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- 24 days
Who in the everfucking life would ever vote for Roseanne Barr?
Fuuuuck.
- blargh513@sh.itjust.worksEnglish24 days
Undecided voters in the modern era are ALL fucking morons. It’s not like the two parties are at ALL aligned in any way. They could not be more different.
If you declare you’re undecided, you should not be allowed to vote because you’re too goddamn stupid.
24 daysWithin any given party, you’ve got a wide spectrum of opinions. Unfortunately, very few of these opinions are any good.
- 23 days
Also:
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that’s clear, I will choose Freewill
-Geddy Lee, Rush
As someone in a swing state, I made the mistake of voting third party once. As much as I’d love to be represented by someone outside the two parties shoved down my throat, the system needs major change before such a vote can actually affect the outcome.
- 24 days
There are so few of you out there. The vast majority of voters under the Electoral College system live in deeply uncontested territory.
There are tens millons of those compared to the tens of thousands of voters living in the select few swing districts of a select few swing states.
Genuinely very annoyed at the guy who sees a Californian or a South Carolinian vote third party and gets mad about it.
Why even bother with democracy if there’s only one correct choice on the ballot? Just do a dictatorship already, you cowards.
Ueah I agree, and perhaps I over simplified with my “swing state” statement. My district was ~52% to ~46% in the presidential election. That’s close enough for me to stick with the program. The story is even closer for the 2016 one where I voted 3rd party.
- 24 days
Thank you for realizing. I meet too many people who think “protest” is them voting 3rd party.
I put that on par with people I meet who tip $0 or tip 1 cent to make a point and force owners to pay better.
- 24 days
What did Rosanne ever run for?
The ice cream truck???
(Hey-Ohhhhhhhhhh!!!)
- 23 days
So the average voter is very easily influenced by online bot farms, that tracks.
- Turret3857@infosec.pubEnglish24 days
Bluesky is an open platform you could use literally any open source project to follow
fucking discord
ok.
- 23 days
As someone who lives in a deep red state and an even redder district, voting third party is about all I got. Supporting people over party is what I care about. Maybe if I lived in a purple or blue area my mind would be different, but that’s not the hand I’m dealt.
As someone who lives in a deep red state and an even redder district, voting third party is about all I got.
For a long while, down in the beating heart of Tom DeLay’s Houston suburbs, the Libertarians were the second party. Democrats regularly failed to make it onto the ballot (for… reasons).
Supporting people over party is what I care about.
Absolutely. Although that’s got nothing to do with voting.
- 22 days
What I meant by the last part was I voted for the person that represented what I wanted instead of voting for the party. Every single time the person I want is a third party option. If the Dems ran a presidential candidate that I liked more than any other option or if the ones in my state put up a Senator or Congressman that wasn’t just a conservative that didn’t hate unions and stood for what I stand for, I’d happily vote for them. I don’t see any of this actually ever happening even in primaries.
I don’t see any of this actually ever happening even in primaries.
I mean, I do see it happening from time to time. Bernie was a recent example. Jesse Jackson also a big one during the 80s. Even Obama had his moment in the sun, back in his 2008 run.
They never last, either because the party snuffs it out or because the candidates themselves turn milquetoast and lame by the time they get to office.
But, idk. Would Ralph Nader have governed any better or worse than Al Gore? Really hard to say without giving them both a shot at high office. But neither landed. Instead we got Bush and Clinton.
In a two party system each vote is strategic. If you vote for a third party you risk the worst candidate winning.
each vote is strategic
Votes can’t be deployed strategically if they have no weight. When voting districts are enormous, when elected representatives never have to face their constituents in person, and when all of the incentives of pursuing office tilt towards selling out to the wealthiest partisan activists, your individual vote quiet literally doesn’t matter. It cannot be deployed strategically on its own.
Only a coalition of voters can sway a candidate’s behavior. You have to be an active member in an organization that rallies other voters. You have to contribute to the bureaucracy of that organization, either through your money or your labor. And you have to be publicly vocal in your support for your candidate.
If you vote for a third party you risk the worst candidate winning.
If you organize with a third party campaign and rally people to its banner, you are doing more to influence the remaining candidates by expressing a threat to their potential majorities.
The clearest recent demonstration of this is the RFK Jr independent campaign. RFK was polling at around 10%, while Trump was underwater with respect to Biden/Harris. So what did the Trump campaign do? He onboarded RFK to his own campaign. He promised RFK a cabinet position. And he co-opted RFK’s platform, pivoting hard into vaccine denial and MAHA bullshit. By running independent of Trump, and racking up an election-winning share of indie voters, RFK forced the Republican Party to swallow his brand of pseudo-science bullshit.
Compare that to the Harris campaign, which tried to capture the #NeverTrump block through his courtship of Liz Cheney and Jeff Flake. The #NeverTrump voting base was barely 1-2% of the total voting pool. It paled beside RFK Jr’s block. And it alienated a bunch of more progressive voters. Particularly voters of color. Double-plus particularly Muslim voters and their friends in key swing states like Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
These indie voters never formed a visible coalition. They never aligned around an alternative candidate that Harris would (or even could) explicitly align with. They never showed up in popular polling as a “gettable” block of issue-oriented voters. So Harris ignored them. They dropped out of the general election pool as non-voters, contributing to Harris’s catastrophic plunge in support after Biden’s 81M vote high watermark from 2020. And they remained faceless, until…
The DSA began mobilizing these voters in the 2026 primary campaigns. Suddenly, they were a viable, vocal block of support. They showed up at rallies as a community. They donated as a block. They block walked as a block. They backed candidates as a block. They won primaries as a block - first (notably) in the NYC Mayor’s race. And then again in primaries from Maine to Minnesota.
This partisan block was now gettable. They were visible to pollsters. They were visible to fundraisers. They were visible to candidates who wanted to win them over. As unaligned individuals, they didn’t matter. But now they fucking mattered.
- 24 days
I respect these people more. Not because of who they voted for but because they aren’t ‘Always Vote Blue/Red’. People don’t get that career politician are there to help themselves first. DONT VOTE FOR THE PARTY, VOTE FOR THE PERSON.
- 23 days
At least she voted. I’d take that over the “we’ve tried nothing and we’re out of ideas” crowd.
- 24 days
I’m not quite sure that’s either an ideal, nor a swing voter. It is accurate to the average active voter, and likely closer to the persistent non-voter. With turnout like we have in America this is a much more coherent ideology than you can expect from most.
