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this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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I guess you just want to keep not getting it then. Cus what you are doing, how you are thinking, acting, talking: Its why we lost the election.
You don't get it. But you also don't want to get it. You want to be "right" but your approach to politics has lost the popular cause of the people, and just, objectively loses elections.
You can either "be right", on your own terms, or you can win elections. You can't have both.
Here is the biggest hint of your lifetime: Democrats losing elections has nothing to do with Republicans.
I still fail to see your point tbh, thank you for sharing it though. I do always enjoy trying to change my perspective. For me though it just feels as if the non voters are essentially passing the blame on and not taking accountability for the shit show they find themselves in now.
Maybe just try and appreciate the deep cynicism of your perspective.
In the same way you are trying to blame non-voters for having nothing to vote for, you are not taking accountability for the shit show we find ourselves in.
Think about your rhetoric: Whose mind is changed because of how you think, and then you expressing it?
How many people did you (or the Democrats for that matter) convince with this perspective?
Republican bad; voters should [, , ] xyz: That's not at how elections, electoralism, or voters work.
You just simply have to come to terms with that. How you think the world works in regards to electoralism; its not how it works, and that not working was put on extreme display in November.
Do you want to win elections or not? Thats the first question to answer. Then, if you say "yes" to that first question, you then have to come to terms with the fact that your perspective, the dominant, mainstream, corporate Democrat perspective: it loses elections. It doesn't work.
Its not cynicism that brought me to my current perspective. It's a drive to learn from mistakes and be better from it. Something that non-voters I feel need to do as well. Let me demonstrate, if leading up to the election you were to write a pros and cons list, with Palestne being the only definite con for both sides. Given the rhetoric from both camps are you saying that the Democrats had more or the same cons as the MAGAt camp? If so I would be curious from your perspective what those other cons are? Ensure you are comparing them to the same rhetoric as the MAGAt camp during that time.
I just want you to appreciate that its, really, deeply, not worth my time to continue doing the of explaining why, that the perspective you refuse to move from: that its the voters fault; is part and parcel with the mechanism of how Democrats lose elections.
You just have to decide what you want more: Do you want to insist that you are right in what arguments and how you think about elections, or do you you want to beat MAGA and fascism?
You can't have both. The Democrats drove the USS YourExactApproachToElectoralism right into the cliffs. If you can't change your mind, and understand that how you are having this conversation was precisely is an extension of how the Democrats are managed as controlled opposition: we're fucked.
Just set up the framing right? Lets take it apart. You want this to be framed as a "Well Democrats were bad, but Republicans were worse™. This trope has been repeated endlessly for the previous 60 years. Literately, the entire modern political hegemony (starting with the southern strategy; basically the end of the Roosevelt social Democrats), has been couched in this rhetorical framing.
Look at what you are trying to do with your framing. You are trying to set me up as if I'm defending or care even one iota about Republicans. Buddy, I have not one lick of influence on anything any Republican could ever think or do. I couldn't convince a republican or the republican party of ANYTHING. I have 0 influence on them. My opinions or perspectives of the Republicans are utterly moot: because I have no carriage with them. They'll never come to my perspectives, I'll never come to theirs.
You have it burned into your head that this was a choice between two sides: but it never actually was, and it hasn't been since.. 1996? There has been no tangible center in the American electorate in at least 30 years.
Your job this election cycle, as an obviously intelligent and informed voter, your job was to get people off the couch and interested in voting. And your rhetoric, this rhetoric you are using right now: it does the opposite of that, and exponentially more so for low information voters. Literally, this presentation, that I, the voter looking to be convinced, "have to" do something, when you offer me, basically nothing other than "well the other team is pretty bad too": what exactly is it you think that does to voters?
Again, its a broken record, and its clear that you aren't interested in actually winning elections because you don't have the introspection necessary.
Hey thanks for talking about it though. I would argue it appears I am not the one set in my view point. You have not really presented anything to change my mind and have spent a great deal more time writing that monologue then it would have taken to prove my point. A simple task that all people should do when entering an election. The non-voters remain in my books the biggest disappointment in the US 2024 elections, when the other side was as blatant as they were in the racism, hatred and authoritarianism then blaming the other side for their poor messaging when they were the opposite is just poor form from the non-voters and as far as I am concerned just as much fodder for the leopards as the conservatives who voted to have their rights slowly stripped away.
You want the election to have been about Republicans versus Democrats so that you can blame non-voters or anti-genocide voters, whomever.
Democrats and those who repeat their arguments simply needed to do better. They needed better policies to run on and needed to do something other than "Republicans bad" as rhetoric. "Republicans bad" when a persons life gets just as worse under Democratic rule as it does under Republican rule falls flat.
Blaming people who didn't vote: You will lose us another election if you continue with this, and you've now been notified. You won't be able to deny accountability if you continue with this strategy to rhetoric.
The difference between the two parties was not just insignificant policy difference. You had one side literally boost hatred on a Haitian community, that was loud in their Nazi and authoritarian rhetoric. You are not applying the reflection needed to understand that when one side is like that and you don’t vote against it then you are also the problem.
Sure. And who did you convince with that argument that wasn't already voting for the Democrat?
You want me to be someone who didn't vote or didn't vote Democrat, but bruh. I've put more time and money into Democratic campaigns, working directly with candidates them elected, than you probably ever will in your entire life. I've been on stage with Katie Porter. I personally have dialed the number of almost every fucking veteran in Rashida Tlaibs district to do wellness checks during COVID. Rashida won her district with 70% support. She was extremely critical of both the Democrats and Israel. 🤔
Vote harder is a failure of electoralism. Blue no matter who DOESNT WORK as rhetoric. You WILL get another Republican elected if you keep at it. "Strategic voting" isn't strategic if it costs you the game.
IYou want to pretend you've got some kind of moral high hand. Blaming voters; not trying to understand them and address the real criticism that the Biden presidency was kind-of a joke and didn't really do shit for people: The insistence that we should just "vote our interests" by voting Democrat: it cost us our democracy.
and you are basically insisting on doing it again.
You again fail to see my point, which is logic based. Its not vote blue no matter who. Its a simple task of pros and cons and actually paying attention to the rhetoric of both sides. In my view this is where the non-voters actually failed and they need to learn from their mistake. The pros and cons for those that appreciate democracy and don't ascribe to the hate that the right pumped out would have been a better way to ensure as a voter you knew what was at stake.
No one is missing your point. You are simply too obtuse to realize its consequences. Its also obvious that you aren't incapable, but simply unwilling to understand this main point. You want the world to be an a way which it isn't and because of that we lost an election. And to be clear, you are in no manner unique in holding that perspective. Your argument, was the core argument that almost all of the DNC infrastructure was relying upon to convince voters to show up last November: and it cost the US its democracy.
Yeah, we know dude. We've been over this. Ad nauseam. Your world view is wrong. Like its just straight up wrong. As in, it has no basis in reality.
Your worldview results in wrong outcomes (based on the charitable assumption you actually wanted to win the election).
You want voters to be different than they are: but they aren't. You want elections to work differently than they do: but they don't.
Having a view that doesn't map to reality: thats at the core of the problem Democrats faced last November.
They didn't want to meet voters where they were. They didn't want to address voters concerns on the voters grounds. They didn't want to hear criticism. They didn't want the candidate to have to move to where the voters were. They wanted the voters to move to where the candidate was. They didn't want to convert non-voters into voters by addressing their grievances with the current state of things. They didn't want to address the fact that Democrats were deeply unpopular with voters and non-voters alike.
But thats not how the world works. And any one could have told you that the above strategy, and more general, approach to interpreting the world and understanding the outcomes and consequences of decisions, any one since Aristotle could have told you that this would obviously fail.
You can't just completely fail to enumerate the board, the pieces, and their positions correctly, fail, and then complain that its the board or the pieces who are wrong because you didn't want to even look to understand how the game was set up.
You are blaming the board and the pieces for losing a game.
Sorry, your points still don't sway me. To learn and move past what happened, the non-voters need to take a large portion of the blame. Otherwise you are only pandering to their apathy, without them acknowledging this simple error on their part then the US will repeat this same error in the future.
Edit: I will add I have seen more self reflection and growth from former Republicans who realise that they fucked up by supporting him in the first place. A concept you and those non-voters are failing to grasp.