When you don’t support local third party candidates but only vote third party for the presidential position? Yeah they can fuck right off. Go all in or stop bitching.
Or more importantly do the specific opposite of that. Vote 3rd parties, fight in the primaries in the local, state, and important levels everywhere you can.
Don’t throw your vote away on candidate of which your vote is literally less than one millionth of the way they need to get.
Local parties are generally more in tune with the community. If you live in an area where a progressive party candidate would be viable, the Democrat candidates are probably progressive (or at least claim to be, Shitbag I mean John Fetterman).
While this is true, no third party president will succeed without a base of support in their local levels. If progressive democrats keep getting screwed by the overall party, it might be time to form a local third party that can work with moderate dems for bills but maintain a separate structure so moderate democrats cannot take progressive votes for granted.
No third party president will ever succeed at all under the current system.
So you could say there is some work to do before protest voting for the presidency?
I would say that there’s a lot of work to do in general. Protest voting is like any protest. It’s disruption to draw attention to a problem. It doesn’t solve problems, it isn’t even an attempt to solve a problem. Protest is the last step before violence, and most people aren’t willing to go any further.
The fact that people are willing to protest vote is everybody’s problem. You can’t say the protesters are wrong, or their methods are wrong, or that they don’t have valid concerns.
You’re shadowboxing with strawmen.
I don’t see any third party state level political groups so clearly not.
To answer the question asked in the meme, no it doesn’t. We have two problems. One is a Democratic party that is largely run for the benefit of the ruling class and not the workers. The other is a Republican party that is actively trying to overthrow the government and replace it with a dictatorship. They are both serious problems, but they are not the same. The Democrats still acknowledge the rule of law and can be fought within the system. If the Republicans get what they want, there will be no system and the Democratic problem will become irrelevant.
You have to avoid disaster before you deal with anything else.
2024:
Trump - 49.8%
Harris - 48.3%
All others - 1.9%3rd party is a losing proposition and you have to go back to 1968 to find an election where a 3rd party won ANY Electoral college votes*.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_United_States_presidential_election
* Not counting the accidental electoral vote for “John Ewards” in 2004.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidential_election
This is a multifaceted issue. The Democrats need to do better, and voters need to be better informed about the process. Both things are true.
From a numbers perspective, though, this supports the Democrats moving further right simply because there are more votes in that direction. “Vote Blue” voters will not abandon the party they believe is less evil, and targeting 5% of republican voters will tip the scales twice that of gaining 100% of the third party voters (who are spread across various hopeless causes). If more progressives were willing to leave the centrist party and vote for third party candidates, it would force the Democrats to the left as long as the number of voters leaving exceeded the number of voters gained on the right.
In other words, being a pragmatic voter weakens your influence on party politics. Look at how unreasonable the far right wing is, and how outsized their effect has become. Most Republicans aren’t fascist nazis, but they roll with it because they want the benefits that come with being inside the circle when the nazis get violent. And if you’re a conservative, then aligning with the Nazis is just as pragmatic as progressives aligning with centrists. It’s the same thought process, just with completely different systems of morality.
If you believe in your cause, then you should be unreasonable. You should reject compromise, and you should demand justice. And the math supports it.
If more progressives were willing to leave the centrist party and vote for third party candidates, it would force the Democrats to the left as long as the number of voters leaving exceeded the number of voters gained on the right.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. See the ratchet effect:
That’s precisely the way I described it working. The ratchet effect exists because there’s never more progressives willing to leave the party, but some do and the remaining progressive voters weaken their own position with compromise.
More progressives leaving the party will freeze the ratchet harder.
We need more progressives in the party and evict the centrists, the same way the Tea Party and Red Hats did on the Republican side.
Leaving the party creates a minority party with zero power, it doesn’t convince Democrats to move left, it convinces them they were right to move right.
Primary and remove. That needs to be the goal.
I mean, yeah. The centrists run the Democratic party. They aren’t going to relinquish control.
Then you primary them and get them out. That’s what the Red Hats are doing.
It puts the democrats on its skin or else it gets the MAGAts again. Harm reduction is the name of the game. If you want change, you need to start local and build parallel power structures like community support networks
Seeing the Democratic establishment react (or not react) to Trump so far this year has made me feel like this sort of disruptive spiral into fascism was going to happen no matter what. It just would’ve been some other likely Republican positioned as a populist strongman.
Third party voters: " I didn’t vote conservative, but I’m fine with them’
Both? Both.
Democrats: Choosing a candidate that you want to vote for is ruining democracy.
Well, as it turns out yes. But they designed it to work that way.
Strange game, the only winning move is not to play.
sucks when one party ties people’s cultural identities to their party and the other is a big tent
