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Ugh. I'm not real happy about having to vote to uphold the gerontocracy, but as both likely frontrunners are a part thereof, all I can do is vote to minimize the harm.
That’s only true if you live in a swing state. If your state’s certain to go one way or the other, vote your conscience, even if it’s a write-in.
I would argue the opposite. An increasing minority vote/poll in a "safe" state would pull resources away from swing states to keep the state "safe". Not many people would have imagined Georgia going blue in federal elections but here we are.
I live in Texas (a state that will go a certain way) and I will vote Dem. It makes no sense to me to help make a bigger gap between the Republicans and everybody else just because the Dems suck too.
The "principled stance" a protest vote makes only helps embolden the current political hellscape within my own state. If I can chip away at the Republican power structure, I will do it.
Wow, a lot of vitriol on this topic! Okay, so, for my first post on Lemmy I am going to make a positive leftist case for Biden.
Biden is not the problem! He wants to do big things; he wants be a great president. If congress sent him voting rights, reproductive rights, major climate action, and many other leftist priorities, he would sign them. He could definitely be better, but he is mostly not standing in our way. How many decades would you have to go back to find another president you could say that about?
Biden is not the problem. Congress is the problem. State and local governments are the problem. Nimbys are the problem. We have a lot of problems to solve but the presidency is not one of them. What we need to do with the presidency is simply reelect Biden and then get on with the work of solving the actual problems.
Biden is still a centrist, also known as a fascist enabler.
The man is not for labor, see ending the railroad strike, one of the most infuriating moves a so-called great president could perform.
If he truly wanted to do great things, and not be hindered by the backing of capital, he'd be moving fast and breaking things more than the previous administration. He's not.
I understand your frustration but also encourage you to pay more attention to what happens behind the scenes. Your position on the railroad strike is outdated/misinformed relative to what happened a month ago:
When Joe Biden and Congress enacted legislation in December that blocked a threatened freight rail strike, many workers angrily faulted Biden for not ensuring that the legislation also guaranteed paid sick days. But since then, union officials says, members of the Biden administration, including the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, and labor secretary, Marty Walsh, who stepped down on 11 March, lobbied the railroads, telling them it was wrong not to grant paid sick days.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/01/railroad-workers-union-win-sick-leave
In other words, Biden instructed his administration to double back and force the hand of the railroad companies to get the union exactly what they wanted.
IBEW statement. this is one of the unions involved, and their official statement on the matter. pretty positive.
I think it's a bunch of kids with little life experience. On one hand their passion recalls fading memories of my own young, idealistic self in my 20s. On the other hand, politics doesn't work with raging hardliners. On the third hand, the world is pretty fucked, the US is going to hell in a handbasket and I don't think geriatrics are who we should be voting for. You say Congress is the problem, but really, it's voters. Voters just fucking suck. But unless someone wants to do away with any type of democracy, shitty voters is where we are at.
raging hardliners
you're not wrong, politics is about compromise and in the most successful nations no one gets what they want and no one leaves the bargaining table happy. the question is, how does one work the politics of coalition and compromise when the people you're supposed to coalition-build and compromise with are raging hardliners. How does one find a middle ground with open christian nationalist fascists?
we pick from the menu for dinner tonight, and for future meals we fight to have more of a say in what's on the menu. there's too many people calling for my head right now for me to protest vote or sit out because the guy who doesn't want to kill me is problematic about some niche policy position. remember that a lot of trump's money in 2016 went toward campaigning for democrats to stay home, with reasons alternating between "clinton is an awful candidate" (she was) and "she's got this in the bag so your vote doesn't matter".
Biden is trying to get some progressive stuff done. For the most part pretty happy with his agenda. Still be nice to have someone running that isn't old as fuck.
It would be nice to have a strong challenger, but the DNC protects its elders. I can't imagine any Dem not endorsing Biden as it's the only choice, and not endorsing him is a strange waste of political capital.
It amazes me how much and how quick people are to blame Biden or AOC when the political landscape isn't this richly progressive utopia in a rank choice voting system. We have real problems in this country and the ONLY way we get closer to solving them is by not electing fascists
The ONLY way we get closer to solving them was by educating our populace about the dangers of authoritarianism in the wake of the world wars. And coming to terms as a nation how much the Nazi regime learned from America and our concentration camps that we don't teach nearly enough about.
But that ship kind of sailed and we now live in a country where some obscenely high percent of Americans don't even believe the holocaust happened at all.
In my opinion we are way past the solution being democrats, they hardly even stop the bleeding anymore. They are just there to show the masses that there are two parties and they didn't really want to pass all of this pro business, anti people legislation, but we had to because of the debt ceiling that we didn't even stop for long and the Republicans can beat us with it again in a few years.
The system is designed to be fucked.
we can whine about how we didn't do the right thing before now all we want, but we live in the world of today, and the solution, or at least part of it, must be to keep the actual fascists from doing actual fascism. we have to do more, electoral politics isn't gonna save us, but genuinely it makes me really mad when people get all doomer about this shit. most people used to be serfs. a hundred years ago children were working in coal mines. progress can be made. progress against capitalists can be made. and if voting didn't matter businesses wouldn't be pouring money into politics, republicans wouldn't be trying their best to stop people from turning up.
Locking this thread to clean up the mess. Come on, ya'll, we can do better than this.
Really wish we didn't need to wait for politicians to die of old age before we could replace them...
I really wish workers had enough organizing power to yeet these duplicitous assholes. Why can’t we have candidates who actually fucking care about bettering our circumstances?
Not a big fan of this, but I can't really blame her when the only other options are "unserious protest candidate who's a bit of a crank" and "unserious protest candidate who's completely nuts and possibly a crypto-Republican".