hereticritic

[hereticritic]

I'm not sure how effective this sort of messaging is at actually convincing people to vote. It's true, broadly speaking—the Democrats are largely uninterested in appealing to abstaining or third-party voters, and the left is considered an inconsistent group not worth appealing to. This is, generally, why they bend over backwards to appeal to moderates and even conservatives before trying to appeal to the left.

I think this is a phenomenally stupid political strategy, but that doesn't really change that this is the reality we live in. The Democrats are not a competent opposition party, and no small part of it is by design. You can see that in the Israel issue; continually funding the genocide in Gaza is not a politically popular position, as revealed by poll after poll, but they'd sooner stand their ground than cave to public opinion and take the stance more readily supported by their voter base, even if adopting those policies would be helpful in key battleground states. (This was always going to be the case; the Democrats will not budge on the interests of US foreign policy.)

But I think this sort of messaging has the opposite effect. A voter boycott, misguided as it is with its intentions, at least reflects the idea that the Democrats care about leftist votes. By making it abundantly clear to them that the Democrats have no intention to listen to them, it just encourages them to disengage entirely from the electoral system. I see people in the replies and reblogs of this post making grandiose statements about convincing the Democrats that leftist opinions matter from within as if this is a novel concept, and not something the left has tried and failed with before.

Hell, if anything, we're coming down from the tailwind of one of the most successful leftist electoral campaigns in recent memory, with Bernie Sanders' presidential campaigns making it abundantly clear that there's a loud contingent of people (especially typically undecided voters) who would vote for candidates that offer progressive policies—including in battleground states like Iowa, which Sanders won in the 2020 Primary. The end result of this leftist participation in the electoral process has seen...seemingly no real material gains, at least in the eyes of left voters. Yes, I'm aware of the progressive platforms Harris is running on, but if your first instinct is to try to claim that Harris is a standout progressive candidate, you're failing to read the room. It's simply not enough to drum up enthusiasm, especially in the wake of a Democratic redshift on immigration policy and fervent support of an abhorrent genocide. If Harris is trying to extend an olive branch to the left, she's failing miserably at it—and I don't think she is.

To be clear, I'm not telling people not to vote. I'm just assessing the messaging strategies at play here, and I'm not seeing anything that I think is actually effective at convincing anyone who doesn't already agree with you. Framing voting as a way to "turn Biden Harris left" isn't nearly as successful after the last four years proved in the eyes of many that was impossible. Framing voting as a civil responsibility clearly isn't working, either. Shaming the left or blaming them for Republican victories has the opposite effect.

The best you can do, it seems, is to do what the OP here is doing—lay bare the callous mechanisms of electorialism, and make it abundantly clear that the system does not care to try to win your vote, and to instead use that vote as an incredibly limited method of harm reduction. It's true, but it strips away one of the predominant fantasies that kept people coming to the polls in the first place: the idea that the Democrats believed their vote mattered.

So there's something I want to say re: intentionally withholding your vote, and I want to do it without coming across as condescending or dismissive.

I've worked as a field organizer in two campaigns, 2010 and 2012, and my job was to help turnout the vote for Democratic candidates up and down the ticket. Technology may have changed, but people are still knocking on doors for specific voters the way they were 12 years ago.

If you say you're not voting/voting 3rd party, the campaign volunteer is supposed to mark that and move on. Their job, in the final month of the election, is to make sure the campaign's supporters have all the information and resources they need to cast a vote.

They aren't collecting data on why you're withholding your vote. They aren't submitting opinion polling results to the campaign. Something like 155 million people voted in the 2020 election, and if you say you're not voting, the campaign is not going to waste a volunteer's time and morale begging you to vote when there are literally millions of other voters to turn out.

Let me repeat that: The campaign does not track why you're not voting. They simply note your vote is not a priority for turnout and move on.

I say this because I see a lot of promotion of non-voting like that's a boycott, when the function is not the same. A boycott is a coordinated mass refusal to engage with an institution—which sounds similar if you see a vote as a good or service to withhold. Unfortunately, it's not.

A vote is a choice you're making as part of a community hiring committee. Your abstention doesn't prevent someone from being hired. It just lowers the threshold for the worst candidate to succeed.

All this to say: In my direct experience as an organizer, abstaining from the vote sends a message. That message is not "You need to try harder to win my vote." It's "Don't waste time on me."