YoBuckStopsHereBiden confronts a 'pissed-off generation' of young voters who may be decisive in 2024
HazdazYeah, they are sooooo pissed off that they couldn’t be bothered to show up at the polls in the last election.
6 years ago Bernie Sanders, one of the most left-leaning candidates in our modern history, ran on a platform that depended on the youth vote. He was utterly destroyed in the primaries because the youth vote never materialized. And this type of thing has happened time and time again.
In the last election, it should have been especially important for the youth what with an endless stream of school shootings, anger toward inaction on climate change and the whole student loan debacle. These are all massively important topics for the youth - or at least they should be - and they couldn’t be bothered to go out and vote in full force. Something like 75% of the youth of this country sat this election out. 75%. That’s pathetic.
But now all of a sudden they are going to act pissed off?
This is the type of arrogant attitude that drives away young voters. The democrats have had 15 years to get ANYTHING done on guns, climate change, health care, and student loans and they didn’t do jack shit. It’s not they’re “all of the sudden” pissed off, they’ve been pissed off.
The first democratic primary I voted in one of the main issues was a single-payer health care system supported by Hilary Clinton and single-payer public option supported by Obama. With a super majority in the senate and a majority in the house they still couldn’t get shit done. Now they can’t even endorse medicare for all as a party.
Obama was the candidate of tackling climate change, was in office for 8 years, still didn’t get shit done.
Biden campaigned on student loan forgiveness, still didn’t get shit done.
So what did 15 years of voting for democrats get me? A party that moved further to the right. Guess I just need to vote harder?
At some point, if you’re Charlie Brown and Lucy keeps yanking the football away you have to be an idiot to keep trying to kick it.
Youth will begrudgingly vote for democrats because it’s the least shit option they have, but don’t pretend like they’re actually voting for any meaningful change.
The democrats have had 15 years to get ANYTHING done on guns, climate change, health care, and student loans and they didn’t do jack shit.
If you ignore everything the Democrats have in fact done on those topics, then sure, they haven’t gotten ANYTHING done.
I guess?
Like, there’s been a Democratic president for 11 of the past 20 years, and of those 11 years half of them democrats had unified executive and legislative control. And with that, gun violence has gotten worse, climate change has gotten worse, Roe was still overturned, the voting rights act was gutted and not fixed and any number of other issues. The democratic party message is always “vote for us, we’ll make things better!” and we’re just sitting over here like Charlie Brown. We’re pissed off because we have voted for Democrats and things aren’t better.
Problem is we haven’t voted in enough Democrats. We either need 60 senators or 50 senators who will kill the filibuster. Without either, we’re stuck. We can only do things with budget reconciliation.
Democrats did have 60 Senate votes, for about 2 months because of runoffs and deaths. In that time, they passed Obamacare. And it would’ve had single payer too, if not for Lieberman’s vote being required.
If we give Democrats 60 senators or 50 who will kill the filibuster, and things still don’t get better, I’ll agree with you completely.
“Vote for the party that isn’t willing to change the broken system” isn’t the hard sell you think it is.
Well yeah, because most understand the broken system takes a lot of time to fix and it can’t be done if you have a deadlocked Senate. People who want to fix the system focus on getting us 50+ senators willing to end the filibuster or 60+ in general. People who just want to bitch and moan say no one is trying to fix the system.
And if they don’t vote because I’m not inspiring them to, they are quite literally sitting on their asses bitching and moaning.
The democrats have had outright control of the senate for six of the past twenty years, they had caucus control (for lack of a better term) of the senate since January 2021. If they wanted to end the filibuster, they could have.
For the record, I’ve voted in every presidentialand midterm election - and most primary and local elections too - since 2003, voting almost straight democratic every single time. So I’ve toed the party line for damn near 20 hears.