don’t blame me, I voted for Kang!
what in the shitlib lesser evil propaganda bullshit is this?
So called “don’t vote for 3rd party candidates, they never win” voters when their shitty centrist candidate doesn’t win the primary and runs as a 3rd party:
I’d like to take a moment to point out that the third-party candidate did not, in fact, win.
Third party candidates never win.
The lesson here isn’t “we’re stuck on rails with no real choices because both dems and republicans make me feel icky” the actual lesson here is that if the party that most closely connects with your ideology doesn’t satisfy you, remake it, sweep out the dusty old corpses and artifacts from a century ago and bring in new leadership and new mandates.
THAT is the lesson that this election should be teaching every leftist and progressive out there. That and the power of actually unifying as a fucking community and not creating weird, isolated ideological factions purity testing each other.
We should take a huge lesson from Mamdani’s handling of his repeated grilling on why he won’t condemn this word or that phrase - STOP GETTING DISTRACTED.
The lesson was to vote in the primaries.
I think it’s also worth noting that the independent candidate (Cuomo) was not the 3rd party candidate - since Mamdani and Cuomo were the 2 viable candidates, Sliwa’s votes moved to the nearest viable candidate.
Lots of people seem to think that 3rd parties are defined by lack of party nomination
But still got more votes lol, just vote it more instead of saying “BuT tHeY nEvEr WiN”
I guess im like a reckless deer
Funny, and promoting the wrong idea. “Tactical voting” is the bane of democracy. If you’re against “third parties” you are, fundamentally, against choice and thus democracy.
And if you’re adamant you are not, in fact, against democracy, then you must be trying your best to destroy the two-patwo-party system that corrupts democracy in the USA, right? And what better way to do that than to make third party options viable?
The issue is that voting for third parties doesn’t make third parties viable in first-past-the-post systems. I, for example, would love if my country had a diverse parliament, but I continue to vote for the saner major party in my constituency because if votes are split between them and the party I’d really like to be in power, then neither of them will be.
Tactical voting is the symptom of two party systems, not the cause.
Nothing will change if you keep voting for one of the main two.
Nothing will change if the only thing you do is vote.
True.
You’re right, the right wing parties will do better
Is that the change you were going for?
The way you get to positive results is through grassroots movements (including within major parties), protest, and voting in a way that gets you as close to a good outcome as possible. Mamdani’s victory is a glowing example of that strategy working.
Right wing parties won’t do better don’t vote for them.
And no you can never move things closer to a multiparty system by voting for one of the two party system candidates. They benefit from that system why would they give up their power like that?
Sorry, but vote splitting categorically is a thing. You can say “they won’t do better”, but on a fundamental level that just is how FPTP systems work. I don’t like it, you don’t like it, but here we are.
As a counterpoint, my country had a direct referendum on voting reform a while back. So yes, you absolutely can change a two party system by voting for one of the two parties.
Which country was that?
You don’t make third parties viable by voting for them, though. You do so by pushing for electoral reform and systems like score voting, proportional representation, or MP
You do both. Nader could’ve been a real way out of this fucked up mess we still call the USA, had he not endlessly been pushed side to calls of “too soon, we need to stay focused”. End result is all this tactical voting turned out to be a great tactic for the right.
I miss being young, my friends and I hanging out on the weekends, carefree, getting high, voting third party.
I had a friend who tried using ‘voting republican’ as a euphemism for doing coke. It kind of worked. When we were at the bar, and he’d say '“Let’s go to the bathroom and vote republican,” everyone assumed we were having gay sex, not illegal drugs!
That coffee clearly has a lid on it. Why would you blow on it?
