We live in an electoral system. For almost all of the states of the U.S. it's actually factually correct that there's no difference for whom you vote in the Presidential elections. In many locations, it also doesn't matter who you vote for in Congressional ones thanks to gerrymandering drawing boundary lines around you before you even get to the polls.
We can discuss ideologically what the differences are between the parties, but as those of us in CA, NY, NJ, etc. well know - it's purely academic.
[edit:] Folks, it's a winner-take-all capital-E Electoral system in the vast majority of states, and in the vast majority of states, the demographic votes consistently in the same way. Thus very few states swing the entire Presidential election process, meaning that they matter. In California, for example, 3 million Democrats could have stayed in bed all day and not voted at all, and still it would have not touched the end result there.
We just had an election in Alabama that proved this view incorrect. Even in seemingly "safe" districts your vote can matter. That's how safe districts become safe.
Howard Dean pursued an explicit "fifty-state strategy" as chairman of the Democratic National Committee in the mid-2000s, putting resources into building a Democratic Party presence even where Democrats had been thought unlikely to win federal positions, in hopes that getting Democrats elected to local and state positions, and increasing awareness of Democrats in previously conceded areas, would result in growing successes in future elections.
The strategy was gradually abandoned after Dean stepped down from the DNC, and I believe that a large part of the Democrats' losses since then is exactly a result of your mindset, since abandoning red states or districts as lost causes only allowed the Republican Party to grow even stronger in areas where it was unchallenged, resulting in lopsided losses for Democrats in even more races and killing any ability to lay the groundwork for future victories.
>We just had an election in Alabama that proved this view incorrect. Even in seemingly "safe" districts your vote can matter. That's how safe districts become safe.
It's kind of counter-intuitive, but the election of a Democrat in Alabama actually provided a lot of discouraging data about gerrymandering. While a Democrat won the state-wide popular vote, if those votes had been cast in the House districts, Republicans would have won six of the state's seven seats. Gerrymandering doesn't really help as much in a Senate race, but in House races, it's everything.
This topic is very much in legal flux right now and will be going before the Supreme Court. I think election results like in Alabama can feature prominently in arguments but even more persuasive are more academic models which can compare degrees of gerrymandering. Anthony Kennedy was looking for just that kind of rigor and now it’s available.
What is unquestionable is that in a very tangible way, Garland would have provided a crucial vote here. He would have been on the court with a Clinton presidency, instead a partisan extremist is. The path to progress is by participating in the current system so that you hold power to make things better. Things would have gotten better directly on this issue with a Clinton presidency. So if you’re not participating because you think that’s the quicker path to progress, I think this issue provides a large point against that logic.
Same goes for the recent Virginia election. Democrats outvoted Republicans by a wide margin in November, yet they might not even gain control of the house of delegates.
I can't substantiate or refuse your Deanian Loss Theory here, but I do agree we abandoned swaths of voters (we being Hillary Clinton, I say while suddenly experiencing acid reflux). But where did the machine fail most? The swing states, the states that 'matter' for these elections. As per my parent comment.
Not sure how you can still have this "it doesn't matter" view after the 2016 election. If there was any proof at all that the masses had the power to give away their power, it was given November 10, 2016.
Great. So, I live in NY State. Tell me what the people that stayed home 'did wrong' being that it was an overwhelmingly Democratic Electoral win here?
It does matter, but it only matters in small sliver of states, as those states literally can swing elections.
Whether Republicans and Democrats have the same, slightly different, medium different, or wildly divergent views is secondary to the fact that for most Americans, the choice has already been made.
As an example, take Wisconsin - it was a blue state for 8 cycles before swinging to Trump in 2016. Democratic turnout was paltry, in great part because Democrats assumed that Hillary would win without them.
When a policy issue comes up, politicians look at their constituency. An issue may be very important to certain demographics, but if those demos don't vote, they don't care.
One of the single best ways to get your voice heard is to vote. Even if it doesn't have direct impacts, it drastically changes what politicians look at. They won't vote to your every whim just because if it, but they'll try to gain your vote at any opportunity they can. Lots of small decisions add up.
Gandhi said, "Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it."
You are technically correct. Almost no election is changed by the result of a single person. However, if everyone who thought this way chose to vote anyway, they could collectively swing every election.
I was tempted to not vote seeing as I live in Idaho, I don't even have anyone running for local/state seats I want to vote for (our state district had republicans running unopposed for house/senate) and though I hate the phrase my vote literally meant nothing in the federal elections last year.
I still did it, because I firmly believe it's my duty (and I personally would go so far as to say we should have Australia-style penalties for NOT voting) - though I did get to protest vote both Hillary and Trump since the latter was going to win my state anyway.
I too am from Idaho and voted for a third party candidate because I didn't feel comfortable voting for either Trump or Clinton. I know my vote will likely never change Idaho, but I still vote for who I think is right.
The problem with most voters is that they choose an identity and then vote according to how they think that identity votes. It's why you end up with people who vote Republican even if it is not in their best interests. I try to vote for people that I think have strong moral character and will be willing to do what's right (in my opinion) rather than what's likely to get them elected.
I did not vote, and I see that as a "vote of no-confidence."
At some point, a president will be elected with only like, 10% of the population having actually voted for them, and that'll be a crisis that forces us to overhaul some things.
It really won't. See Brazil. The president was elected with less support than that[0], and they are overhauling nothing. Don't think that things would be different in USA, don't fall to American exceptionalism. I recommend that you take a few minutes and honestly ask yourself what is different in the USA that would cause such a poor election to have a different consequence. A 10% will be taken as a sign of apathy, not of opposition, and as an opportunity to do whatever because people clearly don't care.
I'm not "falling to American exceptionalism" - I just don't think that because something happened once, in another country, in a particular way, means that it'll happen exactly the same way, in every other country, forever.
I abstained from voting. I'm still happy with my decision. People actually care about politics again [1]. Maybe next time don't railroad my candidate (Sanders) during the primaries. I will never vote for a neoliberal or corporate Democratic candidate, even if you hold my country hostage.
[1] Alabama has a Democratic state senator for the first time in decades.
>Maybe next time don't railroad my candidate (Sanders) during the primaries. I will never vote for a neoliberal or corporate Democratic candidate, even if you hold my country hostage.
This isn't a game where you earn points for purity. You can pat yourself on the back for not voting for "a neoliberal or corporate Democratic candidate" all you want, but the election had consequences, one of which is Trump becoming President. Presumably as a supporter of Sanders you oppose most if not all of the policies Trump is pursuing, yet your refusal to vote against Trump helped enable everything he is doing whether you intended or like that. Real-world consequences happen regardless of how you think or feel about them.
You're putting your own vanity over actual beliefs. If you truly stand for what you claim, you'll fight for it any way you can, even if that's not personally appealing or ideal.
Electing Trump makes Americans look like fools, but Congress is where the action happens (ACA repeals, despicable tax bills, etc). Repealing the clean power plan? Natural gas and renewables are crushing coal and nuclear, and nothing is going to stop that. Rolling back net neutrality? Citizens get involved in local municipal broadband deployments (as it should be!) where governance is controlled by the local electorate.
I'm putting principles (edit: autocorrect fixed) first. I don't fault you if you don't, but what I "stand for" (people taking an active interest in the political landscape) is still going to come to pass, even faster than previously with Trump having been elected (while notably, he has very little control over actual policy). Congress will see more tilting towards progressives under a Trump administration than it ever would have under Clinton.
>Congress is where the action happens (ACA repeals, despicable tax bills, etc). Repealing the clean power plan?
Congress drafts legislation, true, but it would be much harder for Republican legislation to pass if they didn't also control the White House. You'll recall that legislation needs to be approved by the President to become law, and at the very least a President Clinton would not be assisting a Republican Congress and Senate in passing all these things you oppose.
>I'm putting principals first.
They do work hard to lead their schools and deserve admiration for that, but we should probably be discussing principles.
> I don't fault you if you don't, but what I "stand for" is still going to come to pass
Maybe, but faux-religious certainty of future victory ignores the very real suffering that comes between now and the glorious future. People losing access to food or healthcare today thanks to Republican policies, for example. That could have been avoided with a different electoral outcome, and telling someone who can no longer afford to eat or get the medication or treatment they need that some day we'll have universal healthcare or UBI or whatever isn't exactly helping.
>Step 1: Set fire to house
>Step 2: "Do we have your attention now?"
>Step 3: Progress
Step 1: Set fire to house
Step 2: You are homeless and have nothing
Step 3: Some day this situation will fix itself, I guess? In the meantime you are starving and living in the street.
> People losing access to food or healthcare today thanks to Republican policies, for example. That could have been avoided with a different electoral outcome, and telling someone who can no longer afford to eat or get the medication or treatment they need that some day we'll have universal healthcare or UBI or whatever isn't exactly helping.
How quickly we forget that Bill Clinton was responsible for dismantling welfare in the 1990s. [1] Hillary would've done better? I don't believe so. Nor does Hillary Clinton think she could get universal healthcare done [2].
> Step 3: Some day this situation will fix itself, I guess? In the meantime you are starving and living in the street.
Step 3 is in progress. Step 2 was beyond our control due to Republican majorities. Excuse our dust while we fix our country.
>How quickly we forget that Bill Clinton was responsible for dismantling welfare in the 1990s.
No one forgot, it's just not relevant to this conversation. The choice was between Hillary Clinton and Trump. Whatever Bill did can be discussed on their merits.
>Nor does Hillary Clinton think she could get universal healthcare done
And she's right by your very own admission: the Republicans currently control Congress. Universal healthcare isn't happening anytime soon. What could have been done is limiting the damage the Republicans could do while working to take back the legislature. You chose to exchange that real chance for idealistic fantasy.
>Step 3 is in progress. Step 2 was beyond our control due to Republican majorities.
But, again, there didn't have to be a Republican President to implement their policies. It was very much within our control. You are, again, ignoring reality.
>Excuse our dust while we fix our country.
We who? The Republican majorities you seem to oppose are now both in power and have a President who works with them. The "dust" is the human misery currently being caused by them while your glorious Golden Age beckons just over the horizon. I'm not happy calling that suffering "dust" or accepting it as the price to pay for some nebulous future, and I don't think "you have to break some eggs to make an omelette" is very principled at all, especially when those affected in the meanwhile are the poorest and most vulnerable, exactly the people you claim to want to help.
Hillary would have been far worse.. Trump is under every microscope waiting for an impeachable offense.. Hillary would have had full immunity to take bribes as she pleases.
Trump is under a microscope only in the sense that people can point out how corrupt he is acting, but without any power to actually stop that corruption.
And the idea that Hillary wasn't under (and wouldn't continue to be under) a microscope it absolutely ridiculous.
I remember reading an article about Trump v. Clinton, and how no matter who won, it would reinvigorate the opposition for a generation.
I'm not quite sure if that was true if Clinton had one, we'll never know, but one thing is for certain: The opposition to the current government and policies seems reinvigorated, and the generational aspect of it could be true as well. Perhaps this country really did need an enema.
I think the reinvigorating the opposition thing already happened when Obama was elected. That is how we got the Tea Party and how we got Trump. The Democratic party that Clinton ran under wasn't that different than the party of her husband. The Republican Party of Trump is drastically different than the party of GW Bush.
Alabama's new Democratic Senator won because the choice was literally "this guy or a pedophile?" That seat'll almost certainly go overwhelmingly red again in 2020. Sessions won the seat in 2014 with 97.3% of the vote.
There's probably a Democratic wave happening nationally, but the Alabama special election is really poor evidence to use for it.
Alabama's race was "Democrat or pedophile" and going into the race, _everybody thought Moore was going to win because a Democrat was considered more unelectable than a pedophile in Alamabama_. It's easy to say "Well the republican candidate was uniquely terrible, and that's why the Democrat won". But if Moore had won, nobody would have been surprised. Plenty of people would have been disappointed, sure, but nobody would have said "Well, I for sure thought Alabama would go for the D over the R in this case".
Yes, there's definitely some unusual factors that went into this race, and the Republican party made a lot of unforced errors that let the race be competitive. But the fact that it was even possible for it to be competitive seems like evidence of a wave to me, especially when you pair it with the recent Democratic wave in Virginia.
> Sessions won the seat in 2014 with 97.3% of the vote
Which sounds impressive, except that he was running unopposed (not just no Democratic opponent but no other candidates filed for the election at all) in both the primary and general election.
The fact that a Republican can run unopposed in a state-wide election of national importance is probably the best evidence it'll turn back to red at the earliest opportunity.
That a Republican incumbent could run opposed for a Senate seat that Democrats had written off based on decades of losses, in a midterm election (which is generally bad for the President's party) under a Democratic president is not a strong sign of how a Democratic incumbent will fare six years later in a Presidential election year.
No. Give me a candidate worth voting for, and I will vote. The current "pick the lesser of two shitheads" is ridiculous. Both parties in the US are to blame.
The two party system in the US today means that voting for anyone that is not a Democrat or Republican is a complete waste of time.
However you feel about the system, it's the system that exists. Refusing to make a choice in the system also has consequences, whether you like or want them. This action by the FCC is one of them.
Cute but demonstrably false. If Trump weren't President, this action would not have happened. Your failure to oppose Trump contributed to that.
Vague discussion of "a broken system" obscures the concrete reality and the results of your choices, which is likely why you choose to discuss the matter in this way.
> If Trump weren't President, this action would not have happened.
Source? Because you likely don't have some magical crystal ball, which means you're just 'hoping' that whoever won the election in Sangermaine's alternate universe would have let this ride.
No one in the previous administration had the spine to make Net Neutrality permanent, and you can't hide that no mattery how much gloss you throw at it. Keep dreaming, buddy!
Your comment does not demonstrate an accurate recollection of history nor the stances of the candidates.
Clinton would not have repealed Net Neutrality. Keeping Net Neutrality was one of the Democratic platform planks. So right there, we know that this action would not have happened.
Second, the idea that no one in the Obama administration wanted to make Net Neutrality permanent is absolutely idiotic. The only way something like that could be made permanent would be through an Act of Congress. And the opposition party controlled Congress, so you're not getting that to happen.
Honestly, given your deliberate misunderstanding of the issues, it's probably best you don't vote. Let the adults make the decisions.
> No one in the previous administration had the spine to make Net Neutrality permanent
The previous administration spent all their political capital passing Obamacare. After that, they lost the house and senate and were stonewalled at every opportunity by Mitch "Let's make him a one term President" McConnell.
> Source? Because you likely don't have some magical crystal ball
We don't need a crystal ball, we have the statements of the candidates during the election. Trump was, from the beginning, anti-Net Neutrality. As for Clinton:
2015:
>Hillary Clinton is vowing to enforce strong net neutrality rules if she is elected president....
“Closing these loopholes and protecting other standards of free and fair competition — like enforcing strong net neutrality rules and preempting state laws that unfairly protect incumbent businesses — will keep more money in consumers’ wallets, enable startups to challenge the status quo, and allow small businesses to thrive,” she wrote in an op-ed in Quartz.
>Hillary Clinton has indicated support for net neutrality. She gave two thumbs up to FCC chairman Tom Wheeler’s proposal for strong net neutrality rules, though admitted it was only a “foot in the door.” Clinton has expressed concern that regulations could mean stagnant competition among service providers, saying “we’ve got to do more about how we incentivize competition in broadband.” And she’s committed to fighting broadband monopolies, citing Google Fiber in Kansas City as a perfect example of what she wants to see everywhere in the US.
>Hillary Clinton gave a shout-out to a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission for her rallying call to "raise a ruckus" to save net neutrality, which the Republican-led FCC is poised to dismantle next month.
>"Time to call foul. Time to raise a ruckus. Time to save #NetNeutrality," Jessica Rosenworcel, one of two Democrats on the five-commissioner FCC, tweeted Wednesday.
>In response, Clinton tweeted: "You go girl! This is important; costs will go up, & powerful companies will get more powerful. We can’t let it slip through the cracks"....
>Net neutrality was not a major issue often brought up during the 2016 campaign. However, Clinton, who served as former President Barack Obama's first secretary of state, has shown support for net neutrality in the past. She said she would vote for it back in 2015, calling it a "foot in the door," and characterizing it as a starting point in the broader Internet regulation discussion.
It's simply a statement of fact that the FCC would not be repealing Net Neutrality right now, or ever, under a Clinton administration. You can argue about the nature of Clinton's support for NN, but she has always consistently voiced support for the policy.
You've so committed to your fantasy of both sides being the same that you've become unhinged from reality.
You could have voted for Evan McMullin, a CIA officer for over 10 years and all around stand up dude. There were plenty of other candidates. If you threw your hands up and did not vote, you're part of the problem. Period.
You're obviously trolling, but if enough people did this, we would in fact be a three (or more) party system, hence breaking the stranglehold the two current parties currently have over us.
While I mostly agree, it's not about picking a perfect candidate... It's about moving the bar of acceptance over a little bit at a time. You elect the people that represent your values and, eventually, those values become the norm. I fear that America just doesn't agree with the same values as I do.
This thread is about Net Neutrality. The rules being rolled back by the current Republican administration were put in place by the previous Democratic administration.
Not voting is just a vote for whoever wins. You voted through inaction for the candidate that supported removing these protections.
You're totally ignoring the fact that the previous administration had the power to make Net Neutrality permanent... but did not. They took the 'easy' FCC route, just as the current administration is doing right now.
A half-assed effort, at best from your 'good guys'
