#voting blocs

[thepoliticalvulcan]

I agree with this on the level of harm reduction. It is every voter’s responsibility to be informed and to prudently weigh the consequences of this or that side winning.

On that level when you have absolute ghouls who could come back to power like Pompeo and Huckabee with a nightmare eschatology focused around goading Israel into fulfilling a doomsday prophecy to bring Jesus back, the potential for greater suffering is huge.

And yet this particular form of consequentialism ignores other frameworks and ways of understanding voter behavior and motives. Not to mention it absolves the parties themselves of any responsibility of being in dialogue with their voters.

If the answer to that challenge is that the Democratic Party was in dialogue with its voters and due to the composition of the coalition, what we saw out of the administration, the Biden - Harris campaign, the Harris - Walz campaign, and the convention is their version of threading a needle, okay fine. One I don’t buy it and two even if that was the best they could do to keep the coalition together, I think we need to talk about how blocs function.

Right now the Democratic Party is freaking out over its issues with young men, especially young men without college degrees.

Why is it freaking out? Because they believe that category helped throw the election to Trump via their unwillingness to vote or their willingness to vote for Trump.

Now the party is spending tens of millions to study how to approach young men while many pundits and electeds experiment with changes in affect and policy.

We can debate what it is young men want, whether it’s actually good, and if Democrats trying to pivot to flatter them will be effective or an absolute disaster that alienates more voters than it brings into the tent. But if young men wanted to send a message with their vote (or non-vote) a signal has been received loud and clear and the Democrats are desperately trying to decode that signal and find an actionable message within the noise.

Anti-war motivated voters were not merely ignored, even moderate, patriotic Palestinian American success stories were denied any sort of visible role at the DNC for fear they would do or say something off script.

So by November they had a choice and it was an absolute nightmare of a trolley problem.

Vote Democrat, stay inside the tent, hope to have some small amount of influence but also risk the very real probability that Democratic elites could safely ignore this element of the coalition in perpetuity and threaten them with ostracism and culpability for whatever the prayer warriors inside the JD Vance wing of the GOP wound up doing should they win.

Or don’t.

Vote third party, vote Republican, don’t vote and gamble that the GOP won’t win or that if it did win the notoriously vain Trump would seize upon this influx of new voters, revel in their imagined praise, and temper his love affair with Netanyahu and the “Greater Israel” crowd.

And if it all went to hell anyway then they might be able to tell themselves that they taught Dems their votes cannot be taken for granted if electoral politics survived to 2028. In the long run, MAYBE a chastened Democratic Party would be more amenable to the anti-war crowd, resulting in a grim trade of more lives lost and devastated now for more lives spared in the future.

Such feverish speculation and wishcasting is why I’m increasingly skeptical of trying to project more than a single electoral cycle into the future. Especially since my estimation is that this is the worst of all worlds for “Greater Israel” opponents in the US: not only does the GOP not even remotely care about Muslims, is actively trying to deport the most vocal, and seems content to assist in depopulating Gaza: the Democrats also don’t give a damn because their new love affair is with alienated young men.

But on an emotional level, I get it. The choices were awful, and the so called “good guys” were behaving at peak levels of paternalism and disingenuousness. So why not take a big swing and hope for the best?

I mean, the very predictable reality we are now living in is why, but I also don’t see where anti-war voters had a lot of options besides accept they were being sidelined or demonstrate that they were prepared to use the nuclear option and withhold their votes: the last and final thing any bloc can do in democracy if their inter-election canvassing and persuasion efforts fall short of persuading major stakeholders.

I don’t have it in me to be mad at them for rolling the dice.

I've said it before and I'll say it again.

Palestine is to the alt left as abortion is to the alt right. All other policy is irrelevant as long as you support the important cause.

This is just not how politics should be working. If you want a functioning system, you cannot reduce your entire voting behaviour to a single issue. It's so easy to do, but that's not how the world works and as we have seen time and time again, it causes absolute carnage if the result of a vote becomes determined by a single issue whcih causes people to ignore the actual aims in a party' manifesto

[escinsight]

Which Country Is Luckiest In Allocation Draw History?

Which Country Is Luckiest In Allocation Draw History? The Allocation Draw is when the different competing delegations at the Eurovision Song Contest find out if they are competing in the first or second Semi Final, and who they are competing against. Ben Robertson dives through Allocation Draw history to answer...Who has been the luckiest nation in Song Contest history?

On Tuesday 30th January we have Eurovision: The Draw, the new branding for what has been known in recent times as the Allocation Draw. This is the event where delegations get to find out which half of which Semi Final you can be a part of. At this point in January we have some, but not all, of the songs set to take place in the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest. It can therefore be hard to judge for…

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

Young Hero Sent On A Quest meets other young heroes also sent on various quests—only to discover they're all being used as free child labor by the same flaky wizard as a scam to collect magical artifacts.

the Young Heroes' collective new "Quest" is now to Unionize.....

[captainjonnitkessler]

Insisting that if leftists all refuse to vote, the Democrats will be forced to move left and give in to all our demands is kind of like insisting that if I refuse to show up to work, my boss will be forced to give me a raise.

Like yeah, there's kind of a kernel of truth there, leftists COULD turn themselves into a voting bloc worth appealing to and strikes CAN work. But you're leaving out the massive amounts of organization, cooperation, and support that it takes, and in the meantime if I just stop showing up to work I am simply going to get fired.

[ramblingaro]

looking at the nbc exit poll demographic data and it’s not surprising but still a bit soul crushing to see that Black people, queer people, and Jewish people all had votes over 75% cast for Harris but Harris still lost, because the rest of the country did not back her in the same way, and almost every white demographic voted in favor of Trump. We cannot do this shit alone.

[ispyspookymansion]

third party voters did not lose you the election if you say it again im going to give you a basic addition and subtraction worksheet so you’ll understand that half a million votes (generous) going from third party to dem does not equal 5 million republican votes

[nitewrighter]

I feel like "Voting as harm reduction" falls under the category of, "Does your leftist praxis involve doing the dishes" like yeah no, it's not ideal but it's kind of bare minimum.

[bauliya]

tbh I honestly think american elections have just become anti-incumbent due to the successive and concurrent neoliberal crises (which is what indian elections have historically faced because of the deep socioeconomic dysfunction) and given the unwillingness of any party to do meaningful structural change it’s just gonna be one term red one term blue for a long, long time

[bamboo-muse]

FUCK THE CONS & FACISTS

DON'T ALLOW IT TO EVER COME BACK.

PLEASE GET OUT ON MONDAY APRIL 28TH 2025 BETWEEN 7AM TO 7PM TO VOTE

BRING 2 PIECES OF GOVERNMENT ID

BRING YOUR VOTER CARD

BRING A PEN OR PENCIL

VOTE STRATEGICALLY.

GET UP

STAND UP

STAND UP FOR YOUR RIGHTS, CANADIANS

[poetrysmackdown]

These polls have given me such anguish (/pos) because How to Be a Dog has ALWAYS beaten the poem I vote for, up to now. What started as an “Eh, this is an okay poem and solid to where I can see why people like it” to being something that triggers some sort of primordial emotion in me. Have a good day

HAHAHA I've been in a similar predicament! I don't mind the poem at all, but it's all about timing—it's a poem that's huge on Tumblr right now for a handful of reasons, but if this was conducted a year or so from now I think it might've had a bit more trouble. Or maybe not! Possible it's got more longevity than I'm predicting

[piratekenway]

once again I stand here to beg you to please for the love of fucking god vote against the Republicans

[hyperboreanhapocanthosaurus]

putting head in hands seeing americans telling us not to split the vote in our election and im just like you have no idea what you are talking about our government doesn't. uniformly. work. like that.

i.e. its not the same 'two-party system' in every region and where i live, voting liberal basically IS the same as throwing away my vote to a "third" party :))))) voting liberal WOULD be splitting the vote and put us at risk of a conservative candidate!! if you're going to encourage canadians, the abc 'anyone but conservative' is more useful when voting strategically!!!!

[bjfinn]

YES!!!!! CANADA REJECTS FASCISM!!!!! 🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Reuters, via The Guardian:

Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, has easily survived a vote of confidence after his main political rival failed to muster enough support to end nine years of Liberal party rule. Legislators in the House of Commons voted 211-120 to defeat a motion by the official opposition Conservative party declaring a lack of confidence in Trudeau’s minority Liberal government. Trudeau, whose popularity has slumped amid unhappiness over rising prices and a housing crisis, became more politically vulnerable this month when the smaller New Democratic party tore up a 2022 deal to keep him in power until an election scheduled for end-October 2025. “Today was a good day for the country because I don’t think Canadians want an election,” said Karina Gould, the senior Liberal in charge of government business in the House. Despite surviving the vote, other challenges loom for Trudeau. Earlier in the day, the leader of the separatist Bloc Québécois said he would work to bring down the government unless it quickly agreed to the Bloc’s demands.

Trudeau’s Liberals will soon face a second vote on one of its budget measures, which is also a matter of confidence, but are expected to also survive that. Officials said the vote could take place on Wednesday or Thursday. “We are going to work piece of legislation by piece of legislation, issue by issue, negotiating with the different political parties,” Gould told reporters. The right-of-center Conservatives have a big lead in the opinion polls ahead of an election that must be called by the end of October 2025. The Conservatives say they want an election as soon as possible on the grounds that Canadians cannot afford a planned increase in the federal carbon tax. They also say federal spending and crime have ballooned under the Liberals.

Canadian PM Justin Trudeau (LPC/PLC) survives a no-confidence motion in the Parliament in Ottawa, but he and his party are bracing for a heavy defeat in the next election at a time before October 2025’s conclusion to the point that the battle for the Official Opposition status could be a heavy lift for them as well.

[skamortuus]

Things you can do in Blood on the Clocktower but probably shouldn't, #177: Lord of Typhon inna Teensyville

[megumi-fm]

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