I don’t know what was wrong with Joe Biden. It’s hard to imagine that they ever would have asked for a debate if this was the way he is normally. We’ve seen him recently holding press conferences and giving speeches and he seemed to be fine. They said he had a cold so maybe he really was on drugs — Nyquil or Mucinex or something that made him seem so shaky and frail. Whatever it was, it was a terrible debate for him and if he does stay in the race (which is almost certain in my opinion) the campaign is going to have a lot of work to do to dig out of the hole that was dug last night. The media smells blood and they are circling like a bunch of starved piranhas.
. . . For some odd reason, moderator Jake Tapper told Trump in the beginning that he didn’t need to answer the questions and that he could use the time however he wanted. Trump ran with that, essentially giving a rally speech whenever he had the floor and was unresponsive to the vast majority of the questions. He made faces and insulted Biden to his face, at one point calling him a criminal and a Manchurian candidate. If anyone had said 10 years ago that this would happen at a presidential debate they would have been laughed out of the room.
After the debate when most of the country had turned off cable news or gone to bed, CNN aired its fact check. And it’s a doozy:
It sure would have been good if even some of that epic litany of lies could have been checked while people were still watching. The decision to have the moderators sit like a couple of potted plants woodenly asking questions about child care while Trump responded with irrelevant lies was inexplicable. Why did they even bother to ask questions at all? They could have just run the timer and let the candidates talk for two minutes each about anything they wanted. It probably would have been more enlightening.
As long as the US has a two-party system where the third-party mechanically ONLY acts as a spoiler candidate - see Ross Perot for Bush in 92, Nader, Stein, whoever you want to fucking name… whichever THAT 3rd party candidate is most closely aligned with are the ones that get screwed the most.
Voting third-party is about as stupid a fucking thing you can do outside of not voting at all.
Voting third-party is the worst kind of dipshit gesture - like raising your middle finger to flip someone off while a helicopter blade is spinning inches above you. Voting 3rd party means you effectively give another vote to the candidate you want the least.
If the US had ranked-choice voting, then voting for a 3rd party would make sense, but both parties know that this helps them stay in power and so as long as they keep it the way it is, our ONLY choice with a demonstrably positive outcome of any kind is to try and fight super fucking hard in the primaries and hope to God that we can squeeze someone through before dark corporate PAC money missiles or the ring-leaders in the DNC recognize what they are before being able to stop them.
It’s how we got AOC, and a few others from the squad… and it’s how we were even able to see Bernie get to push Biden just a TINY bit more left than Biden would have been otherwise.
If you want to tell them to fuck off… then show up and volunteer and phone bank and knock on doors for the best candidates you can find DURING THE PRIMARIES.
If someone really awesome makes it through to the general… then great!
But if they don’t, hopefully they were strong enough presence (thanks to brave volunteer supporters who wanted to say “fuck you” to the shitty party leaders) to force the right-leaning Democratic members to lean a little bit more leftward than they otherwise would have been (like Bernie helped make Biden do… as much as he could).
Don’t bring Perot 92 up if you really want to believe in spoilers. After everyone freaked out and made that accusation his campaign was shown to have only decreased Clinton’s margin of victory in the electoral college.
It seems counterintuitive but remember that Clinton ran conservative to scoop up republicans who were mad hw bush lied about taxes.
Perot 92 also refutes the idea that third parties can only act as spoilers because perots nafta platform drug Clinton and hw bush’s positions on the trade agreement into the public view kicking and screaming. It’s the reason there was no argument from anyone that we’d need to replace it after it expired before Clinton’s first term was even over.
Political parties aren’t stupid. They have people whose whole education and job is all about knowing how to pick up just enough votes in particular districts in order to win. If you always vote for them no matter what then why would they adopt your platform and policies when they could tack right on the border and pick up a district in Pennsylvania?
You went out of your way to describe third party votes in a lot of flowery language, let me describe third party votes in concrete language:
Third party votes, like all votes, are a record of exactly what positions a party needs to take in order to win each district. If you vote for a candidate who is imprisoning people at the border and funding and denying a genocide, you are telling all the political parties that will spend years poring over the recorded votes “you can lock migrants up and supply and deny a genocide and I’ll still vote for you”.
Stop doing that.
Vote for a candidate from a party with a platform that reflects your values and politics and reap the real documented benefits of it instead of throwing your support behind your abusers.
It’s not a “fuck you”, it’s not a middle finger, it’s telling politicians in the literal only language they listen to what they have to do to get your support.
Name a time when any third-party candidate won the presidency please go ahead. I’ll wait.
And if you can’t come up with one of those name me a time when a third-party candidate resulted in the party changing its actions the next time around for the better…
And if you can’t come up with anything for either of those, then what evidence do you have to prove voting 3rd party would help further accomplish?
It fucking sucks and isn’t fair but it doesn’t change reality.
Reality shows that if you vote for third-party, you make the worse candidate win.
Hillary lost in 2016 arguably because the DNC fucked over Bernie. And what did they do in 2020? Fuck over Bernie harder. They don’t “learn their lesson” or change their behavior for the better.
If you want good people to win, your only option is to fight harder during the primaries and to protest and to run for office yourself… not give the ol’ 🖕🏻 only to have the helicopter blade reduce it to a bloody stump moments after you initially excitedly raised it to the sky to say “fuck you” to the people who won’t even look back while you’re lifting it up.
Lincoln’s second term was a third party victory running under the Union party.
It’s also a great example of a third party causing a major party to change its position for the better because it represents creating a new, broad coalition including a bunch of extant parties that popped up to capitalize on new identities and platforms that sprang into being in the lead up to the civil war and during it.
You know, it’s almost like if you think we’re headed for another civil war then there’s a lesson there…
Of course if you wanna stick with recent stuff, Perot 92, like I said, had a positive effect on both parties because his campaign forced them to talk about nafta instead of glossing over the fact that both Clinton and hw bush held the same incredibly anti-worker positions and neither was interested in wrestling with the details of how the trade agreement would impact American lives.
In this very moment both Biden and trump are trying to bring back (or recreate!) the American jobs lost to nafta.
It’s almost like there’s a lesson there…
Another great example of a third party causing one of the two major parties to change their platform was Nader 2000, who literally ran on the platform of pushing the democrats left and suddenly, as if like a bolt from the blue, the democrats ran more left campaigns in 04 and 08.
Surely there’s no lesson there…
I already detailed explicitly why and how your description of third party votes as protest votes is wrong and represents a fundamentally flawed understanding of the American electoral process, so instead of rehashing that, I’ll talk about the Simpsons.
There’s a funny bit where two tentacled space aliens with big sharp teeth are campaigning to get American votes on different platforms that both boil down to killing and eating their constituents in slightly different ways. A guy pipes up and says “I don’t like any of this killing and eating business, I’m gonna vote third party!” And one of the aliens says “go ahead, throw your vote away!” And the guy takes on a sheepish expression and sits back down.
It’s very funny.
Not because voting third party is throwing your vote away, the conceit of the bit is that voting for either the democrat or republican monster would be throwing your vote away because they intend to kill and eat you, but because the person who steps out and voices an alternative is so afraid of the possibility losing that he can’t continue to speak out against the explicit guarantee of losing.
As I said before, your vote is the only way you can force politicians to listen to you. Don’t throw it away telling them that you’ll stand with them even when they commit atrocities, make it clear that if they need your vote they have to take up your platform.
If you do anything but vote third party you’re literally, not figuratively, literally, explicitly, in writing, expressing support for the democrats and republicans genocide.
Don’t do that.
Right, stick to what’s not working, voting Democrat. 🥾👅
I hate both parties, but I understand what the rules of this shitty game are.
I’m am not living in a fantasy world where doing what feels the most like “sticking it to the man” (but is just an excuse to be lazy and ineffective rather than doing something hard like volunteering to help the campaign of whoever is most closely aligned with my positions in order to push them more toward the future I want) is what results in the most tangible benefit to my interests overall as a voter.
Sorry but opposing genocide and imperialism overrides all other interests, IMO.
Right. And the republicans on their best day would be doing any genocide and imperialism more than even the worst neolib on their worst.
Remember the embassy in Israel was moved by Rs. The Rs got us in to Afghanistan. The Rs got us into Iraq. The Rs caused the Great Recession. The Rs caused the US to have an even more terrible response to COVID, indirectly leading to the preventable deaths of a million people.
Voting for ANYTHING that gives the Rs more power is objectively a more terrible thing.
Again, shitty, but real world.