#do not split. the fucking vote

[goldkirk]

also, I UNDERSTAND. I understand how ineffectual and morally and ideologically sold out the democrats are. I don’t want them either.

but I LIVED THROUGH a mayoral election during a race where the vote split. The forces of moral uprightness vs the corrupt selfish evil. Whatever you want to call it. It was like that.

there were three main players:

the industry plant: a long time (32 years) city council member, the endorsed (and spiritual) successor of the man who’d been our mayor for years and years and years—that mayor was very ethically and financially corrupt, and also groomed and molested me between the ages of 4 and 7.

just some guy: a man who was not corrupt like industry plant but wasn’t super anti-corruption and such. more chill go with the flow, somewhat able to be bought, not corrupt like our local government officials currently were though.

a woman with backbone: Track record as a former city council member who actively fought and called out corruption and under the table dealing and refused to be bribed, which obviously won no coworker favors but did endear her to a lot of citizens who found her championing city funding transparency or things like adding sidewalks

The endorsed man had the full weight of the local political machinery behind him. The other two had the majority of the common citizens.

The man didn’t drop out because he believed the woman wasn’t capable of winning and he’d do it best. The woman didn’t drop out because she didn’t believe the man was resistant enough to corruption. (These are heinous oversimplifications. I understand. I’m trying to make a specific point, so allow me this for now.)

On election night, guess what happened?

The man who ran with the machine behind him got the votes he expected. Not quite the majority, but a lot.

The rest of the populace had split.

Some voted for the other guy. Some voted for the woman. (Many, as usual, didn't vote at all, unlike the local corrupt labor union bloc that turns out in force every cycle for their chosen machinery candidate.)

The majority vote did NOT go to a candidate most citizens wanted.

the vote was split almost in thirds. and you know what?

I watched the sliiiiiiightly largest third win, and saw a man celebrate who was chosen for the King of The Whole City position by a man who sexually abused me and used his local-kingly-powers for personal gain and under the table dealings before I was tall enough to go down a water slide.

37% of the vote was enough to elect the nominated successor of my childhood sexual abuser into office without term limits. He then proceeded to reign as mayor for multiple terms, and the city stayed as corrupt as ever instead of having ANY alternate instead.

No, it’s not exactly the same in this election. But it should be enough to make us ask questions, plan, and organize from the ground up without moral infighting when the stakes are so high.

We’re all tired. But not all of us are in the same amounts of danger from different outcomes. It MATTERS.

Who’s the up-next four year old you might be able to save from abuse by voting, you know?

better financial and societal policies come AFTER immediate scene-is-on-fire safety is secured. in the middle of a crisis, and this is by far a crisis, you choose the next thing that keeps you ALIVE and you plan bullet points and strategies for what comes NEXT after you’re not about to die every other block going down the street, metaphorically.

[fallling-in-winter]

If you voted third party, you voted for Trump

[englandsgirl18181234]

I'd say sorry for the sudden political spam but I'm really not. We finally have a good option and we need to grab it with both hands and run with it as far as we fucking can. So here's some facts that people seem to be ignoring when they say you shouldn't vote for Harris.

Harris was not a fucking cop, she was a district attorney and attorney general. Stop fucking saying otherwise, it's misinformation and you need to understand that.

Harris is documentedly pro LGBTQ+. When she was elected Attorney General, she co-sponsored legislation to ban the gay and trans panic defense which passed. She also officiated the first same-sex wedding in California after Section 8 was overturned 20 years ago.

In her entire time as District Attorney she never sought the death penalty. She also created the San Francisco Reentry Division, with the first of its kind reentry program Back On Track for first-time nonviolent offenders. 200 people graduated from it with less than 10 percent going on to commit another crime, compared to the 53 percent of California drug offenders that would do so in less than 2 years after release.

When she was elected to Attorney General of California, she introduced the Homeowner Bill of Rights, considered one of the strongest protections nationwide against aggressive foreclosure tactics.

In 2015, Harris's California Department of Justice became the first statewide agency in the US to require all of its police officers to wear body cameras.

So to reiterate:

Fucking vote for Harris.

Voting third party right now is not the fucking way. All it's gonna do is split the fucking votes that we need to keep Trump out of office. None of the third party candidates have the numbers to actually beat Trump. It's not going to fucking happen, stop saying it will because you're lying to yourself and others.

Not voting at all is even fucking worse than voting third party and you're an idiot if you think otherwise. Not voting isn't a fucking protest like some idiots are spouting. It's not making a fucking point. It is giving the fuck up and being a coward about it. It is actively choosing to not make things better when you have the fucking chance and I am disgusted that people actually think it's a good idea when we are on the verge of a second term for a literal traitor and convicted felon that actively thinks disabled and LGBTQ people should die.

Someone is still going to be President. Full stop, that is how elections fucking work. THERE IS STILL GOING TO BE A PRESIDENT. There is still going to be a president whether you vote or not. And our only real options right now are Harris or Trump. So use your fucking vote to make things better in the only way we can right now.

Yeah, there are things Harris needs to change and things she isn't on the right side on. But Trump is worse in every possible fucking way. So we need to lock this down and push for improvement, not decide shit is hopeless and fucking give the bad guy the win now that we finally have a fucking shot!

You didn't want to vote for Biden? Great, you're not! Now take the fucking miracle that just dropped into our fucking laps and run with it!

[sieglinde-freud]

one time eva told me that inigo was basically just a total drama character and i cant like that kinda hit me like a slap in the face but like in a good way because like. she was right. and that was several months ago but the concept was so good i sometimes just come back to it and now i have a question for the class

no i dont think inigo (or anyone else i excluded) would win but if you have a case for him im open

[albonium]

wild to me that it takes hours for people in the usa to vote. it's never taken me more than 10 minutes and that's including the inevitable chit chat with the people there because they're either my parents' neighbours or the parents of people i went to school with.

[vivaciouscynner]

To USians again

I know, I know, I'm very likely to yelling into the echo chamber.

A lot of news networks and magazines are full on endorsing Kamala Harris for president.

GREAT

but don't forget this happened in 2016 with Hilary Clinton.

If you were ever on the fence about casting a vote and feel like yours doesn't matter, I'm very emphatically telling you

IT DOES

Please make an effort to vote for Harris this election.

Any other action really is a vote for fascist orange.

[beeseverywhen]

"All political parties face a trade-off under a first-past-the-post electoral system. Governing depends on attracting a broad coalition of voters, inevitably involving compromises that leave a party’s base disgruntled.

So it is perhaps unsurprising that as we move closer to a general election, the discontent from the anti-Labour left who claim there is little to distinguish Keir Starmer from Rishi Sunak in the battle for the premiership is only getting noisier."

"The argument is threefold: there’s no meaningful difference between the Conservatives and Labour; Starmer supposedly can’t be trusted because he has dropped pledges he made in the 2020 leadership election to shift his party towards the centre; finally, the “Tories are toast” and Labour can’t lose, so disgruntled left voters can safely vote for other parties, such as the Greens.

With Labour so far ahead in the polls, the urge to debunk these sentiments may seem like an expression of paranoia. But all three aspects of this narrative are comprehensively wrong, including the reassurance that it is safe for anyone who would prefer a Labour government to vote for another party in Labour-Tory contests."

"But what this underplays is the number of Labour-Tory marginals where a relatively small vote for other left candidates could cost Labour a win. James Kanagasooriam, of the polling company Focaldata, has written about the “sandcastle” nature of Labour’s likely majority; his forecast is that there will be many more marginal seats in the 2024 parliament compared with 2019. If more than predicted numbers of those who voted Green in the locals decide they can afford to do so in the general election because Labour is so far ahead in national polls, that will boost the Conservatives.

Next up is the idea that Starmer’s dropping of some of his leadership pledges makes him dangerously untrustworthy. But this is the product of a system in which the tiny unrepresentative slice of the electorate that is a party membership pick their leader before voters choose their prime minister. Anyone hoping to be PM would have to shift position between a leadership selection and a general election: a Labour leader’s most important job is to connect with potential voters, not to coddle members with the comfort blanket of a policy platform such as the “free broadband for all” 2019 pledge that was roundly rejected.

Liz Truss provides a cautionary tale of what happens when a party leader seeks to impose a membership-endorsed platform on the country without a general election. For Starmer to have stuck to his 2020 leadership election pledges, instead of spending the past four years understanding voters, would have been fundamentally anti-democratic.

The most egregious aspect of the anti-Labour left argument is there isn’t much to choose between Starmer and Sunak. Yes, Labour’s “Ming vase” election strategy has seen it take a much more cautious fiscal approach than many of us would like: it has effectively adopted the Tory macroeconomic worldview and with it a set of spending constraints that no one sensible thinks either party could stick to in the wake of the election.

That is frustrating for anyone hoping this election campaign may illuminate some of the tough trade-offs facing Britain; but it would have been incredibly risky for one side to go it alone on this. The alternative is Labour walking into the trap and handing the Conservatives a “Labour tax bombshell” election campaign.

From a commitment to scrap the Rwanda plan to making clear that in an ideal world Labour would discard the two-child benefit cap, there are plenty of reasons that it is preposterous to think that a Starmer government would make the same trade-offs as successive Conservative governments that have financed billions of pounds worth of tax cuts for more affluent families by cutting tax credits and benefits for low-income parents. The six pledges Starmer launched two weeks ago may be incremental, but Labour needs voters to believe they are deliverable, and they are indicative of a very different set of priorities than those that animate Sunak."

"Starmer is not without weaknesses, as shown by the days he took to clarify an interview last October in which he gave the impression he thought Israel had the right to withhold power and food from Gaza. But there is no doubt whatsoever he would make a vastly more compassionate and competent prime minister than Sunak. To encourage people to put that outcome at risk by casting a protest vote against a Labour government that does not yet exist is perhaps the ultimate form of luxury belief campaigning."

[coldflasher]

extremely fucking stressed about who to vote for in the election ngl

[personnotfound]

if you don't vote, someone still gets to be president

idk, i see a lot of people talking about the election and criticizing the democratic candidates, which is great, please do that, but please also acknowledge the stakes and the context here. If you're saying talking about something horrible the dems have done/are doing, and saying not to vote for them because of it, then at least let it be a criticism that does not also apply tenfold to the republicans. Because SOMEONE IS GOING TO BE PRESIDENT. It's one or the other. Realistically, it is Trump, or it is Harris. Convincing people not to vote for Harris is advocating for Trump to win. Period. End of. That is what you are doing.

Since I am going over project 2025 - which was written by some very good friends of Trump, and which the man himself has tried to distance himself from without actually addressing any of the contents of the document itself, which align quite well with how he talks about his values and intentions - here are some quotes i have selected to contextualize the stakes of this election (under the cut for length and tw for transphobia, misogyny, )

If you are trans, here is what they think of us, "Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today: Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries" (from the foreward by Kevin D Roberts, PhD, on page 1. Kevin is the president of The Heritage Foundation, which describes itself under the 'membership' tab of their 'about' page on their website as the "most influential conservative group in america")

and here are a few of the policies they would like to inact in regards to us, "Reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military. Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service, and the use of public monies for transgender surgeries or to facilitate abortion for servicemembers should be ended." (Page 104),

"Reissue a stronger transgender national coverage determination. CMS should repromulgate its 2016 decision that CMS could not issue a National Coverage Determination (NCD) regarding “gender reassignment surgery” for Medicare beneficiaries. In doing so, CMS should acknowledge the growing body of evidence that such interventions are dangerous and acknowledge that there is insufficient scientific evidence to support such coverage in state plans." (Page 474)

"Restrict the application of Bostock. The new Administration should restrict Bostock’s application of sex discrimination protections to sexualorientation and transgender status in the context of hiring and firing" (Bostock in this context is a legal case regarding workers protections against discrimination in the workplace, this is page 584 saying that they would like it to be legal to fire people for being trans)

Or how about this from pages 4-5, "The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civilsociety hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion(“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensi-tive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists." Still the foreward there, same author. Literally calling to restrict speech in the name of 'freedom of speech'. Some irony there. The next paragraph starts by describing 'transgender ideology' (the existence of trans people) as 'pornography'.

Page 5, literally the next paragraph. "Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered."

How are we feeling? But what about foreign policy? What about Palestine?

Page 94 reads, "Sustain support for Israel even as America empowers Gulf partners to take responsibility for their own coastal, air, and missile defenses both individually and working collectively"

That does not sound like pulling support from Israel to me.

Oh, also on page 94 is this, "Implement nuclear modernization and expansion. The United States manifestly needs to modernize, adapt, and expand its nuclear arsenal. Russia maintains and is actively brandishing a very large nuclear arsenal, but China is also undertaking a historic nuclear breakout."

Because what we definitely 100% need is more military spending on nuclear weapons. I also cannot help reading that in connection to Palestine, Israel, and our country's allyship with Israel.

I'm getting stressed. I have linked the full document below. Please look up these quotes yourself, check my work, read the context for yourself. Decide for yourself if you feel I have been unfair. Decide for yourself which of the two sets of options is going to do the least damage. Because remember, it's not just the one person you're voting for. The president gets to appoint the people who run the rest of the government. The people Trump likes very much wrote this document.

Please do not play games with weather or not I can be fired from my job for being trans. Please do not play games with my access to healthcare.

It is horrific that we do not have a choice that will end US support for the genocide going on right now. But that choice isn't on the table. Our choices are genocidal fascist or a lot less genocidal fascist.

[npdclaraoswald]

.

[chaos-in-one]

This election is going to make me lose my fucking mind, some of y'all are not using your brains at all and it shows

[daz4i]

bro i hate my country's politicians so much it's unreal

[lycorid]

How the fuck do you have a Neo-Nazi phase?

[a9saga]

i know i said the men on big brother 5 are pigs but after jase and scott go its honestly fine. marvin is a better guy than some of his comments about women in the first few episodes suggested, which his own mother up and said she disapproved of which i respect her for. but for real he's been quite decent and a good player. oh my god diane is pissing me off

[ceilidhtransing]

The discussions around whether or not to vote for Kamala keep being dominated by very loud voices shouting that anyone who advocates for her “just doesn't care about Palestine!” and “is willing to overlook genocide!” and “has no moral backbone at all!” And while some of these voices will be bots, trolls, psyops - we know that this happens; we know that trying to persuade progressives to split the vote or not vote at all is a strategy employed by hostile actors - of course many of them won't be. But what this rhetoric does is continually force the “you should vote for her” crowd onto the back foot of having to go to great lengths writing entire essays justifying their choice, while the “don't vote/vote third party” crowd is basically never asked to justify their choice. It frames voting for Kamala as a deeply morally compromised position that requires extensive justification while framing not voting or voting third party as the neutral and morally clean stance.

So here's another way of looking at it. How much are you willing to accept in order to feel like you're not compromising your morals on one issue?

Are you willing to accept the 24% rise in maternal deaths - and 39% increase for Black women - that is expected under a federal abortion ban, according to the Centre for American Progress? Those percentages represent real people who are alive now who would die if the folks behind Project 2025 get their way with reproductive healthcare.

Are you willing to accept the massive acceleration of climate change that would result from the scrapping of all climate legislation? We don't have time to fuck around with the environment. A gutting of climate policy and a prioritisation of fossil fuel profits, which is explicitly promised by Trump, would set the entire world back years - years that we don't have.

Are you willing to accept the classification of transgender visibility as inherently “pornographic” and thus the removal of trans people from public life? Are you willing to accept the total elimination of legal routes for gender-affirming care? The people behind the Trump campaign want to drive queer and trans people back underground, back into the closet, back into “criminality”. This will kill people. And it's maddening that caring about this gets called “prioritising white gays over brown people abroad” as if it's not BIPOC queer and trans Americans who will suffer the most from legislative queer- and transphobia, as they always do.

Are you willing to accept the domestic deployment of the military to crack down on protests and enforce racist immigration policy? I'm sure it's going to be very easy to convince huge numbers of normal people to turn up to protests and get involved in political organising when doing so may well involve facing down an army deployed by a hardcore authoritarian operating under the precedent that nothing he does as president can ever be illegal.

Are you willing to accept a president who openly talks about wanting to be a dictator, plans on massively expanding presidential powers, dehumanises his political enemies and wants the DOJ to “go after them”, and assures his supporters they won't have to vote again? If you can't see the danger of this staring you right in the face, I don't know what to tell you. Allowing a wannabe dictator to take control of the most powerful country on earth would be absolutely disastrous for the entire world.

Are you willing to accept an enormous uptick in fascism and far-right authoritarianism worldwide? The far right in America has huge influence over an entire international network of “anti-globalists”, hardcore anti-immigrant xenophobes, transphobic extremists, and straight-up fascists. Success in America aids and emboldens these people everywhere.

Are you willing to accept an enormous number of preventable deaths if America faces a crisis in the next four years: a public health emergency, a natural disaster, an ecological catastrophe? We all saw how Trump handled Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. We all saw how Trump handled Covid-19. He fanned the flames of disaster with a constant flow of medical misinformation and an unspeakably dangerous undermining of public health experts. It's estimated that 40% of US pandemic deaths could have been avoided if the death rates had corresponded to those in other high-income countries. That amounts to nearly half a million people. One study from January 2021 estimated between around 4,200 and 12,200 preventable deaths attributable purely to Trump's statements about masks. We're highly unlikely to face another global pandemic in the next few years but who knows what crises are coming down the pipeline?

Are you willing to accept the attempted deportation of millions - millions - of undocumented people? This is “rounding people up and throwing them into camps where no one ever hears from them again” territory. That's a blueprint for genocide right there and it's a core tenet of both Trump's personal policy and Project 2025. And of course they wouldn't be going after white people. They most likely wouldn't even restrict their tyranny to people who are actually undocumented. Anyone racially othered as an “immigrant” would be at risk from this.

Are you willing to accept not just the continuation of the current situation in Palestine, but the absolute annihilation of Gaza and the obliteration of any hope for imminent peace? There is no way that Trump and the people behind him would not be catastrophically worse for Gaza than Kamala or even Biden. Only recently he was telling donors behind closed doors that he wanted to “set the [Palestinian] movement back 25 or 30 years” and that “any student that protests, I throw them out of the country”. This is not a man who can be pushed in a direction more conducive to peace and justice. This is a man who listens to his wealthy donors, his Christian nationalist Republican allies, and himself.

Are you willing to accept a much heightened risk of nuclear war? Obviously this is hardly a Trump policy promise. But I can't think of a single president since the Cold War who is more likely to deploy nuclear weapons, given how casually he talks about wanting to use them and how erratic and unstable he can be in his dealings with foreign leaders. To quote Foreign Policy only this year, “Trump told a crowd in January that one of the reasons he needed immunity was so that he couldn’t be indicted for using nuclear weapons on a city.” That's reassuring. I'm not even in the US and I remember four years of constant background low-level terror that Trump would take offence at something some foreign leader said or think that he needs to personally intervene in some military situation to “sort it out” and decide to launch the entire world into nuclear war. No one sane on earth wants the most powerful person on the planet to be as trigger-happy and careless with human life as he is, especially if he's running the White House like a dictator with no one ever telling him no. But depending on what Americans do in November, he may well be inflicted again on all of us, and I guess we'll all just have to hope that he doesn't do the worst thing imaginable.

“But I don't want those things! Stop accusing me of supporting things I don't support!” Yes, of course you don't want those things. None of us does. No one's saying that you actively support them. No one's accusing you of wanting Black women to die from ectopic pregnancies or of wanting to throw Hispanic people in immigrant detention centres or of wanting trans people to be outlawed (unlike, I must point out, the extremely emotive and personal accusations that get thrown around about “wanting Palestinian children to die” if you encourage people to vote for Kamala).

But if you're advocating against voting for Kamala, you are clearly willing to accept them as possible consequences of your actions. That is the deal you're making. If a terrible thing happening is the clear and easily foreseeable outcome of your action (or in the case of not voting, inaction), in a way that could have been prevented by taking a different and just as easy action, you are partly responsible for that consequence. (And no, it's not “a fear campaign” to warn people about things he's said, things he wants to do, and plans drawn up by his close allies. This is not “oooh the Democrats are trying to bully you into voting for them by making him out to be really bad so you'll feel scared and vote for Kamala!” He is really bad, in obvious and documented and irrefutable ways.)

And if you believe that “both parties are the same on Gaza” (which, you know, they really aren't, but let's just pretend that they are) then presumably you accept that the horrors being committed there will continue, in the immediate term anyway, regardless of who wins the presidency. Because there really isn't some third option that will appear and do everything we want. It's going to be one of those two. And we can talk all day about wanting a better system or how unfair it is that every presidential election only ever has two viable candidates and how small the Overton window is and all that but hell, we are less than eighty days out from the election; none of that is going to get fixed between now and November. Electoral reform is a long-term (but important!) goal, not something that can be effected in the span of a couple of months by telling people online to vote third party. There is no “instant ceasefire and peace negotiation” button that we're callously overlooking by encouraging people to vote for Kamala. (My god, if there was, we would all be pressing it.)

If we're suggesting people vote for her, it's not that we “are willing to overlook genocide” or “don't care about sacrificing brown people abroad” or whatever. Nothing is being “overlooked” here. It's that we're simply not willing to accept everything else in this post and more on top of continued atrocities in Gaza. We're not willing to take Trump and his godawful far-right authoritarian agenda as an acceptable consequence of feeling like we have the moral high ground on Palestine. I cannot stress enough that if Kamala doesn't win, we - we all, in the whole world - get Trump. Are you willing to accept that?

And one more point to address: I've seen too many people act frighteningly flippant and naïve about terrible things Trump or his campaign want to do, with the idea that people will simply be able to prevent all these bad things by “organising” and “protesting” and “collective action”. “I'm not willing to accept these things; that's why I'll fight them tooth and nail every day of their administration” - OK but if you're not even willing to cast a vote then I have doubts about your ability to form “the Resistance”, which by the way would have to involve cooperation with people of lots of progressive political stripes in order to have the manpower to be effective, and if you're so committed to political purity that you view temporarily lending your support to Kamala at the ballot box as an untenable betrayal of everything you stand for then forgive me for also doubting your ability to productively cooperate with allies on the ground with whom you don't 100% agree. Plus, if the Trump campaign gets its way, American progressives would be kept so busy trying to put out about twenty different fires at once that you'd be able to accomplish very little. Maybe you get them to soften their stance on trans healthcare but oh shit, the climate policies are still in place. But more importantly, how many people do you think will protest for abortion rights if doing so means staring down a gun? Or organise to protect their neighbours from deportation if doing so means being thrown in prison yourself? And OK, maybe you're sure that you will, but history has shown us time and time again that most people won't. Most people aren't willing to face that kind of personal risk. And a tiny number of lefties willing to risk incarceration or death to protect undocumented people or trans people or whatever other groups are targeted is sadly not enough to prevent the horrors from happening. That is small fry compared to the full might of a determined state. Of course if the worst happens and Trump wins then you should do what you can to mitigate the harm; I'm not saying you shouldn't. But really the time to act is now. You have an opportunity right here to mitigate the harm and it's called “not letting him get elected”. Act now to prevent that kind of horrific authoritarian situation from developing in the first place; don't sit this one out under the naïve belief that “we'll be able to stop it if it happens”. You won't.