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@freemo I totally understand the choice you’re trying to get people to make. I wish there were a candidate I’d like to win but there’s definitely a candidate I particularly want to lose (I think Obama was the only presidential candidate that I affirmatively wanted to win rather than voting for someone because I wanted the other candidate to lose )
@Gbudd Honestly i feel like if your top priority isnt ensuring both loose then your doing it wrong. They both have such extremely over the top racist histories that i cant imagine being able to support either and still sleeping at night. But thats just me.
@freemo That’s not unreasonable in a vacuum. It’s certainly true that I wish I had somehow done something concrete to somehow meaningfully create a different alternative but at the moment what I’m capable of doing is voting for what I believe to be the less awful alternative. (I do spend a fair bit of time trying to improve my local world but it’s more about EMS than creating political change)
@Gbudd The lesser of two evils is fine if your picking between a salad and a burger. Not when your picking between two overtly racist candidates when you have at least 2 other choices on the ballot. Saying your voting for one racist because you hate some other racist that is running and refusing to vote for the two other non-racist good people is **not** picking the lesser of two evils, its literally just picking evil when you had non-evil choices.
@freemo That would be fine if we did ranked choice voting but today my meaningful choices are going to be between Biden and Trump. For me that’s not a close call, I’ll vote for Biden any day over Trump (with all respect to your first hand and well earned loathing of Biden).
I would really like ranked choice voting to take off so we could meaningfully vote for third-party candidates as our first choice but we’re not there yet
@Gbudd The only reason you have those two choices is because everyone in unison says what you say. Like somehow everyone recognizes there are 2 evils and then a bunch of not 2 evils, but we all agree those 2 evils are our only choice cause everyone else thinks it.
Its idiotic and just a shared delusion (not calling you an idiot, just the idea)
@freemo I agree that it’s a shared delusion (as are many things that make a society, like money for example). It’s definitely a system that keeps the two parties in power and that’s why they fight things like ranked choice voting.
@Gbudd What im gettign at is that while the system keeps 2 main parties,it doesnt dictate who those 2 main parties are. In the course of history in america a main party has bee replaced with a third party (and once that happens the old party never becomes a main party again) 8 times. In all examples the third party had <5% support the previous year jumping to majority support the next.
So by all means accept that 2 parties are likely to win. But also accept that who those two parties are can readily switch on a dime. So the logic fails that you know which 2 parties you should vote for. And logic dictates when you have to monumentally unqualified and racist candidates as your 2 party choices that this year, and the next few elections to come stand a very good chance of flipping who those parties are.
@freemo It’s possible, but since the Bull Moose party in 1912 it doesn’t look like a third party has gotten a significant share of the vote and the Whigs appear to have disappeared in 1860 or so.
I’m seeing Kennedy, Stein, and West as third party candidates (with apologies to any I’m missing), I can’t say I’m affirmatively enthused about any of them. None of them are likely to crack 5% unless something dramatically changes.
In a normal year, where there were just two candidates that I didn’t like I’d be more inclined to vote third party (and I have in the past). For me (and speaking only for me) Biden / Trump is a choice between bad and catastrophic. My personal judgment is that I’d prefer bad over catastrophic but everyone gets to make that choice for themselves.
None of that is to tell anyone else what to do or how to vote, it’s just my thought process.
@freemo Practically there’s no difference who I vote for in NJ so I could always write someone in.
On the other hand, it’s arguable that that strategy in the aggregate gave us Bush 2 and Trump. Gore and Hillary Clinton should have just earned the majority outright but while it’s impossible to know what would have happened but I’d say that those two losses produced some pretty awful consequences.