Third party? More like ten or twelve! I was gobsmacked when I saw how many presidential candidates were on my ballot who I haven’t heard of.
Hardest job in the world?
Given how big a shitshow the US is, it feels like it’s a much easier job than most leaders of state. I’d go as far as to say that if your platform isn’t one of complete reform (it never is) it’s probably one of the easiest jobs.
The US being a shit-show is exactly why this job is so hard. You’re constantly having to deal with political crap from Congress or the Supreme Court, state governors suing your administration whenever it does something they don’t like, opposition pundits calling for your impeachment, and that’s not even mentioning America’s foreign affairs. There’s a reason people call the president of the United States the “leader of the free world”.
The US has a geopolitical position to defend and it’s a never ending queue of foreign leaders clogging up your phone line and calendar book either threatening you or grovelling to you. And then there is the unique military position of being the commander-in-chief of the most powerful army in the history of mankind. So the president also has to attend military briefings, decide how to maintain and achieve the USA’s foreign policy objectives using that army, whether to intervene in foreign wars, and so on. The US just has their fingers in so many goddamn pies that the job of president is unbelievably stressful. Yes, you’re the most powerful man (or hopefully next year, woman) in the world, but with that immense power comes a humongous amount of responsibility. You could change the course of human history by merely scrawling some words on a piece of paper. You have the power to fuck up millions of people’s days across the world with a stroke of a pen or by shouting some words down a phone.
You have to contrast this role with the leader of a country that is comparatively geopolitically irrelevant—their foreign policy is probably limited to dealing with the regional counterparts and/or the leaders of the USA, China, or Russia. The President of the United States has to deal with every country in the world because if there’s one lesson we Americans will never learn, it’s to mind our own goddamn business.
Just look at Obama—the man turned from a young energetic candidate to a ready-to-retire late middle-aged man after just eight years in office. Meanwhile, the prime minister of a country like Singapore governed two decades and is still in good condition to continue a career in politics.
She’s also a Russian asset and a vaccine denier.
I hadn’t heard the vaccine thing? What did she say?
I read about it during a different election cycle. I remember it so clearly because an otherwise sensible friend suddenly started talking about how vaccines didn’t work when I mentioned it to her.
Qualifications considered by those funding her campaign:
What event is this?
A dinner celebrating the 10th anniversary of RT in Moscow in 2017.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/guess-who-came-dinner-flynn-putin-n742696
It’s pretty damn indefensible.
Oh look, another person who bases their opinions on gut feeling.
What “gut feeling” would that be? The “gut feeling” that she was there in Moscow to celebrate the 10th anniversary of RT? Because that’s a fact. The “gut feeling” that she sat at a table with Putin and his cronies? Also a fact.
So where does the “gut feeling” come into it? Please show me where.
The gut feeling is where you make an assumption based on the photo.
“Jill Stein works for Putin because she sat at a table with him once.”
But maybe you don’t think that, I could be wrong.
You mean you based your opinion on a gut feeling?
What’s my opinion of Jill Stein?
What a weird reply to someone who only stated facts.
Sure they did.
If the US had a single transferable vote system then you could comfortably vote for a third party, if you wanted to, without helping out the opponent you dislike the most.
You just rank the candidates, so you could rank Jill Stein as 1 if you want, then Harris as 2, and Trump below that. So then if Stein has fewer votes than Harris and Trump each have (likely) then her votes would transfer to whoever her voters ranked 2nd.
Under this system, a third party candidate is more likely to win (maybe you don’t like Jill Stein, but conceivably a third party could produce a good candidate). The ballot under this system looks like this:
Australia had this, our parliament is full of complete assholes. The issue of candidates won’t be fixed by preferential voting. We’re the assholes.
On the plus side Stein is a miles better candidate then Trump and yet his polualty is ludicrious. You also can’t make any changes if you keep doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome.
People at e bizzare, can’t vite fkwr Stein bevoase of this and that but a tozic mile long laundry list of shit from other caduaudates is excused.
Hardest job in the workd is laughable, go pick strawberries in baking heat for a week, that’s a hard.job.
Arizona Prop 140 is trying to implement this exact system. I hope it passes.
And Colorado proposition 131
The ballot example is bad, but I definitely think this is an improvement on the current system.
As with every system; someone will eventually find flaws and then it’ll need updated. Which is how democratic countries should work.
If someone tells you the system is good enough already, you can guarantee they benefit from some inequality.
We’ve already found the flaws in RCV and STV.
Ranked Choice has some serious flaws.
The first and strangest is the monotonicity criterion.
Ranked Choice is the only system that fails it. What it means is that you can actually improve a candidate’s chance of winning by lowering their ranking on your ballot.
Oh yeah, it also still has the spoiler effect, where a third party can fuck over an election. It’s just slightly harder to achieve. But the mechanism that forces two parties remains.
It’s also hard to count and thus more susceptible to malicious actors.
Some of us have been screaming about these flaws for years.
There are better options. Approval is one. It’s dead simple. The ballot instructions are as such. Do you approve of the candidate, mark yes or no next to any, all or none of the candidates listed.
Candidates with the highest approval win.
Approval is immune to the Spoiler effect. It would be a direct improvement vs anything being done in the world today.
And it’s still not the best system out there.
That’s likely to be STAR.
Immune to the Spoiler effect and also protected vs clone candidates and such, while allowing the voter to show clear preferences.
It also is constructed in such a way that it gets around some of those “one person one vote” laws put in place by the anti-voting reform people.
Approval voting absolutely sucks. Not for any mathematical reason, it may very well give us the best results mathematically, but for psychological reasons. If you give approval to both the safe (popular) candidate and your preferred one, then you won’t feel you have expressed your preference once the popular candidate wins. If you only approve your preferred candidate and an opposing (very undesirable) candidate wins, you again regret not voting tactically. In either case, you justifiably have no confidence in the results.
Also, as a candidate, how do you get people to not mark other candidates in addition to you? The answer is you don’t run on your own positions but attacking opponents. Not very healthy for democracy.
I need to think more on STAR.
Gives a much better breakdown than I could.
Cause popular vote is such a bad idea? This is just as flawed as the electoral college.
Can we just say that, going forward, if you’re over 70, we don’t want you in ANY high pressure leadership role.
Your career is over. Shuffle the fuck off.
Pretending these elderly politicians weren’t elected in…
they were elected in like 40 years ago, then made it their career to stay there. so yeah, they may have won an election recently, but being an incumbent and household name in the area gives them a pretty massive advantage over anyone new running against them sadly.
This is about Stein and age in general, but let me say that, for example, I don’t fault Trump for being an absolute garbage person, statistically there will always be garbage people. It’s his supporters I take issue with. Nobody should be voting in incompetent or dangerous candidates, and if they are in a position of power, the average person is to blame.
you don’t fault trump for inciting an attempt to storm the capital, or the lies he’s told to vets, or the attacks he’s invited in minorities? there’s a long ass list of things that you should very much fault him for.
I understand what you mean, but still. the blame can be on a lot of people, such as the voters, trump himself, and the massive power structure of the gop behind him that’s been weaponizing voters for many many years.
Being President of the US is absolutely not the hardest job in the world if clowns like Trump and Bush could do it.
There’s a difference in doing it and doing it well
She has a rich list of accomplishments! Like being a Russian asset
It’s nonsense to assume that every vote for Stein in 2016 would have voted for Clinton. Most exit polls showed that people who voted for Stein or Johnson would not have voted in the first place. Hillary was a losing candidate from the start.
Anybody who cares about Green policy should vote against Trump.
Logically, yeah.
But if these voters were logical they would realize the issue with FPTP voting systems and not fuck with 3rd parties in the first place.
At least not at the national level. Third parties do fairly well locally.
The ones that bother actually showing up. AKA not the Green Party.
Nobody ever claimed “everybody”, just the “enough”, and the data actually reflects that. Even if they didn’t vote, Clinton would’ve won.
I voted for Stein for 2016 (before we knew what we know now), and I voted for Howie Hawkins in 2020. But then I lived in New York, and I knew my vote wouldn’t matter, so I could vote my conscience without threatening the concept of democracy. This year I am in Florida, and I damn well fucking know I’m gonna vote for Kamala Harris and a straight democratic ticket below that. Because I understand the consequences of my actions.
Let us salute this brave soul who has moved to Florida.
God speed.
It was family stuff. I absolutely hate living here, I wanna get back to New York as soon as possible.
That sucks, mate.
Hope you are able to move back soon.
That part. They are repeating 2016 talking points again.
Nader is a mich better example. If 99% of the Florida Nader voters had stayed home and the remaining 1% voted for Gore, he would have won even with the Supreme Court’s decision to stop the recount.
But then I hear so many Trump voters would have voted for Bernie. So who is the real spoiler?
Imagine supporting a political party so unappealing to a majority of the population, that you resort to blaming them when you don’t win.
Trump was appealing enough to win. Was it that he was actually good or are a good portion of voters just fucking idiots?
It is harder to get the bothsidesing done if you think of Repubs as having agency and responsibility for their actions, instead of believing only Dems do. Dems as a collective are also all as bad as their worst member, whom they are all actively colluding with. Repubs are just a few bad apples so we can interpret their actions individually.
Weak ACA is the Dems’ fault, Citizens United is the Dems’ fault, Donald is the Dems’ fault, Dobbs is the Dems’ fault, Chevron is the Dems’ fault.
The first time I voted, I cast it for our green party, not because I wanted them to win, but because I knew they wouldn’t win and my vote would have no effect on the outcome. I haven’t been paying much attention to politics at that point in time so I didn’t have an opinion on who should win. I just wanted to vote to understand how the process works.
Sure and maybe by not voting these people could’ve said “I wasn’t foolish, I was just lazy!”
But unfortunately for them, Jill Stein was on the ballot and they foolishly voted for her and here we are.
Good thing you don’t need to assume that every vote for Stein would have voted for Clinton… In Michigan, the number of Stein voters was ~5x the margin of victory. FIVE TIMES.
And 7 times the margin of victory left the presidential spot on the ballot blank in Michigan, if stein wasn’t on the ballot they would’ve just gone there. People did not like Hillary, blame her for that not stein.
Dems pick garbage fascist candidates. Why blame voters for that?
And the republicans pick rational, honourable, sensible, caring and responsible candidates?
This tbh, if we don’t want Green votes, make better reasons to them to vote the way you want them to vote. They vote green because they don’t agree with the other candidates. They should fix that instead of complaining about it.
Somehow “not facism” isn’t enough for some people
Funding genocide is fascist.
Fascism is fascism, not sure what you are on about. A vote for Trump or Jill is just a vote for genocide here with the rhetoric the right is currently spouting. But I guess fuck trans rights, immigrants, the climate, and the economy because your hill to die on is peace in the Middle East. JFC
I agree. Voting for Jill will fund the trashcan with one ballot. So I guess I’ll have to take the advice of Uncommitted and vote Harris because I am against Donald instead of for Harris.
Why do you think you had to resort to mental gymnastics there?
Why do you think Donald “finish them” “best King of Israel” “Biden is trying to hold Netanyahu back, he should be doing the opposite” Trump would be better for Gaza, or how do you think anyone other than Harris or Trump could become president, or how do you think that letting Trump win absolves you of complicity? Inaction is a moral choice, and it’s not like you haven’t been warmed that Trump is today the most fascist candidate this close to the presidency in our lifetimes.
The mental gymnastics of… listening to what Uncommitted has asked voters to do?
It’s literally not actually. All political ideologies are capable of genocide when taken to extremes, and many have done so. Colonial America, Stalinist Russia, too many absolute monarchies to count…none of those were fascist, but they were genocidal. We associate genocide with fascism because of the Holocaust, but they’re two different concepts.
Bro the overly repetitive usage of that word won’t guarantee you the votes, and worst, may even deter people from voting
By most definitions (some require national malitia backing) it’s fascism. Why mince words or pretend the current rhetoric isn’t following the exact same route as previous iterations?
Oh ð youngins hate ðis one.
Little shitstains become allergic to maþ ð red second it requires ðem to acknowledge shit like ðis or ðat Bernie was absolutely smacked by ð popular vote boþ times.
This thread mostly shows how broken the democratic system in the US is, not that she did anything wrong. Try coming to a real democracy with many parties and coalitions being formed. They actually thrive on dissent, finding compromise and collaborating for the greater good ;)
The fact that this thread replies to facts by going “b-but, Russia” like it’s still fucking 2016 is just peak political literacy from USians. Not only do they vote for candidates everyone hates, they get absolutely piss mad if a candidate tries to run on issues their voters believe in.
I thought the issue with reddit was that it was full of idiots and bots, turns out it was just full of Americans lmao.
Aside from having a friendly meal with Putin, I would say that disappearing for four years, only to suddenly show your face on election years to tear impressionable young, left-leaning voters away from a party that could actually win… that’s not a good thing.
If she, or her party, were for real, they wouldn’t disappear for four fucking years.
I just wish she, and all of her shills, would just crawl back into the hole they came out of. Hoping this happens in a couple of weeks when she inevitably falls off the face of the planet for another four years.
Interesting! I did not know any of this. Sort of confirms my impression which I should have framed differently: the other candidates are so niche that the rest of the world has no clue
What do you mean by disappear? Did Joe Biden disappear after Trump was elected only to show up and run for President? No it’s just that he didn’t have a job in politics so the media didn’t cover anything he was doing and he “disappeared”. If it wasn’t for the medias obsession with trump he probably would’ve disappeared in these last few years too. What do you expect a candidate whose not currently in office to do between runs that wouldn’t make them disappear?
She should work on building her party
She does, but this isn’t England there’s no mass party system where there is much off election work to do. If your party doesn’t have any representation then it’s job is to get representation, and the only time you can do that is during election periods, especially big ones like the presidential season. Even party’s that have representation do most of there work during the campaign season. The Democrats ramp up there work and engagement multiple times over leading into the election.
Tear impressionable young left-leaning voters from a party that could win
Kamala’s Gaza policy did that, stein is just picking up people who wouldn’t have voted any way or would’ve left President blank. The people voting for her aren’t stupid, they know she isn’t going to win, they’re voting for her because they don’t like Kamala and are trying to send her a message.
Biden has been a career politician for decades. He never left DC.
Stein on the other hand… Uh… What exactly does she do again?
Removed by mod
Her buddy Putin definitely doesn’t think she did anything wrong.
I don’t disagree that it’s bad we can’t have third parties, but you need some qualifications to hold the office, and have more than one person at each level.
Hell, I’d argue Stein is less qualified than Trump because Trump has at least been in office once. Her presidency would be a clusterfuck of every other better political group steamrolling over her.
Here’s a deal for the Green Party: I will vote for you for president if you can manage to get a governor or senator elected.
Replace Stein with Trump and it’s still accurate.
There should be a third empty block detailing her campaign before September 2024, because that shit was non-existent.
Not true! Stein had a profound influence on the 2016 election, when she got more votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin than Trump’s margin over Clinton in those states. That doesn’t necessarily mean her voters would have voted for Clinton, but getting Clinton voters was definitely her job.
Nah this ain’t true. Under political accomplishments it should include “amazing Russian asset”
Having dinner in the same room with papa poopin (and everyone’s favorite qanon and traitor, Michael Flynn) and not setting off a Geiger counter is definitely an achievement.
Nothing to see here. Just a quick meet and greet with a traitor and a murderous dictator.
Not good for Flynn.
If you’ve ever been to a wedding then you know just how much Stein and Putin talked.
For political accomplishments, she did managed to get invited to meeting with putin. You can’t be just anybody. You have to give it to her.
As for the qualifications, trump showed us that you can do it at your own leisure, nobody will fire you if you won’t do it.
Twisted mediocre removed achieved everything she set out to do in 2016.
She must be very smug and proud of herself.Putin agrees.
How is Stein connected to Putin?
Because literal nation state level negotiations are the same as socializing at a fundraiser/awards ceremony for Russian propaganda.
The point is that literally sitting near someone is not evidence of anything.
Stein comes out better in this comparison because we can be certain Biden and Putin would have been able to hear each other speak.
You’ve got it completely wrong.
Biden and Putin were in an adversarial setting. They were not there as friends.
Stein, on the other hand, was there as friends of RT, the Russian state propaganda system, and was considered such a good friend of the propaganda machine that they sat her with Putin.
You see how that’s worse, right?
Presidents meet with people because it’s their job. Shills meet with people to make deals.
Did Stein meet with Putin for more than 10s? Sitting 10 feet away doesn’t count.
Were you there? Can you provide the official results from your stopwatch? And for the record- most dinners last more than 10 seconds.
Liberal misogyny always brings out the vote. \s
She’s has experience going to Russia.
…At which she shared a table with Vladimir Putin and disgraced National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.
