“Why didn’t Hillary Clinton pick Bernie Sanders as her VP?”
Probably because he called her corrupt, unqualified, establishment, and accused her of rigging the election.
lol, still wouldn’t have voted for her though
but for her own sake, she should have picked a progressive.
“i wouldn’t vote for her, but she should still appease me”
top-notch political stratagem
No, she doesn’t need to appease me. Literally nothing she says will persuade me to vote for her.
I said for her own sake, she should have picked a progressive. Everyone isn’t as big of a progressive purist as I am, and she could definitely have picked up more Bernites if she chose Bernie, Warren, Grayson or someone of that kind.
nah, sis, the “we haven’t evolved specialized lungs to breathe while our heads are placed firmly in the sand 24/7” demographic is already lining up behind her
and don’t call yourself a progressive—let alone a purist in that vein—if you’re willing to put the lives and livelihoods of millions of vulnerable people in this country at risk. progressives don’t do that. worthwhile people don’t do that.
Some have put their support behind her, a lot have not. I’m sure she would like more Bernite support than she’s got.
I hate the concept of falling in line and voting out of fear for the lesser of two evils. I will vote for Jill Stein. I am in no way supporting Trump. And even if he won, we’d probably get a Democratic Senate, which means that he wouldn’t be able to do much. If Hillary wins, the Republicans will probably remain in control.
I live in California and we’re gonna go for Hillary anyway. But the more who vote for Jill or who write Bernie in, the stronger message we send to the establishment that we don’t like the way the DNC plays. I don’t know what I would do if I lived in a swing state, but being where I am, I am not putting anything at risk.
Normally, I wouldn’t engage with this, but this could be one of the most critical elections of any of our lifetimes and, yes, I am afraid for myself, for people like me, and for people who aren’t possessed of the power to defend themselves from what could very well be a long-term trend toward fascism in America.
So, with that…
This election, like all presidential contents of modern American politics, is one with a binary choice. Either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton will be our next president. The existence of third parties is not the existence of a third option. You’re going to counter that this election is different, and that the widespread dissatisfaction with the picks of the two major parties means that it’s the right moment—and perhaps the only moment—for a third party to seize the day.
For better or worse, that just isn’t borne by history or the current state of this election. I mean, look at the last time a third party issued a credible challenge for the presidency. In June 1992, independent candidate Ross Perot led the field with 39%. For reference, that’s almost five times the average of Gary Johnson’s performance and a full ten times that of Jill Stein. Perot only went down from there—not entirely unlike the downtrend we are starting to see with Johnson and Stein. Beyond the quirks of Perot’s campaign, his slump was partially born of the absence of party machinery to enable voter engagement and partially born of our partisan voting habits. Note that the machinery that Johnson and Stein have at their disposal is even less developed than that of Perot—especially so in the latter case—and that voters, including those who identify as independents, have become even more partisan at the polls in the interim. In shorter terms: if 1992 was an election that could have toppled the duopoly, 2016 is barely its stillborn younger sibling. It’ll be Trump or Clinton.
I urge you not to look at as falling in line. I urge you to see it as what it is: a choice between one candidate or the other. Presidential politics are not, and have never been, about the perfect candidate. For many voters in many elections—those, like you, whose candidate lost his primary—it’s not even about the best candidate. It’s about which candidate is better than the other.
Maybe that sounds like the lesser of two evils. A lot of times it is. But please understand that it can only ever be virtuous to spurn the lesser of two evils when a third good exists. That is not the case here. One of two people will become the 45th President of the United States. Your political profile and the vote you will cast with it serve only to make it more or less likely that each of those two will win the election. If you vote for Donald Trump, you will make it more likely that he will be our next the president and less likely that Hillary Clinton will be the same. If you vote for Hillary Clinton, you will make it more likely that she will be our next president and less likely that Donald Trump will be the same. Likewise, if you—as a left-leaning voter in a finite pool of other left-leaning voters—vote for a third party, you will only make it more likely that Donald Trump will be our next president. The likelihood that neither Trump nor Clinton will be our next president does not change because your vote was for someone else. As ever, it will be one or the other. Third options don’t exist.
You can say that you are “in no way supporting Trump,” as you have. But that isn’t enough. We need to be doing everything in our power—all of us—to stop him. Like it or not, the one and only way to do that is electing Hillary Clinton.
The idea that a Democratic Senate would accompany a Trump presidency is the opposite of political reality. The coattail effect of a Trump win could mean Democrats lose a seat in Nevada and lose our shot at any of the Republican seats in contention. Is it that you’re under the impression that Bernie or Bust voters are going to play nice with Democrats down the ballot? For one, what examples we have of the voting habits of the faction of Sanders voters who have placed themselves in opposition to the Democratic Party show that they are either willing to elect far-right candidates over Democrats or uninterested altogether beyond the top of the ticket. And I’m not especially confident that those who want “[to send a strong message] to the establishment that [they] don’t like the way the DNC plays” will line up to turn the Senate blue.
But suppose that—in spite of all political wisdom—Democrats are somehow able to retake the Senate in the same election that elevates Donald Trump to the presidency. It is already within the power of the executive to enforce our immigration laws. President Trump does not need Congress to sign off on his deportation agenda. He can start terrorizing undocumented immigrants on Inauguration Day. Maybe he gets the governors of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and every other state with a Republican at its head to activate their National Guard and help with the process. A lot of people die along the way.
Likewise, a Democratic Senate can’t do a whole lot to prevent President Trump from exercising the prerogatives of the Commander-in-Chief, so he follows through with his promise to order our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines to commit war crimes. He purges any officers who speak out or refuse to execute his orders and doesn’t stop until our military no longer has the leadership capacity to meet our objectives in the world. Hostile actors take advantage of the instability. Maybe Putin decides to annex more than Crimea—maybe he goes after a NATO country because President Trump has voiced his willingness to look the other way. The conflict escalates in the South China Sea, and President Trump suggests that Japan should arm itself with nuclear weapons if it wants protection. He offers the same to South Korea when he withdraws our troops. After all, he wants the biggest, best military presence we can muster in the Middle East for Operation: Take The Oil. If Congress won’t go along with it, he just ignores the War Powers Resolution like presidents before him.
A Democratic Senate also isn’t able to stop Republican-controlled states from creating their own hellscapes. President Trump will control both the Justice Department and, in time, the Supreme Court, so our Democratic Senate can do fuck-all to preserve abortion rights and marriage equality—even if states take it a step further and enact legislation far to the right of established federal law.
This is before I even get into the implications of completely gutting the federal government. This is before he shutters executive agencies like the EPA, which is within his power without the approval of that whimsical Democratic Senate.
The reality, however, is that a Trump presidency will almost certainly engender Republican control over both chambers of our Congress. And you can multiply the “Fuck, this is bad” factor of every above scenario by a thousand.
I’m going to level with you. The Democratic Party is not going to consider your protest vote an impetus for leftward change. It’s going to conclude that leftists are an unreliable bloc, and it’s going to look instead at the coalition that elected Donald Trump. It’s going to position itself to the right to get those votes when the country is in shambles two years into the Trump Administration and those voters are susceptible to the opposition party. When midterms roll around, the party is going to look a lot less progressive. The next president they run will be a populist, yes, but he’ll hardly have a left-wing bent. The Democratic Party is going to appeal to whatever voters can be made to vote Democratic. A vote against the Democratic Party is a vote for the irrelevance of your politics.
If you want to change the Democratic Party, the way to do it is from within.
A middle finger to the establishment is not worth bringing ruin to the lives of millions of women, immigrants, Hispanics, black people, working people, poor people, Muslim Americans, LGBT people and whoever else the Republican Party decides to oppress. It’s not worth legitimizing fascism in our political system. It’s not worth subjecting every effort at progress for the next quarter-century to a far-right Supreme Court handpicked by Donald Trump.
Please don’t play with people’s lives to make a statement.
*praise hands* FUCKING THIS. I voted for Bernie, and I’m disgusted by the DNC shenanigans. But I’m just shy of 32 years old and I have voted blue in every single election; I vote in the midterms, too. Despite the fact that I’ve been in Australia for 6 ½ years, I still fucking vote.
I have a LOT of Bernie or Bust people on my Facebook friends list. Unsurprisingly, they’re all white. A few of them are throwing hissy fits; several of them are threatening to vote for Jill Stein. (Who panders to the anti-science, anti-vaxx crowd. Sigh.)
While sticking to principle is normally good, this is too goddamn important. A friend of mine used the phrase “Nazi Cheeto Jesus” and it fits.
Look, if a few hundred fewer people voted for Nader in 2000 in Florida, GWB would not have been appointed President and the world would be a much better place. This is not up for debate.
I’d also like to point out that Hillary has been under constant right-wing scrutiny and attack for twenty-five years – longer than most of you have been alive. She has fought for progressive causes; as First Lady, she fought tooth and nail for universal healthcare and managed to institute the CHiP program, which covers children. She was very, very effective as a Senator from New York.
People hand-wringing about her are falling for thirty years of Republican lies.
If the other side was able to prove ANYTHING about Hillary, they’d have done it by now, trust me.
At this point in the game, I have one thing to say:
I am disabled. My girlfriend is Jewish. I am converting. Neither of us is straight.
As far as I am concerned, if you do not vote for Hillary, you want us dead.
Um. I haven’t had a chance to finish reading all of the information available, but I’m RELATIVELY SURE she picked a Social Progressive. Someone who has a history of being MORE progressive than even Bernie on some issues.
SO. That’s one bullshit fact kicked in the face. Just admit you think she can’t do anything right and put the fucking hypocrite postit note on your head so I don’t accidentally waste any more time.
Here’s an absolutely true fact: I am not holding my nose to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton. I am fucking ecstatic she is on the ballot; not as vice president, but as fucking President of the United States. I’ve waited half my goddamn life for this.
When I was twenty years old and pregnant as a single mother on welfare, I voted for Bill Clinton’s second term. And I dreamed of the day Hillary would run for president without actually believing I’d ever see a woman president while I was alive. I was also a bit worried about having a kid while not having a job.
Here’s the thing; your pure as snow ideology did not get my kid Medicaid when I had no money–the Democrats did. Ideals did not get my Pell grants and student loans and TANF so I could go to college; the Democrats did. Self-righteous purity meant absolutely zero when I became a welfare clerk, then a caseworker, and worked cases for women who were me, once upon a time: single mothers, young children, no job or minimum wage, sometimes not a lot of hope, sometimes undocumented and taken advantage of, some citizens and not doing any better.
They deserved better.
Ideological purity did not get those women food, prenatal care, and medical assistance for their kids; it didn’t fund WIC or school lunches; neither did I. But I am proud that my job let me be the way they could get it, and that my party was the one that assured it happened at all. The Democratic party is what gave them this.
I’m an analyst now with a grown son, but I don’t forget where I came from. I am a single mother who never married with a gay son; I am everything the Republicans hate and everything they literally want to destroy. According to the Republican party, the women and children I served and still serve as an analyst are not supposed to even exist. According to the Republican Party, neither should my son.
I don’t need entitlement programs anymore, and neither does my son. But I will vote to make sure everyone else does. I still serve them. That is my job as a human being.
I’ll consider your ideological purity when you feed a hundred thousand people and assure their kids get to see the doctor every month. I will care when you fund Pell grants for all the kids who need to go to college. I will take your wisdom under advisement when you fund Section 8 and make sure families have roofs over their head. I will give a shit when your block grant to Planned Parenthood goes through so we can get all those closed clinics. I will happily and joyfully mea fucking culpa when that happens.
Until then, I don’t give a fuck.
Nothing says privilege like being able to enable the election of a classist, racist, homophobic misogynist through either inaction or taking an ideological stand because you don’t have to worry about his policy decisions affecting you in the least.
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