Yes, the Dems are fatally infected by AIPAC and are best put out of their misery. That said, given the people voted for Trump, they’re unlikely to vote for AOC. She doesn’t appeal to knuckle-draggers.
Trump won mostly because of an apathetic Democrat voter. We don’t need to win over republicans, we need to energize people who didn’t vote.
Did you listen to the latest tiff between David Hogg and James Carville?
Carville really wants to push progressives out of the Democratic party while keeping their heads in the sand. I think his last rant was because Hogg wants to replace existing Dems (Carville says he should be replacing Republicans). However, I think Hogg wants to do this because these Dems aren’t really doing anything and waiting to pick up the pieces from this Trump administration. I think agree more with Hogg that it’s more important to show the people that you represent them rather than be like: “we’re not the Republicans”.
I’m not an entire fan of Hogg though, he seems a bit inconsistent but I agree with him here.
To be clear, people should have voted for the Democrats. We’re all in the position we’re in because not enough people did. Would you get what you want? No. But we still wouldn’t be in the mess otherwise. I mean, assuming the election wasn’t stolen.
That being said, all these older people that don’t seem interested in fighting for their people need to be purged from the Democrats. I don’t know if it’s because they’re really old or out of touch or what. There’s a thirst for people to want representation for them to fight (as seen by the AOC and Bernie rallies). I think their inactivity isn’t helping for the most part. Also, they need to get some more names out there.
It’s because the democrats simply cannot fund-raise on the kind of populist progressive policy Americans actually want.
Democrats are up schitt’s creek without a paddle - they can’t fund-raise without the support of the large donor-class, and their increasingly populist progressive base are simply not satisfied by the kind of economic policies those donors are desperate to preserve.
If democrats stay this course they will never hold more than 45% of congress again and only win the white house maybe once every 3 or 4 terms.
If democrats stay this course they will never hold more than 45% of congress again and only win the white house maybe once every 3 or 4 terms.
Yeah I’m feeling that.
You bring up really good points. How do you go to the large donors and say, “give us more money to help take more money from you”.
Can we get Andrew Yang as an option?
you mean Asian Joe Biden?
No the only adult in the room willing to talk about wealth redistribution
he didn’t have a real plan for that though. it was a semblance of a plan.
I still feel like the dnc is going to lean heavy into Buttigieg. He’s young, an eloquent speaker, a sharp debater. He clearly is down to play ball with the dnc establishment as they want him to (stepped aside for Biden to get a cabinet position) , and they hope that he’s baggage free enough (Kamala and her Marijuana prosecutions) that progressives will vote for him. Yes, he’s gay, and the hardcore magats won’t like that, but I think older suburban voters would rather have someone sane that’s gay than insane and straight.
Then it will be 2016 all over again
Leftist leadership or the status quo are the options
And only the rich want the status quo anymore
I think you vastly underestimate the hate conservative voters have for gay candidates.
if they have any hope for a candidate it’s someone like Tim Walz. old, white, trustworthy, and a “too old for this shit” attitude.
Well yeah: America Is a conservative, religious country. Always has been
As a non-conservative and non-christian american, i approve of this comment.
If you don’t like trump and you didn’t vote, then you’re to blame.
My country has compulsory voting so nobody has an excuse
If my country had compulsory voting and my choices were trump and harris I would have voted for mickey mouse. Or do they send somebody in with you to vote for an approved candidate? Because that doesn’t sound like anyplace I’d be interested in living
If my country had compulsory voting and my choices were trump and harris I would have voted for mickey mouse.
A stunning example of exactly the kind of performative pro-genocide bullshit that put us in this mess. Wonderful.
Is you didn’t vote for Harris, you’re to blame.
Negative IQ take
No, it’s the Republicans who are to blame. The Democratic leadership is to blame for not putting up a candidate or policies that the voters wanted.
It’s always amazing to me that people will blame the people who couldn’t stomach to vote for the Democrats, rather than getting mad at the Democratic leadership for being so awful that people can’t stomach to vote for them.
Yeah I agree. I see a lot of folks out here victim blaming rather than critiquing the folks with the most power.
True! One is an ocean of random people with their own beliefs, reasons and personal choices. The other is an institution. An organization with a plan. A plan they wrote themselves. A plan they get detailed statistics and polling data on. A plan in which they saw what they needed to do to win and chose not to, effectively betting on anti trump sentiment to keep them from doing the thing parties in their position are supposed to do. Concede to the people and make concessions. Instead they said “status quo, steady as she goes” mid genocide, mid rent crisis, post covid and they lost that bet. No one is to blame other than the gamblers who played power politics and lost to fascists.
The people are not an organized voting block able to strategically maneuver their votes. That’s what a party is for. That’s it’s whole purpose. And the Democrats failed as a party in that election due to their inability to stop committing a genocide, to stop pandering to mid right voters via radio silence on trans issues and active abandonment of immigrants via the adoption of 2016 trump immigration policy.
I mean come the fuck on, she was talking about FINISHING THE FUCKING WALL, the thing we all agreed was the dumbest thing ever. What do you want when the party runs someone like that?
I get you people who wanna blame the leftist in your life or on the Internet you saw saying they wouldn’t be voting. I get that you blame them. But you should blame the party who thought they could win without conceding anything whatsoever to any of the marginalized groups who had no other choice. They learned that there in fact was a 3rd choice and now we all suffer the Democrats incompetence
I didn’t vote, and it doesn’t matter that I didn’t vote.
There are mass counties that had 0 Harris Votes and all DT. This is a statistical impossibility. On top of the already impossible results we’ve seen with the election anomaly all point together at obvious voting fraud. The election didn’t happen as you think it happened, it happened because billionaires conspired together to put a lunatic at the helm.
Really, how do we get viable third parties? How do we change the voting system to not have " spoiler candidates "? The binary is rotting us.
We’re nowhere near to it. It has to be a grassroots effort from convincing all of our population it is necessary. Because neither the DNC or the RNC really want it. More parties means they lose power. The DNC pretends to not be opposed, but they undermine third parties all the time. We have to fix first past the post, and neither party is going to help with that.
You go out and work in the primaries.
Look at AOC. The guy she ousted was a mainstay of the NY Democratic Party for decades.
If you wait until the general election you get no input.
But that’s not the end of it as this still maintains the binary. First, what are the measures for getting third parties on the ballot? Second, how do we get rid of the fptp system so that we can actually vote for candidates we like, rather than the lesser of two evils?
Edit: I responded too quickly at work, and fixed it up later.
I’m no fan of FPTP, but let’s not put the cart before the horse.
You aren’t going to change the rules for the 2026 primaries.
Concentrate on what is doable.
1000% this. Half our problem is people removed that their perfect candidate is not an option, and that they don’t want to vote ‘against’ someone.
The time to be active is NOW, not complaining about your choices in October 2028. Left media isn’t helping here, since they want to complain about how the election is still years away and yet we’re talking about potential candidates… YES, we are. If you’re not talking now, then you’re not in the conversation. Is it great to have a 24x365x4 political cycle? hell no. But is it what we have? yes.
Join your local democratic organization and get familiar with how things work. Help choose a ‘not fascist’ candidate for now and push for better down the line.
If you’re here, reading this, and you want things to be better, then you have two choices: vote blue no matter who (ceding your choice to others who are involved), or get involved and be part of the decision of ‘who’ is blue.
1.) Federally and statewide, you’ve got to vote for the party that isn’t making Ranked Choice or Star voting illegal, for starters.
2.) Locally, third parties have to actually run local candidates. They are a vanity party otherwise.
If you can’t manage those two things, math & chaos theory guarantees that you’ll never have a 3rd party.
I want Approval Votingand Sequential Proportional Approval Voting, but will support any electoral reform referendum or bill.
And when those get enough name recognition with the electorate, the GOP will start passing bills to make them illegal in red states.
How? Probably not via voting in 2028 or holding a sign. As in, not within the pre-existing failing/failed system. This one isn’t gonna recover.
After the people are in charge of the smouldering ashes, you can start from scratch! The one upside. Assuming USA doesn’t just submit passively and end up like Russia with a broken people for centuries, which is what I’m expecting.
Copy Canadians. Including the limits on campaign length, so your news cycle isn’t so endlessly exhausting. No wonder 1/3rd have totally tuned out. IMO scrap FPTP like we didn’t have the balls to do.
I guess that’s the crux of the question: does it really require smoldering ashes to get this done? Entrenched power is obviously tough times, but within the system we currently have what are the possibilities?
Not sure anyone really knows yet. I’m a pessimist by nature, so there’s blind spots and I freely admit them.
Not by going directly for a moonshot at the presidency. You spend years getting people involved in local politics, then work your way up. State and local governments have power, even if it’s “boring”.
That or a coup or other violent, abrupt, wildcards.
Local government isn’t boring. It’s infuriating. It’s like if you gave the worst HOAs a police force.
Whatever it is, most people don’t engage with it.
I tried to and then realized that they can’t actually help with the main things I want changed, and that they’re just sad little kings of sad little hills.
how do we get viable third parties?
By having a third party that’s willing to put in the work and do things the right way.
So, instead of having a do-nothing candidate like Jill Stein who shows up right before every election, then disappears again after only obtaining a half of a single percent of the total votes, we’d have to have a third party that started focusing on winning local/state elections. That would allow them to start having more than ZERO members in the houses of Congress, which is currently the case. And once they have members in Congress, from various districts around the country, then they’d have a real chance at running a presidential candidate who can win.
Make no mistake. Anyone that currently votes for a 3rd party candidate for president is an utter fool. And there are A LOT of them on Lemmy. A 3rd party cannot win. They are nowhere near winning. Because they haven’t put in the work to create a coalition to actually start having a presence in our government.
Don’t neglect that Stein was a Russian plant to spoil the election. Follow the money and Stein’s activities pre and post election.
Yeah, it was pretty obvious.
But whether she was or not, a 3rd party candidate for president can only serve to split votes and increase the possibility of the worst candidate winning. And that will be the case until a 3rd party starts getting serious and getting representatives in Congress.
It’s a literal joke to vote for a 3rd party candidate when they don’t even have reps in either house of Congress. Do the people who vote 3rd party not think about what would happen if one magically won when they have no one from their party in Congress to help achieve their agenda?
Have you considered just having like a local group organized around something like pro-labor or just the community in general.
Elect officers or organize how you think best. Call meeting invite guess to speak to issues you all like. When elections come around try to solicit questions to all the campaigns. Have the organization vote as a group on who to endorse or not at all.
If it’s worth the effort, work the campaigns for the folks you all endorse.
More people did that stuff then starting a third party in state would be easy. From there you go forward. If you do well or brand then you may have others in their region wanting to do the same. National two parties are federations of these groups with more binding Charters.
Many States have these hurdles for recognized political parties but they can’t stop folks from just organizing how they want.
What you need is a Bernie Sanders funding his own political party, then recruit the AOC and likes. Then they constantly for 20 years present on themselves and refuse to compromise with Democrats and call them on their bullshit whatsoever.
But idk why they didn’t do it sad for you
Back in the day, Abraham Lincoln did not vow to end slavery if elected.
Frederick Douglas worked for Lincoln, because Lincoln was the best candidate.
We tried working with the lesser evil and it doesn’t work anymore.
The reason Bernie never won the dem primary is that less people voted for him
no, the reason why Bernie never won a primary is because Hillary and Wasserman circumvented voters choice because Clinton wanted to be the first woman president over putting forward the only candidate that could have went head to head with Trump in 2016.
and before anyone says I’m wrong, tell me why Wasserman stepped down as the DNC chair?
Clinton was never an appropriate candidate that could ever hope to go against Trump. Both of them are to blame for the current state of our country because they were blinded by achievements over what is best for our country. it’s a common problem for democrats.
I have no doubt we would be in a better place today if Bernie had been presented as the democratic choice for president in 2016.
Clinton received the majority of votes in the primary. How did they “circumvent voters’ choice”?
Superdelegates. They are supposed to make their votes when things are nearly settled. As a collective, they voted for Hillary before the contest even started, which gave people the impression that Hillary was winning.
This is like a judge giving their opinion, before letting jurors discuss their decision.
Superdelegates don’t vote until the convention, potentially they could have still nominated Clinton if Sanders won the pledged delegates, but it never came up, since he didn’t. Like I’m not contesting that the party establishment favored Clinton, but you can’t say they circumvented the will of the voters when the nominee was the person who won the popular vote.
But opposition to Wasserman Schultz, both public and private, had been gaining steam following the publication late last week of leaked emails which seemed to show a plot by DNC officials to damage Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary.
The emails fed the criticism from progressives and Sanders’ supporters that Wasserman Schultz and her team were hostile to his campaign from the start and had done their best to help Clinton win the Democratic nomination at the Vermont senator’s expense.
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/wasserman-schultz-wont-preside-over-dnc-convention-226088
Amid furor over an email leak that revealed a bias against Bernie Sanders inside the Democratic National Committee, U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz announced Sunday she will step down as chair.
https://www.npr.org/2016/07/24/487242426/bernie-sanders-dnc-emails-outrageous-but-not-a-shock
“I know that electing Hillary Clinton as our next president is critical for America’s future. I look forward to serving as a surrogate for her campaign in Florida and across the country to ensure her victory,” she said. “Going forward, the best way for me to accomplish those goals is to step down as Party Chair at the end of this convention.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/debbie-wasserman-schultz-resigns_n_5795044ae4b0d3568f8397f7
so tell me. why would Clinton have more votes? OH YEAH! because of the bias that Wasserman forced upon the DNC!
I could go on and on with reports just like this but I’m pretty sure my point has been made.
Clinton and Wasserman were working together to circumvent voters choice in order to ensure that Clinton was THE candidate. Unfortunately they gambled with our democracy and lost.
it’s worse than whatever you’re thinking too. the only reason why they were caught is because they were trying to cheat. wikileaks wouldn’t have had anything to leak had they not try to fuck over Bernie.
All voters fall out of coconut trees.
Okay but the point is they should’ve been able to run a wet paper bag against Trump and win.
Dems chose someone worse than a wet paper bag.
It wasn’t the wrong candidate, it was the wrong campaign.
The Dems stood in front of an electorate crippled by 4 years of rising cost of living and said “Look how good the economy is! GDP is up! Employment is up!” The electorate said “We can’t afford eggs,” and the Dems said “Shut the fuck up our economy is great how dare you say otherwise you worthless peasant!”
The Dems never stopped to consider that high GDP is meaningless if all the money ends up in the hands of billionaires and high employment is meaningless if everyone is working three jobs to make rent. Biden refused to allow any daylight between himself and Kamala on any issue, so they ended up just presenting a new wrapper on the same shit sandwich.
Trump meanwhile said “I hear you, everything is too expensive. I’ll solve it by blaming immigrants and doing some magic involving something called tariffs that I promise will make everything cheaper.” Now, none of that is actually a solution, but that didn’t matter, because when you yell “Help, I’m drowning!” and one person says “No you’re not”, while the other says “Yes you are and it’s because of brown people…” you don’t really listen to anything past the “Yes you are,” because the point is they apparently want to help you and the other person doesn’t. Trump didn’t need to have workable solutions, because the Dems forfeited the entire contest before it even started. Trump just had to show up and sit in the chair.
I dunno. Pretty sure a wet paper bag would have been better than a felon rapist traitor who’s shitting on our Constitution and tanking our economy.
Right, that’s why they were worse.
🔴
“They will put up x candidates I dislike”
Vote in the fucking primaries then, holy shit. Make a progressive win the primaries for the love of God please
Vote in the fucking primaries then, holy shit.
They won’t.
We have two corporate parties, the status quo and the controlled opposition. They occasionally switch labels but until we get the corporate out, we will never have a real choice.
Get ready for the next DNC nominee no longer being the “lesser evil”!
Democrats would rather lose their power “temporarily” than lose their influence permanently with a progressive.
We need a third party like four months ago. We are running out of time to challenge the standing democrats.
We already have multiple.
inb4 Russia: liberals will say that about any new party, too
Just here to point out that the 3rd party candidate with the most votes was Jill Stein with a whopping half of a single percent of the total votes cast.
There is no viable 3rd party. And there won’t be until they start working to get elected at the local/state level and start getting members in Congress.
We need a third party like four months ago.
Then tell one to do the back-breaking work over decades to start having members in Congress so they have a shot at winning a presidential election.
There isn’t some cheat code for a 3rd party candidate to become president.
