here. Voting for Harris would have told the DNC that hey they didn't do the wrong thing (which is not the same as hey you did the right thing). And enough people not voting for Harris because the DNC sucks also gave Trump the win. I can call out both sides of those statements involvement in the election cycle and be correct about it. Pointing out the faults of the one doesn't ignore the faults of the other. That doesn't mean I think you're wrong about long term strategies. But I think people sitting out the primaries is the bigger issue on that front. We've seen repeatedly that when progressives run and people come out to vote, the progressives win against the opposition from withing of the neoliberal Democratic establishment. So we need to collectively stop waiting for the DNC to listen to us, and shout it in their faces louder than ever before in the primaries. And yes, I'm well aware that there really wasn't a choice to make for president in the 2024 Democratic primary. But there were a lot of other choices to make and not one state hit even 40% turnout in the 2024 primaries.
I don't believe that not voting encourages future campaigns to reach out and engage to win your votes. We had pitiful turnout in the 2024 primaries, and it didn't convince the DNC and Harris to go and listen to the non-voters to form their campaign strategy. It encourages them to really not give a crap about your opinion because if you don't like theirs you're going to stay home instead of vote against them. Beto wouldn't have got so much attention for his unorthodox 2018 Senate campaign of actually going out to every county and talking to people all over the state if pursuing the historically non-voting was the typical campaign response. I believe that showing up to the polls to get your name on public record as being a reliable and regular voter is what tells them you are a potential vote against them so they better try and earn your vote. "Uncommitted" only made up 4% of the vote in the 2024 primary, and it was big news. Imagine what 75% primary turnout and 15-20% of that being "Uncommitted" would do to motivate the campaign strategists.
So anyways, you have your views, I have mine. We've both spoken frankly and listened openly. Cheers.