Come mid-terms I’m going to proudly vote democrat everywhere I can so hopefully we can get some control of the country again.

even if said dem supports genocide and war crimes? vet carefully. vett? vette? whatever. boba vett your votes carefully. :)

If it’s a choice between republicans and democrats I will vote for democrats every time.

I will vet during primaries but mid-terms aren’t the time for that with what’s happening at home in the states and aboard with the current administration.

Democrats who support genocide can’t win, and candidates aren’t static.

If at any point you are supporting a Democratic candidate who holds unelectable policies, you are doing work to support the opposition. Your only option is to move the candidate when they hold a policy which will prevent them from winning the election.

When you say something like “Any Blue will do” in the face of a genocide, you are doing work to get the Republican in the race elected.

If you read my entire comment you’ll see I’m not advocating for ‘any blue will do.’

Not voting for the only other viable option is actually doing the work to vote in the republican.

Please, address the issue on its merits: If you advocate for a candidate who has a policy which will prevent them winning a race, you are doing work for their opposition.

This is what happened with Biden/ Harris. By supporting them (ABWD) instead of being critical, you set up the permission structure necessary for them to recognize they’ve got your vote without having to change policy positions. The permission structure you and I do me you because you are maybe the most clear and consistent Blue MAGA voter on lemmy, that permission structure allowed Harris to maintain a pro-genocide stance into November. Since holding that stance would prevent her from winning the election, shifting the responsibility from a candidate who is one person, of one mind, running one campaign to change their policy, you shifted that responsibility to the millions of unwashed masses, whom have no great track record for making good decisions when it comes to November, and for which there is no credible mechanism to move the minds of millions of people in the period of a few months or weeks. There is no tool a campaign can operate which changes millions of minds from “I will not support a genocide” to “I will support a genocide”, and I’m glad that this is the case.

Framing elections as if its a matter of individual choice shows an explicit and intentional illiteracy when it comes to how campaigns, electoral-ism, and electorates work. One voter is like a grain of sand. It acts and behaves like a solid, and has other properties we would liken to “its a tiny rock”. But when millions of grans of sand are moving together, their behavior is nothing like an individual grain. When we take individual votes and scale them to millions of voters, their properties and behaviors are different. What and how an individual voters should act is fundamentally irrelevant. We’re not talking nor are we ever talking about what individual voters do. That’s what oil companies in the 90’s did with recycling: they convinced you that your individual choice was what mattered, when they controlled the levers of power to determine what choices were available to you.

The candidates and campaigns have all the power to change their polcies or approaches in this system. Voters as individuals have practically 0 power in this system. There is no practical mechanism to get millions of voters to do whatever it is you would have them do (at least not over the course of months and weeks, like an election). There is an abundance of tools to operate on individual politicians to get them to change.

If you allow a politician who is competing for your vote to maintain an unelectable position, you are doing work to support their opposition.

What you’re describing is a strategy for primaries, not the general.

The vote in the general election comes at the end of the race. Any response to the input of your vote or lack thereof is irrelevant at that point. We just have to live under the policies of the winner. Even if Kamala changed her stance on Gaza as a result of you and other 1-issue voters withholding your votes, it doesn’t matter; it’s too late and now we have Trump.

If your plan is to let MAGA run roughshod over the world until Democrats share your stance on the issue, then you are as responsible as Trump voters for what is happening.

No, I am not talking about primaries. If a candidate holds a position which will prevent them from winning a general, in the context of election like the previous election, you have the responsibility to take whatever actions are necessary to move that candidate, including withholding your vote if they don’t change their position.

You need to look at the modifier here: the candidate holds a policy that will prevent them from winning the general. If they maintain the policy, the lose the election. Period. How you vote is utterly irrelevant, because the millions of people who won’t vote for them aren’t going to vote. Voting or advocating or a candidate who is running on a losing set of policies isn’t harm reduction or strategic.

No, I am not talking about primaries. If a candidate holds a position which will prevent them from winning a general, in the context of election like the previous election, you have the responsibility to take whatever actions are necessary to move that candidate, including threatening to withholding your vote right up to election day if they don’t change their position, after which, you need to pull the lever for the Blue candidate once you are in the voting booth.

FTFY.

Hell, even do it in secret and claim even after voting, that you didn’t vote for the Dem because they wouldn’t take a stand against Genocide in Israel. You can even still claim today to have withheld your vote, for all I care. If you didn’t actually vote, or voted 3rd party, or even (God forbid) voted Trump, even though your vote is private, then you are a piece of shit, and the criticism being levelled at you is appropriate.

Jesus fucking christ. You get that this is the exact fucking strategy that Democrats ran on in 2024? What you are outlining, how you want to approach convincing people to the blue lever: Its exactly what the Democrats did in 2024.

And it fucking lost. Get it through you FUCKING skull. You will LOSE the election AGAIN, just like the Democrats did in 2016, and 2024.

You can’t move voters to a candidate. Period. Its not functional strategy. It doesn’t fucking matter if you don’t like it. It doesn’t fucking work. It loses fucking elections.

You can’t be yelling at me, lol. I most likely agree entirely with your position on all of this except for what non-shitstain human beings do once they are alone in the voting booth on election day. You probably need a little more care and nuance in figuring out who essentially agrees with you for the most part and who is actually a shill for the DNC.

Fair enough. I’m getting it on all sides from the shit libs.