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Democrats worry their most loyal voters won’t turn out for Biden in 2024
(www.washingtonpost.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
522 points (95.0% liked)
politics
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First of all, I don't even understand the mindset of someone who doesn't vote. So you don't really like any of the candidates, so what? Vote for the least worst option or the actual worst option could win (see: 2016).
Second, to be fair, any party could try running someone who's less than a million years old. American politics are so bizarre this way. Canada's current PM was 43 when he was elected and still more than 30 years younger than America's current president. Parliament is populated largely by middle agers and a few younger members, whereas congress is a sea of bald and gray, pockmarked by a small handful of 40 somethings? Shit is ridiculous.
In a lot of areas voting isn't easy. It's something you have to work to do. Why stand in the freezing November air worried you're gonna be late for work and lose your job if you're not excited? Why do it in the morning? Because maybe you're me in your 20s and don't have a car and you can actually make it to when the polls open in the morning but not the evening with how the schedules run.
Why go up to the election office and force them to take your mail in ballet after it was rejected twice because your signature "didn't match" if you're not excited?
Why finagle a time in your day when you can stand in the cold for an hour without your baby if you're not excited?
Why stand until you want to literally because the line was way longer than you thought it was and you didn't bring a chair this time if you're not excited?
All this happened to me over the course of me voting in my adult life. This doesn't count how voting locations constantly move on me for reasons unknown. It's not that the voting location moved. For some reason I was just assigned a different location. The times where I've been given the run around about where I should vote. The times where I tried to vote, but whoops all the machines are broken and I decided that I didn't want to wait for a repair which could take hours.
Voting is hard. It can be a breezy affair, but I've never experienced that in presidential elections or midterms, only really in special state elections or pure local elections. The system is definitely rigged against you and you have to ask yourself if it's worth fighting. Is denying my kid's time with me worth this? Is enduring this strain on my body worth this? Is the mental energy when I'm tired from work worth this? I get what you'd say no even if I always say yes
Oh yeah, that's another thing. For something that's supposed to be a sacred right, voting is made absurdly difficult in the US.
In Canada, employers are legally obligated give up to three hours PTO to vote. There are usually two or three advance polls if election day doesn't work for you. Every podunk town in the country has a polling station setup. Basically every form of ID imaginable is accepted. You can register to vote by mail online weeks before an election, receive your ballot and return it in the included prepaid envelope.
Elections Canada bends over backwards to give everyone the opportunity to vote. But it's like America doesn't actually want people to vote at all.
Pretty sure that every state (with maybe a handful of exceptions?) provides for required unpaid time off work to vote. There's also lots of places that have early voting, for weeks ahead of an election, with early and late hours. Mail-in voting has expanded dramatically since Covid.
But I get it. There are also lots of places in the country where voting is hard, and there's a very clear reason why. The more people who vote, the more likely that a Democrat will win and a Republican will lose. It is always Republicans who want to make voting harder, and it is always Democrats who want to make voting easier.
You want it to be easy to vote, so you don't have to be as excited about voting? Go vote for the people who want to make it easy to vote, and stop voting for people who want to make it hard to vote. If nothing else, get excited about making it easier to vote.
For a lot of people "unpaid time off" isn't a favor. You're asking them to pay to vote.
Plus the rules frequently only come into play if their work shift makes it literally impossible to make it to the polls. If they could wake up from their third shift job to get in line as polls open before making it to their other job at 7:45 sharp, then no time off for you. If you need to get your kids to school during that time slot? Too bad, that's time you could technically be voting, so it's not your employer's responsibility.
I didn't say it was perfect, certainly not everywhere. I was trying to point out that it's easier to vote in some places than in others, sometimes dramatically. And that it's really simple to know who's responsible for making it easier or harder.
Sorry, but voting is a civic duty.
Not a pastime.
Not a hobby.
Not a privilege.
A duty.
Republicans win when you don't vote, and they get you to not vote by making it difficult, if not dangerous.
Just remember, not voting will only ever make things worse.
I cannot vote for you.
When someone has three kids and lives paycheck-to-paycheck, asking them to sacrifice pay to vote is not justified. You're saying, "vote or feed your kids, pick one."
I'm not saying that you should let your kids starve. I'm saying that this situation has been engineered on purpose, and that it perpetuates itself by design.
If I could, I would stand in line for you. I can afford it.
But I can't. Legally, I can't.
Privilege.
Not them tho, you. Your privilege is why you can't understand it.
Some people have to wait 8 hours in line while taking a day off work without pay. All for someone whose not going to actually help them. Their choice is "things get obviously worse for me" and "things get worse for me, but slower and no one talks about it".
We could try actually following thru with campaign promises and helping them, but for some reason we dont. Once elected all the Dem presidents in the last 3-4 decades immediately start telling us their campaign promises are obviously impossible so they're just not going to really try.
Even Obamacare was just Mitt Romney's plan by the time it happened.
Personally tho, it takes less than an hour for me to vote and I get a paid half day from work to do so. So I always vote.
That doesn't mean I assume it's as easy for everyone else
Are you determined to not have allies of any kind?
I get that your state is fucked, but as a resident of one of the other 49 states, my options to help are limited as long as we lack one of the the chambers of Congress since the gop is literally the problem here.
That would be because we don't have control of the House. It's difficult to get work done when the side in control of the button that stops everything from working sits on the fucking button while shrieking racist epitaphs at the top of their lungs.
Isn't "things get worse slower" better than "things get worse right away?" What happened to pragmatism? If things get worse slower, there's a chance to stop them in the future.
That sounds a whole lot like lesser evil bullshit. There is no lesser evil, only ever expanding, ever growing evil.
If you have to choose between two evils, and you don't choose the lesser one, then you are an absolute knobhead.
The knobs are the ones that think lesser evil exists.
Are you saying that you can't see any difference between, for example, farting in an elevator vs stabbing a mother's eyes out in front of their children? Or are you just being dishonest and contrarian?
The difference is democrats would supply the knife for a republican to stab the mother
I try not to do this, but here's a reddit comment from 6 years ago that breaks down the voting records between Democrats and Republicans on major legislation.
bOtH sIdEs arguments are fucking insane.
So you're saying the act of handing a person a knife is equal to the act of stabbing someone with a knife.
I don't think you actually believe that, because it's ludicrous and illogical. I think you're just making up cute sayings in order to avoid actually addressing the subject.
This kind of dishonesty is tedious, to be frank. If this is all you're willing to contribute, then you can waste your own time.
Hurrrdurrr BoTh SidEs i am such a fucking enlightened voted
Too bad you don't understand what the enlightened part is, when the left is talking about enlightened voters we are mocking centrists. And they're too ignorant to understand that they are the punchline
Wow you really have it figured the fuck out 🙄
There's nothing to figure out, its common sense, or should be
One of the choices is literally a fascist dictator wannabe.
There is no third choice with a chance in Hell of winning.
What you're advocating for helps the greater evil, bud.
The greater evil is doing the same thing over and over again as things get worse while expecting different results. The current state of the GOP is directly related to Bill Clinton's Southern Strategy
bill clinton's southern strategy? umm
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
Yes, bill Clinton's Southern Strategy
Yes, bill Clinton's Southern Strategy
You are very opinionated for someone who doesn't know what they're talking about.
I know exactly what I'm talking about liberals not paying attention to their own party politics is the problem
can you paraphrase and explain what this means and it's relevancy here?
Bill Clinton helped start the DNC shift to the right by appealing directly to southern Dixiecrats. And the Overton window has been moving to the right since
that's not historically accurate at all. he shifted to the right as a neoliberal, but he had nothing to do with dixiecrats nor the southern strategy. that happened 3 decades before him.
Clinton had his own southern strategy exactly like Nixon did, shift the party far enough to the right to lure in the Dixiecrats back into the party
you're misinformed, sorry
Sure Jan
Of course there are lesser evils. I'd much rather have President Nixon than President Hitler. If those were my two choices, I'd vote Nixon.
Well if we're just making shit up I would rather drink orange juice than cyanide. The problem was the duopoly is that one is cyanide the other is arsenic
Do you not understand hypothetical examples when they're presented to you? Do you have some major cognitive impairment which disallows you from comprehending them?
Those were not hypothetical examples. Here's pulling two different opposing things out of your ass
Sorry... what do you think 'hypothetical' means?