Why Not Vote For A Completely Different Evil This November?
Are you voting for someone with a fuzzy grip on reality? Or against your own interests? Independents will never win, but why not send a message?
“I’m voting for Trump this time.”
Really?
“I guess I’ll vote for Biden again, anything’s better than Trump.”
Are you sure?
I mean, I’ve got food in my fridge older than these two codgers! (Okay, maybe it’s time to throw out the meat loaf.)
Acting grand-dadly is the latest fad in D.C amongst the 75+ set. Mitch McConnell ‘freezes’; Trump and Biden have both been scrutinized for potential dementia, and not only by their adversaries and critics. A Washington pharmacist claims he is regularly filling and hand-delivering prescriptions for treating Alzheimer’s disease—to many members of Congress.
Anyone who’s a baby boomer is already pretty damn old, but our two truly serious candidates from the two biggest parties are from the friggin’ Silent Generation. Or maybe Trump is a very early boomer. Born in 1945, he’s on the cusp, although no one has ever accused him of silence.
A guy who worships dictators and admits he wants to be one himself is the worst possible choice ever, with or without his cookies. He gave us four years’ experience with his petty and morally corrupt presidency, incapable of telling the truth, obsessed with his own petty grievances, issuing crazy directives ignored by his staff, spending more time tweeting than running the country, and insulting and disrespecting everyone, including military veterans. Except deplorable dictators, with whom he may have shared sensitive American intelligence—and kept it unsecured in his bathroom. Remember the days when Republicans lost their shit when someone burned a flag? Now they wipe their shit with the American flag.
I think Biden is a somewhat less demented choice in both senses of the word but—I’m not voting for him either.
God/dess help us if he dies in office. President Kamala Harris: Another reason to Just Say No to Joe.
I expected the former San Francisco district attorney to set fire to her enemies the way Congresswoman Katie Porter does when she traps a hapless CEO in the Senate chambers hot seat. Harris has a glare that could melt steel but not, apparently, her critics.
She’s too Hillary Clinton: Stiff, robotic, unwilling to speak her mind and there’s no way she could ever utter an actual sarcastic zinger. Not publicly, anyway.
She’s a bright, smart woman, but too hyper-conscious of her burdensome identity labels: Female, black, Asian etc. and first Vice President to be all that stuff.
I think most of us would like to see someone younger than either of the two acuity-challenged Methuselahs. I mean, I want a President I don’t have to explain the difference between a boy and a girl to. And ffs, Donald Trump thinks Nikki Haley is Nancy Pelosi!
We bitch about shitty candidates but how is this not our fault? We get what we vote for in the primaries. The Republicans run in fear from any candidate with a brain because their voters do. The Democrats scream on sight at any candidate who isn’t woke because hating all the people the Republicans don’t and wanting to censor as many library books as Moms for Liberty is what passes for ‘progressivism’. And who do we vote for? Whoever we think is the lesser of the two evils.
Even when they’re both against our own interests.
So I wonder. Why vote for either? What if those of us fed up with both extremes voted for some independent candidate we know will never win but at least doesn’t stand in contradiction to our own interests, and who possesses more conscious thought than a jellyfish?
I’m not alone. Bari Weiss’s The Free Press recently covered how voters from both sides are switching in The Great Scramble. It reminds me of Afghanistan before 9/11. Their choices were only the Taliban and the Northern Alliance; voters constantly changed the reigning party and received brand-new violence, same as the other. Would you prefer Mao or Hitler?
Sound familiar?
The article mirrors exactly how I feel: Politically homeless, abandoned by the party I voted for all my life (Democrat). Not wanting to see either side win. Seeing violence and repression no matter which doddering old man leads his younger, toxic party to victory.
What message would it send if a whack of Americans voted, but not for either major party candidate? What if the winning geezer won with, like, 38% of the vote? Even though all those independent candidates came nowhere within megaphone-shouting distance of winning?
I asked that question on Quora recently and most argued against voting indy. A fellow named Mark Stinson described how the states’ elections require a plurality of the vote and how even a 38% winner (the person with the most popular votes) wins all that state’s electors, and how, in the current state of Congress, the Republicans would probably get the votes needed to win in the 26 primarily Republican House delegations. His full answer is here (you have to scroll down).
But we’ve got to do something. There aren’t a lot of declared Democratic challengers to the incumbent’s reign, who’s widely regarded as the only person who can beat Trump, since he did it once before.
Elections are about many different issues, but at the core we care about our own, and our tribe’s, interest. In my position, my tribe under threat constitutes half the country. The same threat I perceive from the right, although expressed differently.
I don’t consider the Democrats pro-women’s rights anymore.
Why should anyone vote against their own interests?
You’ve got abject whackjobbery in the GOP, and abject wokejobbery in the Dems.
As a feminist, I find myself increasingly resistant to voting for any candidate or party who’s not.
The ‘woke’ Democrats are in thrall to a transgender religion which signals a much deeper problem so-called liberals have with women’s rights.
The Squad and other woke-ass-kissing politicians are willing to put women in serious danger in service for the votez for sexual fetishists cosplaying womanhood for the wanks.
Sorry, Dems, but supporting women’s right to abortion is no longer enough to prove feminist credentials.
I believe the unquestioning loyalty too many in the party express towards ‘trans rights’, a subject on which I’ve spilled many words already, exemplifies a pervasive left-wing misogyny no less threatening than historical conservative hostility to women’s rights, and I wonder whether the pledged allegiance to restore Roe is mostly Democratic efforts to distract female voters from an uglier agenda: Namely, the right to say no to aggressive men. I’m not at all sure misogynist souls are any different riding an elephant or a donkey. Men seem pretty willing no matter how they vote to protect male sexual interests, even if it’s not their own. Help out a bro’, could you, buddy?
Roe seems to be the only policy point on which Democrats aren’t actively trying to harm women.
The only policy point on which the Republicans support women is by resisting the transgender cult, including ‘gender-affirming’ care.
But I can’t vote for them, either. Not when culty Trumplove is the intellectually deranged equivalent of ‘Transwomen are women’.
Women are half the population, and our safety, equality and interests far outweigh what suspiciously predatory men want. Wokeness = misogyny, exemplified by disbelieving Hamas’s own documented livestreamed rape and atrocity videos. The Squad’s refusal to support Israeli rape victims makes the Epstein-friendly pussy-grabber look like Harry Styles. And denying that men who grow their hair long don’t possess any physical advantage over their female teammates demonstrates conscious stupidity on the same level as that Biden stole the election becuase it’s simply impossible not enough Americans voted for Trump the last time around for him to lose.
Even as Republicans don’t support ‘transing’ children, they’re the ones who destroyed Roe, and many are want to eliminate birth control, like Clarence Thomas, who’s also against gay marriage (I wonder how he feels about returning 1968’s anti-miscegenation law?). Republicans also voted against the Violence Against Women Act.
There’s so much wrong with both misogynist parties, but Donald Trump? Again? With all the other lib-hating, reason-averse, censorship-happy, misogynist, racist, homophobic, but more mentally acute candidates Republican voters have to choose from, why does it have to be the dictator-lover who clearly hates democracy? What does it tell us about what’s really wrong with this country?
Hint: It ain’t Trump.
I know there’s a lot more to an election than women’s rights. Trump is killing the Democrats, rightfully, on immigration. One of the massive delusions of the illiberal left, as I’ve pointed out many times before, is its unwillingness to just say no to anyone. Not just sexual fetishists seeking to bend women to their will, but to any old Mexican rapist who wants to immigrate to the U.S., because guaranteed, there will be rapists and other ‘bad hombres’ as Trump has put it, when you allow unfettered access from any place on the planet.
Related: They’re Black Democrats. And They’re Suing Chicago Over Migrants. - The Free Press
Voters have plenty of economic concerns too, and I also recognize I don’t live in the U.S. anymore so I don’t have to live with whichever bad decision y’all make. What does bother me is that the only decent Republican candidate worthy of considering was the guy who entered not to win but to try and warn Americans about what an unqualified human being Donald Trump was to allow into power again. Chris Christie knew he had no chance of winning; and it’s a shame because he was the only candidate with a brain not addled by ideotology.
I’ve liked him ever since he ate a doughnut on Letterman in response to his many fat-shamers
But every time I think about holding my nose and voting for the sort of less toxic party, I feel ashamed. I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t. Fuck it, America.
I’ll ‘throw away’ my vote on some candidate or party who has no hope of winning.
I can’t, I won’t, vote against my own interests.
Ranked voting
There’s a better way to conduct elections. It’s too late for 2024, but we should start talking about it now.
Someone answering my question on Quora pointed out the idea of ‘ranked voting’, which sounds like a better way to elect a candidate rather than by which one drools the least .
With ‘ranked voting’, a voter ranks three or more candidates from most to least preferred.
Ranked voting is a little more complicated, but Rankedvoting.co, which believes it’s promoting a more pro-democracy electoral reform, claims ranked voting “determines the candidate with the strongest support, encourages civil campaigning, reduces wasted votes, and eliminates the need for multiple elections.” In other words, your vote does count, since you’re not just voting for your fave, but the ones you’d rather see if s/he can’t win.
It’s already in practice in some states and municipalities. In 2022, Alaska’s new non-partisan primary system offered all candidates on a unified ballot. Voters ranked who they wanted, which advanced the top four candidates to the instant runoff. Supposedly, it reduced extremism and encouraged greater cooperative governance. Voters are believed to have made more nuanced decisions rather than strict party-based ones. After all, no one knows who will make the Final Four or whether any will be Your Party Humanoid. I could sneak in a rank for Chris Christie.
Because the elections were more ‘meaningful’, meaning “ballots cast in competitive elections that are not effectively pre-determined based on party affiliation alone,” a higher percent of Alaskans (35%) cast them, more than any other state.
The ‘cooperative governance’ comes into play when campaigning candidates have to cooperate with each other after an election ends, as it did in Alaska last year, with an unusual bipartisan majority coalition in the Alaska Legislature’s two chambers. The result is that lawmakers have to work together now, and when they run again have to appeal to a broader swathe of voters rather than just playing to their base.
That bit interests me even more about ranked voting.
It’s an interesting idea for creating greater voter engagement, and other options if you’re not that keen on the candidate of your own party. And we could all do with more ‘civil campaigning’.
It’s ten months until the U.S. federal election. What are your thoughts or opinions? Since we won’t have ranked voting, will you vote for one of the Paw-Paws or will you send a message to Washington? I might still try writing in Lyndon Larouche, Ross Perot or Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf.
Yeah, I know they’re all dead, but if I’m asked to rank three of the candidates in the poll at the top of this article my choices are:
Death by chocolate
Death by George Clooney-shagging
The bullet.
What I asked for: An elephant and donkey fighting, both decorated with U.S. flag colors and motifs. What the AI delivered: Siamese twin American flags and an elephant with three tusks, and with a tentacle and a penis growing out of its head. And no damn donkey.
Not going to vote for Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party in the next Canadian election either. Same reasons. When I’m not wondering whether perhaps I should build an underground fort like those rich fucks in New Zealand, I help women and others reclaim their power here on Grow Some Labia.