Trying to build viable third parties by voting for them in presidential elections is like trying to build a third door in your house by repeatedly walking into the wall where you want the door to be.
Trying to build viable third parties by voting for them in presidential elections is like trying to build a third door in your house by repeatedly walking into the wall where you want the door to be.
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I've never voted for a major party presidential candidate in my life. It has never cost anyone anything, because I used to live in a deep red state and now live in a deep blue state. There's a better chance of helping a candidate hit thresholds that would qualify them for things like campaign funding, then there is of Tennessee or Illinois being the pivotal swing state. The vast majority of Americans are in similar situations, there's only a handful of states where your presidential vote matters at all.
Despite this, and the fact that I've voted for Democrats down ballot, liberals hate me, and are always trying to fight me over it. Why? Because the presidential race is the only thing anybody cares about. For all the countless, identical debates over the presidential race, I've seen virtually no discussion on here of other elections. Culturally, your take on the presidential race is how your political identity is defined. That cultural tendency is so powerful that it can even bleed into foreign countries.
The more people focus on my presidential voting behavior, which has no potential to affect anything, the more it reaffirms that such behavior is important. The reason that people care so much about my vote is not because they care about the outcome, it's because they want me to display a sign of loyalty, to bend the knee, to conform to their norms. But if everyone's going to treat it as an expression of identity, then, all else being equal regarding the outcome, it would be better to define myself according to what I actually believe. The fact that people get big mad over someone voting third party even in an extremely solid red or blue state is all the more reason to do it. My vote doesn't affect your life at all since it's totally irrelevant to the outcome, so stop obsessing over what amounts to a personal decision.
There are multiple people just in this post alone advising people to vote in local and primary elections. What are you talking about?
"Advising people to vote in" is not the same as "caring about" or "paying attention to."
Is there any mention of specific candidates? Any passionate arguments over the details of specific races? Any discussion of political theory or historical precedent or anything like that in that context? Has anybody called someone a Nazi because of how they're voting for down ballot?
No. Because what people care about and pay attention to is the presidential race, unless you're some kind of weird nerd or responsible citizen or something.
How active is your local Lemmy community? Mines is pretty dead but voting for the specifics you call for is still mentioned.
Of course people aren't going to be discussing the specifics of local races in the general politics community. It's entirely disingenuous to argue that's an indicator that nobody cares about local races.
I don't agree that that's an "of course." There should be discussion of specific local races in a general politics community. Like I said, presidential votes only matter in a handful of states. If you add up the populations of swing states, I'm sure it's higher than any individual state, but there are still some pretty big states where millions of people live that that aren't included in that. And yeah, everyone is affected by the presidential race, but everyone is affected by congressional races too. If you want to say, let's say 90% of the content should be on the race that's relevant to people living in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and maybe North Carolina that's fine, but if the rest of us have to see their content all the time, then they shouldn't mind if they have to see like 10% of the content relevant to the people who live in some of the other 44 states.
And to be clear, this isn't something I'm saying about Lemmy in particular. Go anywhere in America, from the deepest red state to the deepest blue state, and ask about the latest story-of-the-week about the presidential race, and people will know about it and have an opinion on it and care about it. Ask them about local races, and they'll be far less knowledgeable far less invested, and will probably try to fit it into a framework based on the one race they actually care about, even if they can't affect it in any way.
There would be so much more potential to cut through battle lines if people would go like, "OK, fine, you don't like either candidate, you don't have to vote for them. But do you mind if I ask what state you live in? Maybe there's someone running for congress or governor who's more to your tastes. I'd be happy to look into who's running and discuss them with you."
But nobody wants that shit. We want the battle lines, we want the group identity, the team sports. We don't want to do research about boring shit nobody cares about, we want a constant stream of engaging news stories and hot takes that we can all experience together, as a culture.
"no one talks about X".
Is shown that many people talk about X.
"No, not like that!"Misinterprets what I said to create a strawman
Is explained to that that's not what was meant
Repeats strawman.
Thank you for explaining what you're doing. But we were well aware of it.
"I know you are but what am I?"
Highest level of discourse.
You're the one coming in here and asking why anyone cares who wins an election that's not even in your country.
You can rightly fuck off. Most of us care very deeply who wins.
Not surprised you and the other people downplaying the election are from .ml
I shill voting 3p at every level as tactic to clown the two party regime.
But nothing stops people from getting into the weeds in local elections though.
But yeah the whole vibe... If you don't want my guy, you lack empathy OR you just don't care about hurting people is very 🤡 approach to essentially shame people into compliance.
The shaming campaign from the DNC has been very strong recently.
This entire discussion is only happening BC it was posted in a sub that is not controlled by the group who runs news and politics subs on Lemmy world
You don't need to vote for a main party. However, your vote isn't mathematically significant
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