If Sanders doesn’t get the nomination, and you can’t see yourself voting for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, then don’t. Vote third party.
Consider the Libertarian or Green Party.
Don’t feed the establishment by voting for Clinton, and don’t feed authoritarian isolationism by voting for Trump.
No. The absolute largest chunk of people considering changing their votes at the moment are disappointed non-conservatives. There was barely any competition among republicans; from the get-go, the voter base united behind Trump. If non-conservatives split their votes across multiple fronts, they WILL lose.
Voting third party in America throws your vote directly into the garbage. Our system does not work like Australia’s. You don’t get a second or third choice, and candidates who win aren’t going to look at the numbers and say “I see 25% of Americans voted Green, I should implement Green policies.” That’s not how it works. Conservative voters overwhelmingly back a single party, the GOP, while non-conservative voters are the ones that scatter across multiple, weak fronts when faced with an unappealing Democratic party nominee. Think about it like this:
The majority of Republican voters support Trump and are not changing their vote even though party leaders and figureheads are universally decrying him. They’ve been groomed for decades by the GOP to be this way, and now party leaders have lost control of the impressionable voter base they created for themselves. There’s nothing they can do about it at this point. While a small number of Republicans can and are switching parties, it’s not very much. Meanwhile, Democrats are floundering, trying to decide which front to unite under. Some of them go to the Green party or Libertarians, sure; the rest stay with the Democratic party in the hopes that even with people leaving, they will have enough to block Trump. But Trump doesn’t need a majority of total Americans to vote for him; he only needs more than the other candidates have. Do you understand what I’m saying? Trump could get 10% of the vote, but as long as no other party has more than 10%, he still wins. The second you split the left and middle across three or four fronts, the right seizes control. This is how it goes down every single fucking time we go through this.
The other thing to consider is that the electoral college is NOT going to weigh in favor of a third party. Doing so would be political suicide. They are paid to vote certain ways, and not doing so would fuck up their careers. Even if an entire state votes in favor of a third party, the electoral college is going to vote for whichever primary party matches up the closest, and sometimes not even that. Their votes are counted when making the actual choice of president; ours are not. They proved that with Gore. The majority of Americans voted for him; the electoral college installed Bush anyway and told us to suck it up. The question at this point is whether they’d risk it a second time, and we have to hope that they won’t, which is why we have to unite under a single front to block Trump.
DON’T THINK THIS IS LEGIT? do some research on ralph nader and his affect on the 2000 election. to this day, my dad still says that’s one of his biggest regrets. voting third party may feel rebellious and cool while you do it, but you’re effectively letting the two-party system win by trying to protest it.
The Republican Party is about to approve its 2016 platform, and their proposed draft takes a stronger stance against LGBT rights than ever before.
Among many other backwards views on social issues, the platform says:
Marriage equality should be overturned with a constitutional amendment
Judges to be appointed (ahem, SCOTUS) should be advocates for “traditional family values”
Parents should have the right to put their LGBT children through conversion therapy
States should be able to dictate which bathrooms trans people use
Kids who have one mom and one dad are less likely to be drug addicts or “otherwise damaged”
Religious principles should guide lawmaking: “man-made law must be consistent with God-given, natural rights”
Please do not vote Republican in this election. This platform could literally mean life or death for LGBT youth, transgender people, and so many others who will be targeted – strategically and legally – for being who they are.
Just a reminder to every fucking person going ‘BERNIE OR BUST!!!’ or telling people to write in, or just thinking your vote doesn’t matter,
not voting for the democrat nominee regardless of whoever it fucking is will result in the people who support this being in power. When you waste your vote you’re basically handing it over to the people who agree with these bigoted ideas.
Vote in every election you’re eligible for. Don’t let your country push LGBT rights back when it’s taken this long to get the barest fucking minimum.
“Are you really going to vote for Clinton just because she isn’t Trump?”
Yes? I would literally elect Chef Boyardee because he isn’t Trump.
Why you should Vote for Hillary if you are a Bernie supporter
College costs:
Bernie: Free. Hillary: Significantly cheaper than currently, free for those who need it. Trump: Defrauded poor and working class people for 10s of thousands of dollars of tuition.
Minimum wage:
Bernie: 15 Hillary: 12-15 Trump: Imported undocumented workers and underpaid them to work on his projects. Currently makes his clothing line in China for tiny wages.
Immigration: Hillary and Bernie: Path to citizenship. Trump: THROW THEM OUT! BUILD A WALL!
Taxes: Bernie: Deep tax increases on the wealthy (and middle class). Hillary: Some tax increases on the wealthy. Trump: Cut’em. Cut’em all!
Racism: Bernie: Solving income inequality will solve racism. Hillary: we need a good plan to increase opportunities to minorities beyond solving income inequality. Trump: Yeah, dun care.
Sexism: Bernie: Solving income inequality will solve sexism. Hillary: Full support of all equal rights issues. Trump: Ladies, all your vag are belong to me (no fatties).
Gun control: Bernie: Mayyyyyybbbie, if you convince me hard enough. Hillary: Yep. Trump: Shoot’em if you gott’em.
Please do not listen to 25 years of GOP propaganda. Hillary has worked on progressive causes for 40 years.
She was the 11th most liberal senator while in the Senate.
Due to Republican hatred, she is the most investigated person in the country and nothing has ever come of it. She is not a criminal, she could not be a criminal, they would have found something they could have trumped up charges on in 25 years of endless, ongoing investigations. She’s been abused by the GOP and burned by the press over and over and is still pursuing her goal. She is smart and ambitious and experienced and tenacious and knowledgeable and practical and none of those are bad things for a President. Jill Stein may be a nice woman, but she has no governmental experience and practically no platform. Gary Johnson is a Republican who cares less about social issues. Hillary and Bernie have more politically in common than any other candidates. Please, if you care about the issues that Bernie cares about, think about voting Hillary.
Democratic members of Congress led by Rep. John Lewis (D Ga.) staged a sit-in Wednesday morning on the House floor, demanding a vote on gun reforms in the wake of the Orlando, Florida, massacre. More than two dozen members joined in. Right after they started, the GOP took steps to make sure few saw the sit-in.
Update: House Democrats’ sit-in to force a vote on gun control passed its 20th hour early Thursday morning, with a handful of members still gathered on the floor of the chamber wrapped in blankets and vowing to hold out until Republicans schedule a vote on a bill that would ban suspected terrorists from purchasing firearms.
The sit-in at times grew raucous.
When Ryan — who dismissed the sit-in as a “publicity stunt” — entered the floor to schedule a vote on an unrelated spending bill, Democrats in the chamber loudly chanted over him.
“Are you really going to vote for Clinton just because she isn’t Trump?”
Yes? I would literally elect Chef Boyardee because he isn’t Trump.
My dear Americans:
When we here in Canada had our last election, we made a massive effort to vote strategically. There were even groups here who (since we don’t elect our PM directly but rather elect a ruling party) were literally going around making sure everyone knew who in their voting area was most likely to beat the Conservative candidate so that we WOULD NOT GET HARPER.
At the time I explained at length to many people how at that point, @tkingfisher‘s beagle Gir would make a better PM than Harper. Then I paused and thought, “hey, she lost a dog … relatively recently? In the last year? Was that the beagle? I can’t remember. … anyway it doesn’t matter, because her beagle would make a better PM than Harper even if said beagle were dead.”
You, my dear Americans, are now in this same position. Gir, all by himself with no advisors, would still make a better President than that POS, even if he were dead (the beagle, not that jerk; I am not sure that life or lack thereof would make much difference to that jerk’s presidency).
You are not voting for anyone at this point. You are voting against Trump.
Do not be a fucking moron and end up with Trump because you didn’t vote against him. Because Gir, even if dead, would make a better president. Do not mistake politics for a lifelong statement on your values. You will not benefit anyone or make any kind of statement by doing something that makes that piece of crap more likely to get elected, and every vote not cast for his best competition (that is, the person most likely to beat him, whoever they are!) is something that makes his election more likely.
Do not do this, my darling Americans.
Ideals are great. But so is long-term strategic thinking, and all of you young Americans reading me have many many years left of voting and doing your best to bring change and improvement to your country … unless you are foolish enough to let that jerk win.
In which case we all lose.
So please don’t be fucking stupid. Whoever the not-Trump nominee is, vote for them. Even if you don’t like them. Because you are not voting for whoever that is; you are voting against That Jerk.
Okay? Okay.
SERIOUSLY. It’s worth noting, too, that there are actually a lot of parallels between the Canadian election and the one you guys are entering into now. We had our centrist candidate that a lot of people either outright hated or at the very least didn’t like and didn’t respect (yes, that was Justin Trudeau) and an older, somewhat charismatic socialist leader who was largely thought would win by a landslide. (That was Thomas Mulcair)
Except Mulcair, a lot like his American counterpart, fumbled key moments and key populations badly and the longer the election went on, the more people started drifting away to the Liberals. Who ended up winning by a landslide and, well, *shrug* it definitely worked out.
Now I’m not saying Hillary is going to win and magically transform into Justin Trudeau, but I am saying you’ve not really seen her as a leader yet. You’ve seen her work within the Senate and you’ve seen her carry out President Obama’s policies as Secretary of State (yeah, if you’re not pissed off at him for those policies, might want to ask yourself why) but as her own leader? Not so much. Not quite.
It doesn’t mean you won’t be freaking furious with her at times, or that she won’t do things that make your gut churn, but for the love of God, the fucking KKK endorses Trump. They’re excited by his candidacy.
Ever want a chance to save the world? Here’s your shot. Suck it up and vote against him.
That’s what we did. There were a shitton of hardcore NDP voters who should have voted for Thomas Mulcair (dodged a bullet there, lemme tell you) who sucked it up and voted for Justin Trudeau because they would not risk splitting the vote.
No matter who’s name you write in on the ballet.a
vote for anybody but the Democratic candidate in this election is a vote for Trump.
A few words of help for our American friends, eh? #USA #Election
Today is more or less the day that the Democratic nominee is decided.
It is in, in fact, very decisively going to be Hillary Rodham Clinton.
I can already feel the outrage that is about to pour out on this site: the conspiracy theories, the bungled attempts at “math” (which, btw, are almost always inaccurate or wrong), the ugly, sexist memes of HRC that we can all laugh at because hey, if it’s HRC, who gives a fuck?
But before you angrily typesmash into your keyboard about how the establishment is rigged and how the DNC better abide by the “will of the people” and hand the nom to Sanders on a silver platter, I’d like to ask you to take a deep breath and step back for a moment.
First, you need to accept that the fact that Sanders has come so far is a big fucking DEAL. Last year, he was an unknown. This year, he proved to be an excellent challenge to the Democratic establishment, and he’s already inspired dozens of copycats around the country to challenge establishment corruption. It’s a GREAT thing.
But let’s not pretend that he was/is a perfect candidate. I’d actually argue that him and HRC are probably no more and no less “corrupt” or “twisted” than the other. This was especially true in the last few weeks of the campaign, where he got especially ugly and weird, whether it was racking up no less than 639 pages of FEC violations (the irony) to not denouncing the violence and personal death threats sent to super delegates (how hard is it to JUST say “that’s not OK!”? i mean really) to falsely accusing HRC of FEC violations (spoiler: she has none). Honestly, if Tumblr had bothered to vet Sanders even a quarter as much as they did HRC, he would not be this site’s favorite grandpa.
But that’s all counterproductive now. So as tempting as it is, I’m gonna let it go.
Now I’m gonna say something controversial:
HILLARY CLINTON? SHE’S NOT A TERRIBLE PERSON.
There. I said it. What a shocker.
People go on and on about how Sanders got the millennial vote (and handily, at that), but what they always leave out is that HRC got literally EVERY OTHER demographic. Why?
No really, why?
Simple: she LISTENS to them. And then she translates what she’s heard into policy.
Her job isn’t to preach at the bully pulpit. She listens. There’s a reason why she doesn’t hold rallies of thousands, but has garnered the vote of top people at practically every demographic or movement , whether it was the mothers of the movement (incl travyon martin and sandra bland’s mother), the fuckING human rights campaign, planned parenthood, literally every minority vote EVER, and others.
And she turned those inputs into real policy. No for real. Go read her policy statements. They are the most well-researched, detailed, boring things ever. They are GREAT. Her inner policy nerd probs came out because her plans are the most well researched of any candidate possibly ever, and will also put you right to sleep because of how disgustingly long and well written they are.
Now ppl are gonna say “oh she panders” or whatever but yA KNOW WHAT?!?
She also fucking follows through. For real.
Let’s take a famous example: HRC was against gay marriage until like 2013!1!1
(so was Obama, but i mean whatever right? he’s a guy so we cut him slack)
Also, she is the ONLY presidential candidate to have walked in a lgbt pride parade, EVER. (this pic is circa like 2002)
How’s that #throwbackthursday for ya?
My point is: she’s not right on the issues 100% of the time (wow she’s human?!? no wAY) BUT she will fight for the issues and get shit done.
So my plea is this:
Look for the good in HRC.
She’s a thoughtful person and a listener – those who know her have said that the former is in fact her best trait. Think she’s too center or right on your fave issues? FUCKINGTALK ABOUT IT.Let her campaign know.
I’m not asking anyone to tattoo HRC on their chest or start phonebanking for her tomorrow or anything like that. (In fact, don’t, that’s weird as shit)
Vote for Bernie in whatever primaries are left and do not feel the need to suddenly become a living breathing campaigner .
This has been a tough, tough election and I get that it will be very hard to get over the negative image you have of HRC, but I trust that people are smart enough to get it done. So do it, I beg of you.
And finally, like every pretentious ass post on this website ends…
REBLOG. SPREAD THIS SHIT LIKE WILDFIRE.
thx
There’s also the story Andrea Mitchell told tonight on MSNBC – about Hillary during her tenure as First Lady, traveling to China to give a speech about women’s rights, despite the resistance from the State Department. She hid the speech from them during the trip overseas, refusing to allow it to be vetted. There are dozens upon dozens of stories like that, before, during and after when she was last in the White House.
A lot of people either don’t remember or weren’t alive to know just how galvanizing, how much of a force Hillary was when Bill Clinton took office, and how unprecedented it was (outside of a few powerful examples, such as Eleanor Roosevelt) for a First Lady to be quite so strident and purposeful in matters of state – how much of a shock to the system it was to Washington. Hillary has always been controversial and a firebrand in her own way; she has always been despised by the GOP, which has thrown everything they have at her for almost 25 years but never taken her down. She has been tested, burnt, bowed but never broken. She’s been fighting for the issues she believes in since before she was Hillary Clinton. And she never stops working.
A rare politics reblog because the primary is finally over and we have ascended to the next level of hell.
This post has a more rah-rah than I generally prefer or espouse but it has useful information that many of you may not be aware of and also an image of Hillary Clinton with a watch on a shoelace around her neck which is, I cannot lie, the main reason I am reblogging it.
I’d like to add a couple of things: first, Rachel Maddow devoted her A block last night to the history of women running for president in the US and it almost made me cry. Please watch. Second, Rebecca Traister’s profile of Hillary Clinton, which you may already have seen, is the best piece of writing on her so far this election.
I keep thinking about Ezra Klein’s piece from Tuesday night (ETA: forgot the link) about her skill as a politician and how it’s essentially un-male:
But another way to look at the primary is that Clinton employed a
less masculine strategy to win. She won the Democratic primary by
spending years slowly, assiduously, building relationships with the
entire Democratic Party. She relied on a more traditionally female
approach to leadership: creating coalitions, finding common ground, and
winning over allies. Today, 208 members of Congress have endorsed Clinton; only eight have endorsed Sanders.
[…]
In this telling, in order to do something as hard as becoming the
first female presidential nominee of a major political party, she had to
do something extraordinarily difficult: She had to build a coalition,
supported by a web of relationships, that dwarfed in both breadth and
depth anything a non-incumbent had created before. It was a plan that
played to her strengths, as opposed to her (entirely male) challengers’
strengths. And she did it.
Hillary Clinton is a generationally talented politician — albeit
across a different set of dimensions than men tend to be talented
politicians.
He references her frequent comments that she is not a “natural” politician like Obama or Bill Clinton, and draws on Traister’s suggestion in her piece that “charisma” as we understand it is arguably a masculine trait:
She can’t just suffer through the
indignity of campaigning and then hole up with her policy papers. It’s
not enough to have a plan; you have to sell it to the country, over and
over again. Obama proved to be particularly adept at using the media to
disseminate his administration’s messages to the audiences it was trying
to reach, but he is a masterful orator. Bill Clinton, too. Even George
W. Bush was charismatic in his way.
But if, as in this election, a man who spews hate and vulgarity, with
no comprehension of how government works, can become presidentially
plausible because he is magnetic while a capable, workaholic woman who
knows policy inside and out struggles because she is not magnetic,
perhaps we should reevaluate magnetism’s importance. It’s worth asking
to what degree charisma, as we have defined it, is a masculine trait.
Can a woman appeal to the country in the same way we are used to men
doing it?
Hillary Clinton is not a perfect presidential candidate because nobody is a perfect presidential candidate. But I think that Klein has hit on something important, which is that she got to a place where she could feasibly become a presidential candidate in what is likely the only way a woman in this country could, certainly the first time: she fucking networked. A woman could not have run Obama’s campaign. She would not have been taken seriously. And a woman could not have run Sanders’ campaign, because if a woman had somehow managed to be elected to Congress for ~25 years and then gone around the country yelling about The System, having not actually passed any meaningful legislation during her time in office, and not gotten endorsed by almost any of her colleagues, she would have been ripped to shreds inside of a month.
Instead, Clinton worked and worked and worked. And her punishment for that is now that people penalize her for having done so because she is an insider. Well, no shit. How the hell else could she have gotten to this point? I hope that in future we will be able to have female politicians who have an easier route. But if they do it will in part be due to her working her ass off for 25 years and getting shit on the entire time for doing so.
Today is more or less the day that the Democratic nominee is decided.
It is in, in fact, very decisively going to be Hillary Rodham Clinton.
I can already feel the outrage that is about to pour out on this site: the conspiracy theories, the bungled attempts at “math” (which, btw, are almost always inaccurate or wrong), the ugly, sexist memes of HRC that we can all laugh at because hey, if it’s HRC, who gives a fuck?
But before you angrily typesmash into your keyboard about how the establishment is rigged and how the DNC better abide by the “will of the people” and hand the nom to Sanders on a silver platter, I’d like to ask you to take a deep breath and step back for a moment.
First, you need to accept that the fact that Sanders has come so far is a big fucking DEAL. Last year, he was an unknown. This year, he proved to be an excellent challenge to the Democratic establishment, and he’s already inspired dozens of copycats around the country to challenge establishment corruption. It’s a GREAT thing.
But let’s not pretend that he was/is a perfect candidate. I’d actually argue that him and HRC are probably no more and no less “corrupt” or “twisted” than the other. This was especially true in the last few weeks of the campaign, where he got especially ugly and weird, whether it was racking up no less than 639 pages of FEC violations (the irony) to not denouncing the violence and personal death threats sent to super delegates (how hard is it to JUST say “that’s not OK!”? i mean really) to falsely accusing HRC of FEC violations (spoiler: she has none). Honestly, if Tumblr had bothered to vet Sanders even a quarter as much as they did HRC, he would not be this site’s favorite grandpa.
But that’s all counterproductive now. So as tempting as it is, I’m gonna let it go.
Now I’m gonna say something controversial:
HILLARY CLINTON? SHE’S NOT A TERRIBLE PERSON.
There. I said it. What a shocker.
People go on and on about how Sanders got the millennial vote (and handily, at that), but what they always leave out is that HRC got literally EVERY OTHER demographic. Why?
No really, why?
Simple: she LISTENS to them. And then she translates what she’s heard into policy.
Her job isn’t to preach at the bully pulpit. She listens. There’s a reason why she doesn’t hold rallies of thousands, but has garnered the vote of top people at practically every demographic or movement , whether it was the mothers of the movement (incl travyon martin and sandra bland’s mother), the fuckING human rights campaign, planned parenthood, literally every minority vote EVER, and others.
And she turned those inputs into real policy. No for real. Go read her policy statements. They are the most well-researched, detailed, boring things ever. They are GREAT. Her inner policy nerd probs came out because her plans are the most well researched of any candidate possibly ever, and will also put you right to sleep because of how disgustingly long and well written they are.
Now ppl are gonna say “oh she panders” or whatever but yA KNOW WHAT?!?
She also fucking follows through. For real.
Let’s take a famous example: HRC was against gay marriage until like 2013!1!1
(so was Obama, but i mean whatever right? he’s a guy so we cut him slack)
Also, she is the ONLY presidential candidate to have walked in a lgbt pride parade, EVER. (this pic is circa like 2002)
How’s that #throwbackthursday for ya?
My point is: she’s not right on the issues 100% of the time (wow she’s human?!? no wAY) BUT she will fight for the issues and get shit done.
So my plea is this:
Look for the good in HRC.
She’s a thoughtful person and a listener – those who know her have said that the former is in fact her best trait. Think she’s too center or right on your fave issues? FUCKINGTALK ABOUT IT.Let her campaign know.
I’m not asking anyone to tattoo HRC on their chest or start phonebanking for her tomorrow or anything like that. (In fact, don’t, that’s weird as shit)
Vote for Bernie in whatever primaries are left and do not feel the need to suddenly become a living breathing campaigner .
This has been a tough, tough election and I get that it will be very hard to get over the negative image you have of HRC, but I trust that people are smart enough to get it done. So do it, I beg of you.
And finally, like every pretentious ass post on this website ends…
REBLOG. SPREAD THIS SHIT LIKE WILDFIRE.
thx
There’s also the story Andrea Mitchell told tonight on MSNBC – about Hillary during her tenure as First Lady, traveling to China to give a speech about women’s rights, despite the resistance from the State Department. She hid the speech from them during the trip overseas, refusing to allow it to be vetted. There are dozens upon dozens of stories like that, before, during and after when she was last in the White House.
A lot of people either don’t remember or weren’t alive to know just how galvanizing, how much of a force Hillary was when Bill Clinton took office, and how unprecedented it was (outside of a few powerful examples, such as Eleanor Roosevelt) for a First Lady to be quite so strident and purposeful in matters of state – how much of a shock to the system it was to Washington. Hillary has always been controversial and a firebrand in her own way; she has always been despised by the GOP, which has thrown everything they have at her for almost 25 years but never taken her down. She has been tested, burnt, bowed but never broken. She’s been fighting for the issues she believes in since before she was Hillary Clinton. And she never stops working.
If this isn’t enough to sway you, then please just consider this: a vote for Hillary is a vote against Trump. If that’s all it is for you, it’s still enough. Myself and so many others are genuinely afraid for our safety under a Trump administration. My overseas family is already asking if it’s time for me to leave America. This election has already affected how the world sees us, it has already hurt people.
A vote for HRC is a vote against Trump. That should be enough.
Look at me. Look me in the eye. On November the 8th, 2016, one of two things will happen: Hillary Clinton will become president, or Donald Trump will become president. These are the only two possibilities. The superdelegates aren’t going to switch. An indictment isn’t coming. There is no third possibility. There is no space between the spaces where you can hide. Every vote for Donald Trump requires two Hilary Clinton votes to overcome. A Hillary Clinton vote can only be overcome by two Donald Trump votes. If you stay home, a Donald Trump vote doubles its power. This is the real, actual reality of the situation. There is not one other option.
And there’s no ctrl-alt-del for the election. Read up on 2000 if you doubt this.
Go fucking vote. Also see: How Canada ended up with Harper for Nine Years and No Scientists.
eirenical17 