Mad at current candidates?! Join your local org; make better candidates. Protest by becoming a delegate instead.

Red or blue or green – more of us involved at the lower levels means more representation at ‘the top’. (at least Democratic; I don’t know how the republican party works)

If we are staring down the barrel of a Gavin Newsom presidential run, and we all think that’s a terrible idea (right?), we still have ability to push for and find better candidates by being part of the local precincts, who send delegates eventually to the national committee.

Where do you think those ‘super delegates’ come from, who is helping pick how to spend DNC advert money? The people who elect DNC leadership came from precincts.

What if I was 0% likely to vote for either of them?

Except the DNC icing out Bernie in 2016 clearly indicates that they aren’t actually democratic, they clearly indicated that they are a private org with no legal requirements to enact the will of the people.

All that said, you better believe I’m still voting for the not fascist party, but also still trying in my weak little ways to advocate and advance ranked choice voting to enable the undermining of the two party system.

In most states, primaries are how a party picks its own nominee. Voting in the Democratic or Republican primary chooses which Democrat or Republican is on the November ballot. It doesn’t help a third party at all. Many third parties don’t use state-run primaries; they nominate at conventions. And in closed-primary states, like Maryland, you can only vote in the primary of the party you’re registered with.

The bigger hurdles come before and after the primary. First, a third party has to get on the ballot. That usually means collecting petition signatures or meeting a vote or registration threshold, and the rules differ by state. Then the candidate has to win a plurality in the general election, where the spoiler dynamic pushes voters back toward the two major parties. Primaries don’t change either of those.

Some primary systems make it worse. California and Washington use “top-two” primaries, where only the two highest finishers advance regardless of party. Third-party candidates almost never place top two, so they’re usually absent from the November ballot entirely.

The system is wired against third parties. They have to work significantly harder just to be eligible to be voted for.

That’s why you can’t “Just vote in the primaries”

A literal court case affirming that the DNC isn’t obligated to respect the will of its voters is “just” a “talking point” or “propaganda?”

Methinks your catchy little slogan “vote blue no matter who” is actually the propaganda/talking point, pot meet kettle.

Nope. I’m not fine with either, but I’ll do what I can do stop us from speedrunning fascism.

This is a non sequitur.

Yeah, the bipartisan holocaust is just what it is, I guess, to these people. They just give up on going against it as soon as Democrats are for it.

Voting blue donkey slows the slide, it doesn’t stop it. Remember they are the pall in the system

I have eyes that can see that myself and many people around me are obviously materially less safe than we were under any previous president in our lifetimes?

How many boats of civilians did Binlden order to be sunk? How many heads of state did he kidnap or assassinate in wars of choice? How many American cities did he occupy with military units? How many of his political opponents did he have the justice department charge with baseless crimes? How many Nazis did he dine with?

The Dems piss me off, but saying the only reasons to say they’re no different than the Republicans are:

1. Being a fucking idiot ;or

2. Atremptingto prop up the GOP by convincing leftists not to vote against them.

Sure, that’s obvious to you and me, as seasoned internet users. But we can’t expect lawyers and career politicians to understand such things. They must be ignoring it by accident.

did you even comprehend what they said?

People will hold a vote to see if everyone gets punched in the face three times or once. Would you not vote for only one punch?

Your outcomes are between the candidate who will hurt you and yours less vs the candidate who will hurt you and yours most.

If you’re lucky, choosing to not vote will still lead to the candidate that will hurt you and yours less.

Be as pedantic as you want: this is the reality of it.

Do whatever outside of the election season to change that but once the final polls happen, those are the only choices you have.

It’s like when you get beat up and you’re on the ground. You try to protect your vitals and hope you’ll survive to fight another day.

Not voting is idiotic and lazy.

Okay let’s see. We have a large part of the population who just won’t vote. Voter apathy is real.

Of the Democrats and Republicans, you have about 2/3 of each party that are voting like it’s a sports team. They’ll never change and they’ll never think.

The thinking people who vote for each party understand that the third party has no chance and they’re trying to sway things generally in their direction.

So the third party victory plan, if I have it correct, is to overcome voter apathy, and also to sway some people who are voting like a sports team from both parties.

If that’s your plan for victory, then you don’t have a plan for victory. And you’re just wasting your vote.

Call me cynical, but I think third parties are funded by people outside the country to sway the election. Just like they only thaw out Jill Stein every 4 years to steal votes from the Democrats, and then they park her in a Russian freezer somewhere for the rest of the time.

Yet Jill Stein vanishes for four years between Presidential elections and does absolutely nothing to support a third party coalition at the state and local level.

And she somehow deserves your vote for simply not being a D or R? Yeah nah.

If that was really the strategy they would start with local elections.

I’m not sure I fully understood that . But the first step in any change is ranked choice voting. If we had that then we could do three parties or more.

As it stands, we’ve devolved into a two-party system and neither party will give up control.

No. It’s “which of these two horrible choices might we influence to make some progress”

You don’t get a third choice for the big things. It’s mathematically and literally impossible.

Pro-trans? My nuts, they were pro trans when they could use that as a tool to get votes, then they dropped them like a stone the second trump won again to try and pull votes from the right. Same thing they’ve been doing with POCs since like the 70s, they don’t care they just want your votes to keep the insider trading machine rolling.

What’s more they (and by “they” I mean BoTh of them) actually have an incentive NOT to fix anything, at least not in any meaningful way, because if say, the Ds actually do get guns banned (or Rs and abortion, etc), then they can’t run on it again in the future and that’s one less wedge issue to indoctrinate you into the color cult with.

Well you have to accelerate miserable conditions if you want the workers to rise up. People might die, but they’re just little trash people, so the ends justify the means.

“Third-party” in the context of US politics (I think that’s where it comes from and is most widely used, owing to its major structural problems that almost inherently create only two major parties federally) is an abstract term referring to any minor political party, not specifically the third-most-popular. There’s no such thing as “voting fourth-party”, so an nth level of abstraction beyond that becomes absurdist.

Yeah I live in Australia where we have preferential voting.

I have always voted left of our major parties, because like the rest of the world, our major “left wing” party is centre right and our right wing is way too far to the right. Everyone right if that is extremely racist or a billionaire. Usually both.

But we have options, and even if the major party wins they have to negotiate with the smaller parties if we’ve won them seats in parliament. Voting for the minor parties and independents first based on policy sends a message that these are the things that matter to us. If they want to win the next election they’ll have to support them or we’ll continue voting for the minor parties.

The liberals (our right wing party) handled covid and the following months so poorly that they were essentially ousted in western Australia. They are so small now that they hold the same amount of power as the minor parties. Labor (the “left wing” major party) won 46 of the possible 59 seats and the liberals only got 7. They’ve had to form a coalition with the slightly more right wing minor party to have any voting power. Which has caused them to slip even further right and lose even more votes in the following local elections.

or… representative democracy. where nobody “wins”, and the percentage of votes decides the percentage of representatives in parliament.