The man that should stop Donald Trump is Donald Trump.
It’s stunning that he can say and do so much… terribleness… and still even have a chance at the presidency (again).
it’s a race to the bottom, and liberals are so attached to biden for some reason they seem to actively want him despite the fact that some random state senator would be a safer bet. if we get fascism I’m putting some of the blame on bidenbros
It’s the two party system and electoral college that causes the “lessor evil” effect. We’ll have to address that better next time.
Edit: autocorrect gave us an electric college!
Electric Collage would be a great band name.
We’ll have to address that better next time.
is what we’re told every single time for decades and this is the result. maybe it’s time to break out plan b (before it’s banned in texas)
I meant the next time we set up a democracy…
Has there ever been a current president that the party has not put up for re-election after their first term? The decision isn’t really up to me as a pleb Democrat, it’s up to the party in Washington D.C. on who they want to represent the party in the election. When given the choice, I’ll vote for anyone over Trump.
I just haven’t seen the evidence that some random state sentator would be a safer bet.
The unfortunate reality is that there are still too many voters who will vote for a centrist old white man over Trump, but would not vote for a young progressive over Trump.
I didn’t like it in 2020 either, but the Democrats did what they needed to do to beat Trump.
I’m pretty old. Biden is hands down the best president in my lifetime.
He’s way older than I am, which is a problem, but he’s also a national hero for beating Trump in 2020 and making the win stick, which was more difficult than it seemed.
Since then he’s been great on jobs, infrastructure, defense, and a host of other issues. Not that I agree with him on everything, but to call him a run of the mill conservative Dem, as some do in these comments, is almost slander. He’s an old-school Democrat who survived all the way through the Reagan revolution. The old-school Dems ran the country for almost 50 years from about 1933 to 1980, and did a pretty good job.
In 2020 I was 100% behind Liz Warren and disliked Biden. I thought he’d lose, but this year I’ll gladly vote for him. If he beats Trump for good, they’ll be making statues of him.
the dems seem as helpless to run this geriatric conservative as the gop are to prevent an actual fascist dictator wannabe from successfully running for office.
how can both these massive parties suck so fucking hard
Because voting in the primaries seems anathema to the young progressives who want to change.
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That’s a comforting story but completely unsupported by reality. Look at the exit polls from whatever state you like. The under 30 crowd gets outvoted by 2-1, sometimes a 3-1 margin!
(This gets even more embarrassing when you realize that while the two groups are about the same size of the electorate, the elderly are less likely to vote Democratic, so as a share of potential Democratic voters the 65+ is beating the brakes off the under 30s.)
Also, young Democrats aren’t uniformly progressive.
They voted in the early 2016 primaries too. And the same thing happened.
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“Buh… buh… Biden won South Carolina!”
Yeah… and how did that work out?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election_in_South_Carolina
Trump - 1,385,103, 55.11%
Biden - 1,091,541, 43.43%I couldn’t believe people using the South Carolina primary as the reason Biden should be the candidate. Since when do we let red states decide who the Democratic candidate should be?
South Carolina is generally seen to matter to Dems as it’s a pretty decent cross section of the Democratic coalition as well as folks they need to woo in competitive states (Colorado, the midwest nowadays, Georgia, North Carolina etc.)
The idea wasn’t that Biden would carry South Carolina for the Dems but that a candidate who wins there has the demographic support crucial to the Democratic route to the presidency.
For Biden in particular, it was seen as proof that despite being whiter than the driven snow, he could still motivate Black voters (and honestly, that kind of worked out, Georgia was won in large part because Biden racked up absurd totals among Black voters in Clayton, Fulton and DeKalb) while still appealing to more moderate, working class white voters to win back the rust belt states Clinton lost in 2016.
We obviously don’t know how things would have gone with another candidate but the demographic success that Biden enjoyed in S.C was pretty much the success that kept trump out of office this term.
These are the same people telling us Demcoracy is on the line
I’m glad I’m a progressive that votes in the primary. I plan to vote in more progressives myself.
Thank you! Please keep doing it, and if possible, asking your friends to!
And you are proposing what?
i dont… i kinda think were all fucked. the only action possible here is to just keep voting lesser evil.
i used to hope, but that runs out after the first few decades
They way to fix things is voting reform. But it can’t be just any reform.
We have to ditch Ordinal voting systems. Every single one of them leads to some degree of two party dominance, with voters having to prioritize strategy over their own needs, because not doing so means they will be actively punished.
Cardinal systems are the only way to escape. Strategic voting becomes less necessary and less impactful.
My current favorite system is STAR. It takes all the great ideas of the best cardinal voting system (Score) and adds in an automatic runoff that greatly reduces the impact of clone candidate attacks.
the only voting system i endorse is consent-and-consensus
Do you mean something like Approval?
https://electowiki.org/wiki/Greatest_possible_consensus_winner
Approval voting guarantees the election of greatest possible consensus winners, when it ask voters “which alternatives do you consent to?”
Approval would vastly improve things, but has some drawbacks. Score is like Approval, but a bit more so, and then STAR takes Score and adds to it again to be an even better system.
The systems above all break two party dominance, or rather they make it impossible to enforce two party dominance. Ordinal systems on the other hand, all fall victim to Arrow’s theorem, and thus reinforce two-party dominance.
no, i mean total consensus.
So unanimous consensus? As in, something akin to expecting the tooth fairy to come wipe for you? There’s no such system.
The closest thing is called Approval, and even with that system, there will be people who go away unhappy. Just far fewer of them than under any other voting system,
Perfect consensus only happen if there are dozens or even hundreds of people running for office, and only then if the voters have perfect knowledge of every candidate.
A no holds barred Yu-Gi-Oh match. Winner becomes president, loser cleans the white house bathrooms for the next 4 years.
Will there be some kid competing while possessed by an ancient pharoah?
I believe you’re under the mistaken impression that u/originalucifer is actually running one or both of these parties.
I never said this nor do I believe it. But engaging in doomscrolling and screaming into the void is not going to do much so I’m looking for ideas. Yes they are all way too old, there’s no denying that. The question is: now what?
bOtH SIdeS
The Democrats are generally a fairly ineffective ally on good days. The Republicans are an effective enemy every day. It’s not an equivocation to say those are both crappy options.
indeed. what we really need to do is political action outside of just voting, because voting for genocide joe or donald “hitler” trump isn’t gonna work very well
uhhh no.
“both sides” is pretending both suffer from the same issue… i have clearly not made that case
uhhh yes.
“both sides” is presenting them both as equally bad… you have clearly made that case
ha, again no. i clearly identified one side as the obvious choice. but keep tryin’… im sure youll find something. i believe in you!
I don’t. It’s an obvious distinction.
Because the electorate is doing little to nothing at the local scale to change voting methodology. Until that happens in a broad fashion, the two parties will continue to be a problem.
Edit: you can downvote all you want, it doesn’t change reality.
Yes, welcome to politics.
I have never approved of the person I voted for president
Voting isn’t a valentine. It’s a chess move. —Rebecca Solnit
Except the chess piece doesn’t honestly care what you think and a couple thousand people in flyover country can put you in checkmate regardless of how you move.
Voting is more like beating your head against a wall. If enough people join you then you might just move the building. But don’t expect it to feel good afterwards.
I fundamentally disagree. If this was at all true, Republicans wouldn’t still be working so hard to make it difficult to vote in red states.
The point isn’t for your vote to feel good; if that’s your end goal, you are naive. The point is that it’s strategic to an end, something the Fascists understand quite well.
Like I said: it works if enough people also beat their head against the wall. And the building will shift about a sixteenth of an inch. And we’ll all celebrate the power of democracy and how awesome it is we do this ever four years.
Oh, and for the preceding year there’s bullhorns playing at all hours and if you don’t listen to them you’re not and informed head-basher
And the building will shift about a sixteenth of an inch. And we’ll all celebrate the power of democracy and how awesome it is we do this ever four years.
Yes. A little progress is progress nonetheless. You can wish for it to be different, but this is how democracy works, because not everyone thinks like you or has the same priorities as you. Even ignoring the loud authoritarians, there’s still a wide variety of people with different backgrounds and paradigms deciding what they find most important when they vote.
Sorry! Next year the people bashing their heads against the wall moved it half an inch and now your kid’s trapped under it.
Clown government.
Probably because someone was telling people that voting didn’t matter, so they never showed up to oppose that.
If only there were elections more than once every four years…
Oh wait!
I was exaggerating. Smaller building, same bead bashing. Fewer bullhorns.
Oddly enough, if you move buildings a sixteenth of an inch at a time… but over thousands of times, it moves significantly!
The fascists vote entirely on feeling, it’s why Trump and MAGA have taken over the GOP who’s “strategy” lost them their party.
Forfeiting is a chess move, yes.
but the people who say this keep losing, so it doesn’t work in reality
Untrue. Look at the midterms, where we were supposed to have a “red wave,” which wound up with places like Michigan having a Dem majority in all three chambers and Republicans getting only a very thin majority in the US House, or all the people who voted for “not-Trump.”
Strategic voting absolutely works.
that’s not a presidential race
That’s not a sufficient rebuttal.
Blah blah blah it’s January for crying out loud. Most voters haven’t even actually started thinking about the race. Only the terminally online and talking heads are thinking about this.
Of course Biden’s unpopular compared with a nebulous “what if” alternative. Shit, the real comparison people answering these polls are probably making is him against Obama. Obama was only fighting the Great Recession, not a global pandemic and a wannabe dictator with all his fans and an expansionist Russia with greedy stockholders driving CEOs to gouge consumers under cover of “inflation” and on and on.
I’m not even saying Biden’s approval rating will get better between now and November. But if Trump is the Republican nominee, I think Biden has a pretty strong shot at winning anyway. As long as we all get out and vote.
See you in June when prices come down across the board, wages rise, and more conservatives die of preventable diseases.
Those are the things we like about Biden! That is like saying " You don’t like Trump because the COVID vaccine was developed while he was president."
No, I am pretty sure there are other things that would make people not like him.
Trump’s dislike is going to run even higher (and a lot deeper).
