this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2026
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politics

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[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world -1 points 1 week ago

What is the alternative during the actual election?

This is the wrong question to be asking because, as I seem to continuously have to repeat, this isn't how voters operate and not how elections work. Its not how people operate. And in an election, you don't get to decide how people work. People work however they work. You have no other choice than to adapt to that if your goal is winning an election.

There is a rot in the brain of liberals, which emerged as an extension of a suite of propaganda around "strategic voting". If pushed I could dig up the original clip which was making the rounds almost a decade ago. And the problem with this brain worm, is that it fundamentally misunderstands how voting functions, how voters function, how elections work, and more critically, it does a standard kind of slight of hand that we've seen so many times, where it displaces responsibility from systems and people in power, onto individuals within that system. And you, in your response, are victim to that slight of hand.

Its what the oil industry did when they put the onus for climate change onto individuals (recycling, reducing use, cutting down on meat). Its what the tobacco industry does. And its what the DNC does. Rather than allow the conversation to be about those actually in power, who can actually decide to do things differently, the conversation is flattened to one where, through some magical unprecedented mechanism, mass individualist collective action is expected to manifest, and not only, but to also land on the same collusion around the value of Democrats value when put into power.

Its pure fantasy. It based on hypothetical proposition of voter behavior, one which has repeatedly been demonstrated to be false. There is simply no mechanism for it.

What is the alternative during the actual election?

Push the candidate to where the voters are. Be critical of candidates, harshly so. Force them to hear the criticism so that they move to where voters are. Do not allow them to persist in echo chambers.

You can not move voters in the course of an election cycle. You can move a candidate in an afternoon or during the course of one conversation.