I am not pushing people to vote third party. I am pushing people to shut down the economy with a general strike, occupy the halls of power, abolish the Senate entirely, and rebuild the country. Because anything less will continue the atrocities.
It’s not a hard concept because it’s a fucking fantasy and isn’t mapping to reality at all
You’re contradicting yourself. You’re saying people have been voting for third party but they never get even 3% of the vote, let alone 5%, so clearly that’s not the problem. And they’re not not voting because voter participation in 2020 was the highest since 1908 and 2024 was tied for second highest with 1960.
So again, you’re not dealing with reality. People aren’t choosing to not vote nor to vote third party. The Ds are continually sliding right because of something other than the voters.
Yeah, so you’re not talking about reality. The Democrats have been sliding to the right themselves. That’s not the fault of the voters.
So what you’re telling me is that my votes don’t matter and won’t send anyone a message and that Talarico showing he’s willing to lie in the primaries about his position on trans people and then change his position after we vote for him is the best chance I have simply because his party is blue? So we’ll get another Joe Manchin?
Voting for them doesn’t make them stop.
So let’s answer your question. I expect to gain nothing. Which is exactly what I expect to gain if I do vote for them.
There’s a sense in which the process of “power” shifting from one brand to the other brand is much like people buying store brand vs name brand of the same product made by the same manufacturer. People buy the one or the other en masse because of larger economic trends driving their buying behavior. Individuals making deliberate choices to “not pay the brand tax” is such a small component of aggregate buying behavior it’s not even worth modeling.
In this way, the old adage “it’s the economy, stupid” is saying that people don’t really win elections because conscientious voters who are thoughtful and strategic do things - people win elections because of larger economic and social trends. Yes, in individual small swing districts conscientious voting can sometimes become large enough to have a measurable impact, but not in most races, not in most districts, and even among swing districts, not that often.
Instead what’s happening is the 2 brands work to temper the psychological needs of various groups of the American population, serving to create us/them dynamics within the population that serves to divide them against each other and enlist them in maintaining the very powers who oppress them.
Like what happens in these discussions. We are all being oppressed by the entire political system, and yet some of us believe that others of us are paid Russian or Chinese trolls or that we’re actually Republicans because we are trying to keep the focus on the total political system. What we need is to band together as a single group, not as separate groups who fight on the terrain of ballots, but a single unified group of the people against the oligarchs and that means fighting against their mechanisms of control. Party politics is one of those mechanisms.
Yeah. We know how the Senate works. The problem is that the party is choosing strategies to win elections and those strategies include things like supporting genocide, scapegoating vulnerable people, condemning communism, expanding the military and the police, honoring ICE agents, destroying RCV campaigns, and punching left. For every win they get with these strategies, they will use the victories to claim that this is the way the party must go. For every loss using these strategies, they will attack the voters and say it’s the voters’ fault for not voting properly. They will then pay social media influencers to claim that the party never actually cared about people who didn’t vote for them, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spent over the last several decades on “get out the vote campaigns”.
What expect is that if Paxton is willing to sacrifice his principles on the campaign trail, then he’s likely to sacrifice his principles once in the Senate and will vote with his Republican colleagues, because that’s the evidence he’s providing us. We don’t want another Manchin.
Private business owners have always run the government. From the founding to today
You do realize that Talarico is running for US Senate, right? Whether or not he gets elected has almost nothing to do with how Texas treats its trans residents. He has no say in TX politics as he is leaving the TX legislature in attempt to make it to the Senate.
And OP is saying that he will face consequences for choosing to change his position on the trans question after the primaries. Maybe he’ll lose, and that will tell the DNC and other candidates not to use trans people as a scapegoat (which is a fascist tactic). But whether he wins or loses has no bearing on how Texas treats trans people.
Talarico changed his position after the primary.
but I’ll admit I’m looking at the question through a lens of cold logic
No, you’re looking at it through the lens of propaganda. It is not cold logic to believe that a politician in the Democrat party is inherently obviously better than a politician in the Republican party. The two parties are PR campaigns of the rich elite. The psychographics of the voting population are broadly segmentable into groupings that can be assigned to one party or the other and remain consistent enough to fit their campaign. Using cold logic, the Ds and the Rs are sharing the responsibility of maintaining an ultraviolent genocidal oligarchic international EuroCentric Christian white supremacist patriarchal empire.
Obama is literally out here this week saying the Ds need to stop campaigning on material conditions and focus on moral narratives about we can all live together in this country. He and Biden were the ones that created the policy framework, headcount, budgets, and private contractor relationships that Donald Trump is using to terrorize cities with ICE. Obama/Biden appointed the exact same man that Trump appointed to be deportation czar. And Obama came after Bush 2 but continued Bush 2’s war campaign to destroy 7 countries - Libya was the 6th that Bush couldn’t get to, so Obama and Clinton took care of destroying that sovereign nation. Iran was the 7th, and Obama couldn’t get to it so he negotiated the JCPOA and then Trump demonstrated that the military strategists were already planning to destroy Iran they just needed more time.
What else does cold logic tell us? Did Biden know Trump was a fascist threat? Sure seemed like he was talking about it mostly openly. What did Biden do? Well, he had the full unredacted Epstein Files. He could have launched a federal criminal investigation into Trump. But he didn’t. He just sat on it. And then he fucked the primaries. He did nothing at all to stop Trump, to reduce his available toolset, to play politics. Nothing. Biden saw Trump with a knife and a bunch of people saying “he’s got a knife” and said “watch out for that guy, he’s got a knife” and then left.
What else does cold logic tell us? Corporate profits are higher under Democrats. Democrats regularly say one thing on TV and then vote with their Republican colleagues. Democrats support mass domestic surveillance, Israel genociding Gaza, increased military spending, increased police spending, using police against the homeless, mass recialized incarceration, and yes, they even support anti-trans sentiment.
That’s logic. Blue no matter who is not logic, it’s emotional.
I don’t get it. I’m afraid.
Yes, but also, this assume the respondent’s social network hasn’t been filtered already
Average office workers aren’t involved in planning military first strikes in some of the most consequential campaigns in history. You’re stretching incredibly to try to paint the easily recognizable pattern of deliberate US war crimes as unwitting incompetence and it’s pretty gross
You are far too credulous. First strikes are some of the most deeply and throughly planned operations in a campaign. They knew exactly which apartments to go after, but we think they used a.i.?
Also, bombing schools is something the US has down in nearly every single campaign in the last 20 years and those were planned without a.i. So now we’re supposed to believe they used a totally different planning technique and got the exact same result? And then double tapped it?
Can you imagine not even bothering to plan your first strike on a country that your military has deemed too powerful to attack for some time?
Can you imagine abandoning your old planning techniques for a totally novel technique and getting the exact same results of bombing civilians directly?
Can you imagine claiming it was a targeting error and then double tapping it?
This is incredible reporting
The most undialectical shit post
I literally never defended MAGA. I said that MAGA didn’t invent safe global corruption. That’s not defending MAGA, that’s calling out Pollyanna journalism
Getting rid of both Republicans and Democrats would be part of the process, not a precondition