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I have problems with people who abstained. The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025
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You don't. If you want someone to vote for you, you need to provide something that they want. The point of democracy is not to change the people to fit what the rulers want, it's to change the rules to what the people want. If you can't do that, the people don't want you.
I keep ruminating on this argument, and it gives me deeply split feelings.
On one hand I keep thinking, voters need to grow up. Voting is how the populace gets to engage in self governance, i.e. politics, and as the aphorism goes, Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. Things that are easy aren't solved by politics, and the voters need to accept that you're often not going to get what you want and in governance you often have to settle for choosing the thing you hate the least.
On the other hand, I keep thinking I'm making the classic leftist mistake of demanding everyone should do what I think is right, because I am right, and then being frustrated when my rightness isn't blindingly obvious to everyone.
Like the lady says, It's like rain on your wedding day...
To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld: You don't run for office with the electorate you want, you run for office with the electorate you have.
Well that's a lie, with voter suppression and gerrymandering you can have your dream electorate!
Well then, our troubles are deeper than we know.
On the right as long as you talk a good game on lowering taxes they'll put aside any and all espoused convictions. See how quiet the Libertarians got when Roe v. Wade was overturned. Turns out any time I spent debating the preeminence of personal liberty and the NAP was a big fat waste of my time. Alas.
On the left we have an electorate that "...would rather be right than president," and it turns out they get to be neither.
Most Americans align closer with progressives than any other group when it comes to policy. But messaging has been coopted by the Republicans to make people instinctively hate "socialism" because of the Red Scare Propaganda.
But Democrats block progressive policy because it makes their donors angry.
So really there's nobody willing to represent the majority
I've become pretty skeptical we know where the majority is. The question determines the outcome of the survey. The measuring stick is flawed and error bars are many times larger than the difference being measured. Frankly, the thing being measured has more dimensions than are being measured.
And it's worth remembering how the party got here. The left and labor coalition failed to beat Nixon twice, Ford's losing had little to do with the left, and it utterly fell apart against Reagan. The Democrats only started to get traction at the national level by going to the center, using the DLC playbook. I'm as angry about the abandonment of labor by the Democratic party as anyone, but the reason for it is not a mystery. By the same token if the left doesn't build the structure for a more left leaning Democratic party to operate no one should expect the party to move.
The hard thing is, I don't know what that structure looks like, but it's not enough to be "correct".
YOU'RE skeptical.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/27/majority-of-americans-support-progressive-policies-such-as-paid-maternity-leave-free-college.html
Stop projecting because you are too lazy to go learn about the world around you.
Saving. That survey is hard to find if you don’t search the right terms.
I've read it. Many times from many outlets reporting on more than one survey. The first time I found it comforting.
However it's not hard to find conflicting data. Methodology determines outcomes of these surveys, every time.
Today I'm less comforted. But ultimately, for what it's worth, I don't think we're that far apart.
And yet they would not turn out to nominate Bernie... Talk about lazy.
They did vote for him
So much so that the DNC threatened him into dropping out. The emails from the DNC got out and it caused the head of the DNC to resign in shame.
This is public information that you should probably have already known.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/23/us/politics/dnc-emails-sanders-clinton.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/24/debbie-wasserman-schultz-resigns-dnc-chair-emails-sanders
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/sanders-supporters-walk-off-convention-floor-blame-rigged-system-for-his-loss
Certainly not in numbers that got him nominated. And of course the DNC boogyman that is fronted here had nothing to do with that turn out whatsoever. The superdelegates didn't even matter his numbers were so low and she beat him by a factor of two in Texas. So much for the canard of progressiveness in red states.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/primary-calendar-and-results.html
Hey look it's old info that came out before all the stuff I linked!
Cool find, but there's the entire rigging of the primary by the DNC (who don't legally have to show legitimate vote counts) that you seem to have missed.
Go read my links and catch up with the rest of us.
If you don't feel like engaging with reality and whining at me then I'm done here
I did read your links, they reflect the reality that Bernie didn't have enough votes, particularly in red states. Conspiracy theories and upset delegates simply cannot paper over that.
Ok bye
Americans are impoverished and uneducated, Democrats are not, but they should be fucking smart enough to know you can't use big words or complicated ideas with poor, distrqcted, and uneducated people.
You force through policies that put money in their pockets, that tangibly improve their lives, or you piss them off even more and give them a minority to attack as a distraction from your lack of policy.
The Republicans understand this.
This is how you appeal to the impoverished and uneducated, and that will be the majority of the American voting population until a couple decades after we offer free education