this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025
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I have problems with people who abstained. The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 13 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 22 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

i hate the big d Democratic party. i dont like their platform, i don't like their candidates. i voted for harris in2024. the time to make political statements and form a movement is now. do you know what you are supposed to do during election season? VOTE!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, ive said exactly that countless times right before the election, criticize her all you want after the election but ffs, elect her and the average response was something along the lines of "but genocide Joe!" or just nothing .

Also, all those fuckers are gone now, you're not hearing anything about it anymore so I'm guessing that a lot of them could also have been right wing trolls just pushing people to ensure trump would be voted in

[–] [email protected] 6 points 17 hours ago

I want to believe that was a large scale, coordinated influence operation, but the truth is probably a bunch of scattered, uncoordinated young folks tring to make a statement

[–] [email protected] 19 points 18 hours ago

The democrats tried everything except for actually grappling with the subject. Now blaming the voters completely misses the point .. that the dems where supporting Israel and clearly stated they would continue the current path. Trump had the decency to lie to the constituents. And now they cope by convincing themselves it's part of his plan. The voters where duped.. but the Dems did this.. not the voters.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

I wrote the comment below on a thread that got locked while I was writing. TL;DR: Any bonehead who thinks that every single voter is politically-engaged and fully-informed, and that 6 MILLION of them all made a rational, reasoned decision to sit out the election is dumber than they look.

Oh, well, 18 months, what a slog! /s

Look, I've spent close to 30 years now detailing that this fucking insane "lesser evil" slide-to-the-right thing that Democrats were doing was going to end in evil. (That is, fascism.) Either the Democrats themselves would become what we feared, or the greater evil would happen to win.

Guess what? I was fucking wrong. I admit it now. I didn't guess that BOTH would happen simultaneously. It was bad enough more than 20 years ago when my Senator was the only vote against the PATRIOT ACT. It got worse when Obama decided to abolish due process and the rule of law. But by 2024, Democrats were straight up aiding and abetting the biggest war crime of all. Jesus jumpin' Christ on a pogo stick, how did we get to a place where that is the lesser evil?

Y'all couldn't vote for Nader in 1996, because "he can't win." Well, guess what, bucko, we had to change course somehow. He, or a spiritual successor, had to win, or we'd get... well, look around. It was clear even back then. We had to at least try something different, other than the lesser evil every time.

As they say, the best time to change was then, and the second-best time is now. But, no, Kamala Harris couldn't change her mind on genocide to win. No, sir! We have standards of evil to maintain, you see. Meanwhile, the billionaires weren't going away. The wealth inequality wasn't shrinking. Late-stage capitalism wasn't on track to make the serfs' lives better. The climate crisis would still loom. Charismatic fools like Rogan et al. are still young. So the choice in 2024 was fascism now, or fascism later. 2032, most likely, when the partisan pendulum would predictably swing the other way. 2028, possibly.

Is it any wonder that many voters felt overwhelmed, hopeless, defeated, and declined to participate, through the fabulous power of denial? Politics is depressing, the system is big, my vote is inconsequential... Y'know, denial, that power that we've all honed through a lifetime of practice—knowing the horrors of industrial meat production and still ordering a burger, knowing the role of CO~2~ in the climate disaster while waiting in the car at the drive-thru window for it, knowing the causes of cardiovascular disease and still eating it?

Knowing that someday, eventually, we have to fix our political system now that radicals have found its cheat codes, but still browbeating those disengaged voters that they are the ones responsible for this calamity. Yeah. Denial.

The same denial as 30 years ago. This election has been a long time coming. A year and a half? Get outta here.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 21 hours ago (8 children)

This push to demonize the strawman protest voters is an ongoing propaganda campaign to cause poor people to infight.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 21 hours ago (19 children)

Strawman?

6.27 Million more people voted for Biden in 2020 than Harris in 2024. That's not strawmanning, those fuckers stayed home and that is exactly why we are in the current situation.

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[–] [email protected] 68 points 23 hours ago (20 children)

How do you change voter behavior?

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.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 21 hours ago

It’s also to appeal to candidates , which doesn’t get talked about enough in the case of Gaza

Joe and Kamala did nothing to appeal to those voters, going so far as to cancel a Palestinian speaker at the DNC who agreed to have her entire speech vetted

so why arent we pointing the finger at them?

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 22 hours ago (9 children)

Honestly, the election was three months ago, and we have bigger fish to fry right now. My default assumption now is that anyone still trying to relitigate the Gaza voters is a Russian troll trying to sew division among the left.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 21 hours ago (9 children)

Seems like this is more of a candidate problem than a voter problem - Joe and Kamala were very aggressive to anti-genocide voters and protestors - Gov Shapiro even wanted them arrested

Vote shaming will not get these voters to your side, but you know what will - candidates who will listen

[–] [email protected] 18 points 20 hours ago

Vote shaming will not get these voters to your side

This is beyond voter shaming, though. This is asking what the fuck were they thinking.

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[–] [email protected] 118 points 1 day ago (20 children)

The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?

Give them something to vote for. You can write articles of many paragraphs to analyze the course of the election, but in the end it boils down to this: The DNC pissed off too many of their voters and offered nothing in return.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 15 hours ago

Give them something to vote for.

This. We saw the energy and joy when Biden dropped out, and it was reflected by Harris almost matching Obama’s small donor numbers. Hope. Change. They were simple campaign slogans, but people coming out of the Bush era wanted to believe, and had a candidate to believe in.

It’s a damning indictment that my most genuine electoral engagement, in my entire adult life, was voting “Uncommitted” in the 2024 Democratic primary. That was my most enthusiastic, “I 100% support this” vote ever, because almost every other time has been against something/one, or accepting lesser. From ballot initiatives, Senate races, down to the local comptroller chair.

Contrast that to my vote for Kamala in the general afterwards. It’s so unbelievably hollow to say “our democracy is strong” when the choice is always ‘well they’re better than them’.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 23 hours ago (3 children)

Exactly this! You can't just "lesser of two evils" your way through life as you slide towards hell. "Lesser of two evils" isn't a choice, it's a hostage situation.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 15 hours ago

I had some vote blue no matter who nitwit yelling at me the other day about this. i asked them what are we supposed to do when 2028 is Mitt Romney (D) vs Trump (R). They said you vote Romney.

People who voter shame others when both parties have crossed their personal morals are the reason the Democats don’t ever run on anything substative. They have forgotten they have to earn votes. They’re not owed.

And they have forgotten that when they lose, real people suffer deeply for it. The democrats sin of apathy is often worse than the republican sin of cruelty. At least the republicans are honest about how they want to screw over the country.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 15 hours ago

The lesser of the two evils didn't go after the bigger evil, offered nothing, said the economy was doing great as people suffered higher rent and groceries, and then wondered why people listened to the lying devil saying that they would fix their problems.

They don't want to offer solutions, they want votes.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 19 hours ago (3 children)

Choosing the bigger evil ain't the way out of it though. Unless you are an accelerationist that believes things have to get worse before it can get better.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I will always doubt elections so long as I cannot verify my vote was actually counted in the final tally.

I always think of Florida in 2000. The hanging chads represented votes denied.

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